On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]

It's the simplified form of a personal narrative. I could probably write a long essay detailing all my tangent thoughts there, but that would be of little value, given my lack of actual education on the matter. Just something I got going for me. Also worth mentioning: I don't necessarily talk about clinical depression, but rather some abstraction I don't care to properly define.

For the most part, all this is extrapolated from and inspired by learning about animal models of depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_models_of_depression

Genetic variance aside, I think it's most interesting how depression-like behavior is reliably induced in animals through prolonged exposure to stressors the animal can't evade. The resulting catatonic state is described as learned helplessness (which is the conceptual opposite of confidence in self-efficacy).

To me that's a plausible outcome, thinking in biological abstraction. The brain has an inner model of the world for predicting cause and effect relations living in a mostly adversarial environment, to translate upstream emotions and needs into impulses and actionable plans (avoid bad things, find good things). For simple stressors there are autonomic reactions, like retracting your hand when touching something hot. If that fails, or with complex stressors, like falling into a body of water (if you are not a fish), the brain needs to derive hypotheses from its inner world model about the threat and how to evade it, e.g. swim towards the thing not water. Enduring non lethal chronic stressors, where the brain's predictions repeatedly fail to derive actionable evasion, causes a precarious situation for the brain. From a survival perspective, if something doesn't kill you within a certain time frame, endless evasion attempts will.

I believe there are two adaptive pathways possible: Adjusting neuronal homeostasis, let's call it anonymous integration (-> system depression, later chronification through epigenetics), and a relieving adjustment of the inner world model to integrate complex stressors (-> identitarian absorption). The latter is probably the healthier response, but can be dysfunctional and arbitrary, too. The former may be a resource sparing adaptation to infections originally, may otherwise result in mall-adapted emotional imperatives not caused by environmental/external stimuli. Since the higher brain always has to make sense of the world and upstream emotions (e.g. fear -> prepare fight/flight, identify threat), it is coming up with a reasoning for these emotions despite the missing stimuli, ex falso quodlibet. A depressed person may tell you they are suffering, unable to do anything, because "life is meaningless", "there is nothing that can be done", bla bla ... may even be logical reasoning to you, philosophically intriguing, but in reality, it's the other way around: The emotional state of helplessness came first. Similar in anxiety disorders, complex reasoning is formed around dangling upstream anxiety, often extra spicy with panic feedback loops obscuring cause and effect.

Personal reasoning and finding "meaning" are over-rated. The brain finds patterns in random noise and explanations for any contradiction. Despite agreement on the darkest of reasonings, some people are content and driven, some people are dysthymic and feel helpless, all things equal, living in the same universe. It's not the universe. It's not politics.

If lack of self-efficacy is the cause, experience of self-efficacy may be the cure. Instead of pointing out the reasonable infeasibility of long-term plans and complex changes, the defeatist mind may rather try to focus on what's possible right in front of them. Unless you are an unfortunate stress model animal, there is likely a path towards self-efficacy experiences.

Let's say you want to start exercising for whatever abstract reason, or vision of yourself. You make a reasonable plan. Then one day, against revolting convenience, you drag your self out for your first run. It's hell, but after you finished you feel sooo good! Some iterations later, you realize everything in your life has become slightly better. You can walk stairs without breaking a sweat, you sleep better, you subtly feel better, calmer, more relaxed. The abstract goal doesn't matter anymore, running has become an end in itself.

Top-down planning is an illusion of control and foresight. You couldn't have known all the things that changed for the better and where you ended up. The distant goal is less important than finding the closest step away from frustration and distress. If it wasn't for reason telling you "all is futile" you could intuitively decide for any possible action, if it's the right thing to do or not. Doom-scroll? No. Get stoned again? No. Bring out the trash? Yes. Brush your teeth? Yes. Go for a run? Yes. Not doing the bad thing, not giving in to helplessness, and decisively doing the right thing, any right thing leads to experiences of self-efficacy. Repeated experiences of self-efficacy, lead to confidence in self-efficacy, the opposite of learned helplessness. Work may become and end in itself. Joining a community may become an end in itself. Allowing yourself these experiences, that's where the content, "happy" life is. Despite all the shit. Yesterday, it's been the sabre-tooth tiger or purgatory, today it's total collapse of civilization, or nuclear holocaust.

I think in modern human ("western") life, the overbearing complexity, information overload and severe alienation from work and social belonging, causes an environment where the usual means to experience of self-efficacy are greatly reduced. Especially, since basic needs are weirdly met regardless (your brain won't give you credit for hunting minced meat in a supermarket). I think the alienation from work is the most important change within the last two decades and is increasingly getting worse (catastrophic thinking about LLMs). Here I mean, failure to fully identify with and understand the purpose of the work you are doing, due to specialization and abstraction in industrial production, losing touch with creation, the actual product of labor. Bullshit jobs, bullshit products and services etc..

Consequently, we need to make more of an active effort to find self-efficacy.

Are you me?

> but it seemed like others didn't think much about society or politics, beyond how "great" everything could be made with tech

A wake-up call for me was when I requested fair trade coffee for the office due to potential human/child slavery issues with coffee, even sourced the roast from our supplier that was fair trade (which wasn't more expensive), then after getting one order of it, since one of the execs preferred the other coffee we stopped getting it.

> These days I only work in tech-related projects when it's about supporting social organizations get their (digital) shit together, moving to open source alternatives or understanding how to deal with things like LLM/AIs.

How do you find work that aligns with your values?

The modern alarmist environmentalist projections have even less plausible basis in any kind of science (compared to e.g. IPCC ones [1]) than the Population Bomb et al. Let's hope their moral panic doesn't inspire genocidal policies like Indian forced sterilizations and One Child policy.

We live in the age of unparalleled prosperity, as displayed in part on one of the first slides, human vs wild biomass. Just like with their forebears, framing it as a bad thing in the very beginning really betrays the fundamentally anti-human nature of the modern environmentalists.

"Corporate capitalism" is part of the package that delivered said prosperity; "social media", "surveillance" is just people making choices that old man yelling at cloud disagrees with - like, I am totally with him on privacy, but most people don't care about privacy, and unlike him I do not think I have the right to decide for them.

Just like Paul Ehrlich et al, these people are delusional and truly evil.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/ipcc-scenarios

Didn't watch it. So what about the million dollar question: would nuclear (or global) war have started if the US didn't have nuclear weapons? I mean, it's the basis of the US nuclear strategy after all.

Oh, I absolutely agree!