I’ve been pondering taking my life qua self-liberation. Self-liberation, in part, from the socialism of the status quo, but primarily from psycho-epistemological escapism.
I don’t want to live a life of purposelessness. But it seems to me that, due to my fucked-up psycho-epistemology, suicide might just be the only plausible moral course of action for me. I’m increasingly starting to believe that my psycho-epistemology has been so thoroughly fucked up by my past experiences that suicide is my only option if I don’t want to become a Peter Keating. Or maybe I’m just a stupid teen.
I think my psycho-epistemology might have just made a rational life impossible to me.
At birth, a child’s mind is tabula rasa; he has the potential of awareness—the mechanism of a human consciousness—but no content. Speaking metaphorically, he has a camera with an extremely sensitive, unexposed film (his conscious mind), and an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed (his subconscious). Both are blank. He knows nothing of the external world. (Ayn Rand)
Man, that is serious. You must see a Psychiatrist immediately. It must be a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. The reason is that these things can be organic in origin (eg low testosterone) that only an MD can sort out. It happened to a friend of mine who just got worse seeing a psychologist. I convinced him to see a psychiatrist I knew who subspecialised in psychiatric/psyshological disorders caused by underlying diseases (he was the first to diagnose my psoriatic arthritis, believe it or not, from a sudden fear of flying - autoimmune diseases scramble brain chemicals). He diagnosed my friend’s low testosterone immediately, and sleep studies showed he had sleep-apnea so bad that, if left untreated, he would be dead in 5 years.
This is no laughing matter. Book an appointment now.
Sigh. Neurology, which Psychiatrists are trained in, is not ‘materialistic pseudoscience’ but hard scientific fact. Here we discuss Ayn Rand’s philosophy, whose attitude to science was brilliantly detailed in:
You should probably follow that thought, instead of the mumbo-jumbo about your psycho-epistemology and socialism. Don’t throw away your one and only life because you’re a stupid teenager. Your purpose now is to identify your confusions and evasions and work on fixing yourself. Start being selfish, and stop worrying about stuff that’s above your pay grade, like fixing the political system. You can at least start with fixing your stupidity. Are you really stupid? Why are you stupid? What can you do to be not stupid?
You’re moving the goalpost. The overwhelming majority of psychiatry is not just neurology. It is, like most other modern social sciences, the domain of the arbitrary. There may exist some scientific psychiatrists, but they are rare.
Psychology departments have a sprinkling of Freudians, but are dominated by Behaviorism, whose leader is B. F. Skinner. (Here the controversy is between the claim that man is moved by innate ideas, and the claim that he has no ideas at all.)
You have free will. You don’t have to engage in escapism if it bothers you. Keep a notebook and write down every instance of escapism that you notice. And when you notice yourself doing it, change your choices to confront the situation directly in a reasonable manner. Give yourself a standing order to deal with this escapism issue. You can change your habits, even deeply ingrained ones. I’ve done it several times with different habits. It’s not easy, but use your willpower to get through it. The problem might simply be that you don’t know how to deal with situations and so you evade them through escapism. This is something with which a good therapist might help you. And once you know how to deal with situations, the desire for escapism will gradually go away.
I don’t know about behaviourism, but what both my GP and psychiatrist have told me is that Freudian psychoanalysis has been thoroughly discredited (but a few who practice it stll exist) and replaced by Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT):
Notice how similar it is to other advice you have been given.
Again, rule out possible organic causes, such as low testosterone, first by seeing an MD such as a psychiatrist or the newfangled specialty of neuropsychiatry.
I wonder about the claim (#6, Oct 17) that Behaviorism rules in the psychology departments. My understanding is that Noam Chomsky successfully brought cognition back to theorists’ attention and made a has-been of Skinner in the 1950s, before most people alive today were born. Campbell’s Ayn Rand and the Cognitive Revolution is worth reading in this connection.
Psycho-epistemology is basically a set of emotions about things.
Emotions can be trained, including whole psycho-epistemologies. This can be a difficult process.
Emotions are also contextual, so changing the context (e.g., “reframing your brain,” or just finding new things to look at or do) can cause the old emotions to no longer apply, and can create an opportunity to train new ones.
I am not a psychologist, though, and I am especially not your psychologist. I will echo what has been said earlier in this thread – you probably want to talk to a good one.
To put it more precisely, as a teenager you don’t really know what life is like yet. Have you ever had your own job, your own house or apartment, experienced both the freedom and the responsibility of adulthood? Real life is nothing like school, and you would be amazed at how different adult life is from everything you’ve experienced so far.
In a very real sense you don’t even know what your life is yet.
While I share your contempt for psychiatry, a good psychologist is precisely whom you’d need to consult in order to sort out your own psycho-epistemology. And what’s the worst a psychiatrist can do to you, even if they do have a flawed understanding of your mind? Is it worse than death?
Maybe you haven’t found a good psychologist who was actually capable of helping you. Still, you can’t just give up; you have to at least try to find solutions. It’s your life we are talking about.
Imagine if you had a close friend who needed some psychological work done, and was contemplating suicide over it. Wouldn’t you exhaust every possible option before shrugging and telling him “it’s hopeless; I guess you have to just die”? Wouldn’t you have him at least try talking to every single psychologist you could find, try to talk him through it yourself, think of new ways of finding other psychologists you hadn’t found before, talk to a psychiatrist or two (what’s the worst they can do? kill him?) and think of a whole list of other options before admitting defeat?
Being selfish means treating your self better than you would treat that close friend; not surrendering your life before it’s even begun and without a fight.