Dabrowski’s theory and existential depression (2020)

The exercises are important. I know what he's talking about. There is a mechanism he touches on a few different ways but doesn't mention as what I think is the source of this existential depression. The depression is often caused, as he says, by the loss of something that causes a collapse of an identity, and the solution involves those exercises of establishing yourself with multiple ideas of who you are so that the loss of one thing does not bring the whole thing down.

"Giftedness," itself can be a bit of a curse, because it is a definition of self that originates externally, which you cannot influence or control. It gets you early in childhood, and can be very difficult to unwind. Your giftedness becomes a kind of trap or double bind, where you believe something about yourself but cannot realize or actualize it because the only way to validate it is when other people recognize it. You have to be virtuotic in your talents, your insights must be incisive, your knowledge must be exceptional, and when you feel it isn't (because nobody's always is) the horror creeps in. This is the feeling of lost idenity. It leads to other polarized antipatterns like perfectionism or flakiness, attention seeking, anxiety behaviors and other coping mechanisms.

It's not unique to the so-called gifted at all, but their experience is a model for how the same externally rooted identity causes people to suffer. It's so old that Stoicism , particularly Epictetus, and Buddhism even addressed this idea of attachment to the extenral directly in the pre-psychological language of their times. Today, we might say it was related to a tendency toward forming codependent relationships where one's identity is only validated by it being reflected by someone, and when we lose the person who propped up that idea of self, we disintegrate, as described in the article. Identifying as gifted creates a psychological dependency on seeing that identity being reflected, and an almost infinite need for a source of actualization of that identity.

Managing and extracting personal value from a gifted identity is its own challenge. It's as though people said you were such a clever child you deserved two problems. Personally, I practice being crappy at things. I take lessons in skills and I've been able to fail enough and develop a physical competence that is orthogonal enough to any idea of giftedness that over years I have built a non-gifted accepted self. Education should do it, but even that's not always useful or sufficient.

To expunge that dependent identity, I practice physical things where words and language are meaningless. This is not to just say, "get some exercise, walk it off," (even if that's a necessary condition) it's that the depression hole is caused by waiting for external actuation of your giftedness that never appears and not having the tools to stimulate that part of your identity that isn't even yours, it's just something you were assigned.

> I'm not going to comment on the quality of the article or whether 'giftedness' is a meaningful construct

Just that it is made aware, instead of leveling a counter-argument, you are only appealing to authority.

Everyone, all the way back to Freud or Jung, would be fair game to criticize for such a young field as psychology, because new paradigms and data do surface often. I don't care if they made this their life's work, the author does not once talk about the personality traits especially regarding neuroticism, which is either independent of IQ or inversely correlated, which falls counter to their hypothesis. Empirically speaking big five has much more backing data than their conjecture based on a single 1950's psychologist. Doesn't make it automatically more true, but it would need to be accounted for.

For me and a friend, we'd joke about our existential despair. "What's wrong?" "The Void"

Any philosophy that just asserted that the Universe has meaning was a non-starter, for me. There is nothing that I can see that unambiguously tells me that the Universe ultimately has absolute purpose or meaning. It could, but anyone who tells you they know the fundamental question of why we are here is delusional or a liar. The only overarching framework that could situate me confidently in the world would have to explicitly acknowledge that the Universe could in fact be meaningless.

An English course in college helped me out with this. A lot of the course covered Norse religion and philosophy, which was intensely bleak. Ragnarok, in one version, is the End. There is no rebirth or renewal. The world will be consumed by Fenrir and the chaos wolves, and after, for eternity, the world will be Winter. In that philosophy, this is a fact of life: this future is preordained. Your best outcome is to be invited by the Gods to fight - and lose - in the final battle against the Forces of Chaos and Despair. You're going down, but the highest honor you can bring yourself and your kin is to go down fighting.

Humans create meaning in the face of an uncaring, indifferent Void. It's our superpower. Human-created meaning is arbitrary, but no less real for that. The fact that Vikings chose to create meaning by slaughtering their unfortunate neighbors is a bit beside the point. That was their interpretation, but it's not the only, nor best one.

Hwæt! The Universe might be meaningless, these nihilistic Viking ghosts whispered to me, across the centuries. Live bravely, do not allow yourself to wallow in despair while entropy gathers itself. Make meaning, fight, build, love, stay healthy right in the face of the Uncaring Void. It's the only thing you can do. Entropy will win. Until then, make it meaningful.

Here are a few nice outtakes that also kind of makes sense here and clarify what I mean by the neurotic side:

> "And so, the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live?"

> "The neurotic is having trouble with the balance of cultural illusion and natural reality; the possible horrible truth about himself and the world is seeping into his consciousness. The average man is at least secure that the cultural game is the truth, the unshakable, durable truth. He can earn his immortality in and under the dominant immortality ideology, period. It is all so simple and clear-cut. But now the neurotic: He perceives himself as unreal and reality as unbearable, because with him the mechanisms of illusion are known and destroyed by self consciousness. He can no longer deceive himself about himself and disillusions even his own ideal of personality. He perceives himself as bad, guilt laden, inferior, as a small, weak, helpless creature, which is the truth about mankind, as Oedipus also discovered in the crash of his heroic fate. All other is illusion, deception, but necessary deception in order to be able to bear one’s self and thereby life."

> The result is that the sinner (neurotic) is hyperconscious of the very thing he tries to deny: his creatureliness, his miserableness and unworthiness. The neurotic is thrown back on his true perceptions of the human condition, which caused his isolation and individuation in the first place. He tried to build a glorified private inner world because of his deeper anxieties, but life takes its revenge. The more he separates and inflates himself, the more anxious he becomes. The more he artificially idealizes himself, the more exaggeratedly he criticizes himself. He alternates between the extremes of “I am everything” and “I am nothing."

> "Man lives his contradictions for better or worse in some kind of cultural project in a given historical period. Neurosis is another word for the total problem of the human condition; it becomes a clinical word when the individual bogs down in the face of the problem—when his heroism is in doubt or becomes self-defeating. Men are naturally neurotic and always have been, but at some times they have it easier than at others to mask their true condition. Men avoid clinical neurosis when they can trustingly live their heroism in some kind of self-transcending drama. Modern man lives his contradictions for the worse, because the modern condition is one in which convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis, of creative play, or of cultural illusion are in eclipse. There is no embracing world-view for the neurotic to depend on or merge with to mask his problems, and so the “cure” for neurosis is difficult in our time."

This last one is particularly interesting if you really think about it:

> "The defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem for an active organism, but a problem of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes. Goethe wrote maxims like these precisely at the time when the individual lost the protective cover of traditional society and daily life became a problem for him. He no longer knew what were the proper doses of experience. This safe dosage of life is exactly what is prescribed by traditional custom, wherein all the important decisions of life and even its daily events are ritually marked out."

This is not about narrative. This is about facing our reality and making the best out of it. Seeking truth, not telling stories that suit ourselves in one or another situation.