Some Live on Saturn
Living with dysthymia.
This quote has stuck with me for years, and I wish I could remember where I heard it:
It’s only technology when it breaks.
Δ Me
There are a lot of names for this. Adaptation. Distraction. The Hedonic Treadmill. Entire branches of math(s) are devoted to measuring change. In one of my favorite poems, Jaime Sabines says this about natural disasters:
They say that sometimes [God] becomes furious and makes earthquakes and sends storms, rivers of fire, destructive winds, floods, punishments, and disasters. But this is a lie. It is the Earth that changes — it shakes and it grows — when God moves away.
(Spanish original here.)
But we’re not very good at measuring stasis.
It may go all the way down. There’s a theory in psychology right now called predictive processing or predictive coding (Wiki, another summary). It suggests that at the most basic, our consciousness is a combination of two streams: a bottom-up one from our senses and a top-down one of predictions. One of our core drives, then, is to minimize the disparity between the two.
What’s kind of eerie is just how much existing data supports this. Think about something as simple as vision: what our retina take in is only vaguely like the picture that shows up in our heads. If we did “see” what our eyes brought in without our brains doing any cleanup, our vision would be a mess. There’d be a big hole where the optic nerve leaves the eye, there would be shadows from blood vessels, jumping around as our eyes change focus, etc. Instead, we see a “clear” picture.
And it’s likely that much of this is based on prediction.
Related to this, we have Bayesian inference, which attempts to explain mathematically how all this works. Bayes’ Theorem (named for Thomas Bayes, although the actual formula was discovered by Laplace) is, at its core, a statistical model for the concept of “updating predictions based on new information.” The actual formula looks like this:
A and B are both events, and you can think of | as “is caused by.” So P(A|B) is the probability that A is true if B is true, and P(B|A) is the probability that B is true if A is true. What’s so brilliant about it is that it’s about taking a known result and inferring a cause, rather than making a prediction about the future. (See here for a more detailed example of how this can play out.)
The significant portion for my purposes is P(A) in the numerator: this is the probability that the event whose cause we’re trying to figure out will happen to begin with. Sometimes we have some basis for this, but other times we simply have to guess. In fact, the whole idea as originally thought of by Bayes involved just throwing out wild guesses, measuring them, and then making increasingly-informed guesses from there.
This is significant because, again, we don’t really conceptualize a lack of change very well. We simply don’t notice things that don’t register as “different.” It’s everywhere: a desire for novelty of some form, and just how much work it takes not to take things for granted.
Bayes’ Curse
Years later, I was diagnosed with dysthymia, which is a form of depression. The primary difference between this as something like major depressive disorder is that dysthymia tends to be less overtly severe (to the extent this can be quantified) but much longer lasting. To give an idea, the DSM requires that depressive symptoms be present more often than not for at least two years before a diagnosis can be made.
If one’s emotional state is always low, then two things happen.
First, we stop noticing it, because humans are adaptable like that. This is true for almost anything; if you think back to a worse period in your life, it can be hard to understand how we made it through. But those “worse” periods were often “normal” when we were in them. This is a significant feature of dysthymia as well. As Harvard Medical School’s blurb on it explains:
Most people with dysthymia are undertreated…. They may only complain about physical symptoms, or fail to complain at all because the disorder has become so much a part of them that they believe that is simply how life is.
But whether we’re conscious of something doesn’t mean that it isn’t there and doesn’t affect anything. So while this aspect of dysthymia has certainly affected my ability to deal with it over the years, it isn’t the main way that it actually manifests.
I can remember more than a few occasions where people in my life got really frustrated with what to them probably seemed like intransigence and pessimism on my part. Meanwhile, I was annoyed at what seemed to me the presumption of assuming that someone could come up with a solution in five minutes that I hadn’t been able to find in years of experience. It turns out, instead, that we were both kind of right.
Where I first realized this trend in myself was when trying to sort out conflicting pieces of self image. I had been really struggling with finding some kind of stable picture of myself, of being able to accurately describe myself and be honest about strengths and weaknesses. My first instinct was to compare myself to someone else, but this never quite worked, because I had a hard time conceptualizing what such a comparison actually meant. So say my IQ tested in the whatever percentile; fine, but what does that mean? At one point my counselor asked why it wasn’t enough to appreciate things about myself for their own sake. But if I thought about one aspect or another, I kept coming back to the same response: “For all the good that does me.”
There’s that cliche about insanity being “trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” But I have the opposite problem: it’s not that my expectations are faulty, it’s the results. Because I have a hard time getting my emotional state out of a place that a normal person would describe as unhappy, that is what becomes the expectation. So if, more often than not, decisions don’t result in something recognizable as happiness, then it becomes hard to see why I should do much of anything. I should add here that there’s research bearing this out: one study from 2008 found that people with dysthymia generally expected fewer positive adjectives to apply to their emotional state in the future than the control group.
There’s an old sci-fi story called John Carter (they made a movie based on it some years back). The titular character ends up on Mars where he becomes a super hero. But physically he’s a regular human; he just seems super powerful there because Mars’ gravity is weaker.
For me (or at least, me before medication), the opposite occurs: everything feels heavier. If I’m going to do something, the cost-benefit gets skewed. I either have to do it despite thinking it’ll led nowhere or try to muster up faith that it will anyway. This is both exhausting and doesn’t lead anywhere good. To cope, my brain switched things around. If benefit is unlikely, then the only option is to avoid things being worse. So most of my decision making became about preventing unpleasantness rather than finding anything good.
This is definitely living on hard mode, and means that even basic adulting requires a fair amount of recharge time. Motivation is fleeting, and every day is like that line from Office Space: It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care. And why should I? Success or failure feels pretty much the same as long as I keep myself above “the worst possible thing.”
There are still too many bad heuristics to list, and I don’t pretend to know them all anyway. One thing that happened early on, and which I’ve done the most to get past, is putting all my eggs in one thymic basket. See, no matter what you feel, you can always come up with an explanation. Sometimes you may even be right, and these things help figure ourselves out and predict what to do in the future, what we want, and so forth. Our brains are very good at finding patterns, even when they aren’t there.
But if your emotional state is significantly attenuated from what’s going on around you, finding those patterns and causation becomes impossible. But not knowing this, I just jumped from one possible explanation to the other. Maybe it was intelligence. Maybe the lack of relationship success, or still being in high school, or my college not being a good fit for me, or being broke, or law school not being a good fit for me, or my roommate being crazy, or the economy sucking. All of these are, on their face, valid reasons, which is what makes them so deceptive. Granted they probably were contributing in some way to whatever my mood was, but ultimately that didn’t matter. Solving one wouldn’t magically change my mood, so I was left confused, frustrated, and still feeling bad.
I’m in my mid-30s and still don’t really have a clear idea of what “satisfaction” or “purpose” looks like. I have things that I care about, but still don’t feel like I’ve found my niche somehow. I get excited by stuff now thanks to medicine (and more on this in a moment), but a lot of that still feels like hoping that I’ve found my conceptual savior; that maybe this time, I’ll find the thing that’ll show me that sense of purpose and of validation. Writing is something I keep coming back to, mainly because I don’t know how to stop.
Meanwhile, because “avoiding bad things” is my main decision making tool, it probably seems like I have my act together. I have a family, a good job, and am physically healthy as far as I know. To most people, I probably just seem quiet and kind of odd, but I doubt anyone else could tell the days when I was fine from the days when I wanted to walk into traffic. The vast majority of things people seemed to get worked up about just didn’t make any difference to me. We can fake anything without enough practice.
Thought habits are a funny thing — it’s like I’m still walking with a stoop even though the weight isn’t there anymore.
We Have The Technology
(Even if we don’t know how it works.)
There is an upside, though. Now that I’m on meds and am starting to sort everything out, what for most people is probably a regular day to me feels amazing, to the point that it can almost feel manic.
This brings its own challenges. I’m having to develop new coping strategies and new ways of thinking, and in many ways it’s like a second adolescence. I’m finding myself constantly re-evaluating, constantly trying to figure out what things that I thought were “me” actually are. Do the same things still make me happy? Do my coping strategies for whatever life thing remain valid?
Every time my dosages get adjusted and things get better, I have like three weeks where most of every day feels like the night before Christmas as a kid. It’s great in many ways, but it’s also exhausting.
Still, things are certainly better overall, even if it’s confusing and weird and sometimes really tiring. I still have bad days, but they’re less frequent and less severe. I’ve learned to allow myself to be bad at something, or at least I’m starting to, which actually makes me more likely to do it somehow.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
— Khalil Gibran.
