"Nature Will Come Through The Claws, And the Hound Will Follow the Hare"

18 June 2012

The Last Psychiatrist: Kids Nowadays


          First of all, I have looked all over this blog and found nothing about how the author feels about excerpts. I feel that I would not care as long as things were posted and credit given so I am going to do both of those things. The Last Psychiatrist.  Some of this stuff is frightening, but it resonates, and I think that it's important. Some of it's funny; some of it is sad only because we laugh. I am particularly fond of the following portion, which came from a post today:

Amy Schumer Offers You A Look Into Your Soul

But I pulled out the bit that I liked the best, because it is a lengthy in its entirety and also because this seems to be one of my biggest concerns currently. (not that sex, addiction, and absolution don't come up regularly enough).  Dear Last Psychiatrist, if you track links to your page and find this one offensive, you have my apologies. A simple note and I will remove the large quote, but leave the command for my very few readers to go read your stuff. :)



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~From The Last Psychiatrist~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Slightly off topic but here's an important example: say you yell every day at an/your eight year old girl for sloppy homework, admittedly a terrible thing to do but not uncommon, and eventually she thinks, "I'm terrible at everything" and gives up, so the standard interpretation of this is that she has lost self-confidence, she's been demoralized, and case by case you may be right, but there's another possibility which you should consider: she chooses to focus on "I'm terrible at everything" so that she can give up.  "If I agree to hate myself I only need a 60?  I'll be done in 10 minutes. "

It is precisely at this instant that a parent fails or succeeds, i.e. fails: do they teach the kid to prefer (find reinforcement in) the drudgery of boring, difficult work with little daily evidence of improvement, or do they teach the kid to prefer (find reinforcement in) about 20 minutes of sobbing hysterically and then off to Facebook and a sandwich?  Each human being is only able to learn to prefer one of those at a time.  Which one does the parent incentivize?

If you read this as laziness you have utterly missed the point. It's not laziness, because you're still working hard, but you are working purposelessly on purpose. The goal of your work is to be done the work, not to be better at work.

For a great many people this leads to an unconscious, default hierarchy in the mind, I'm not an epidemiologist but you got it in you sometime between the ages of 5 and 10:

<doing awesome>

is better than

<feeling terrible about yourself>

is better than

<the mental work of change>

You should memorize this, it is running your life.  "I'm constantly thinking about ways to improve myself."  No, you're gunning the engine while you're up on blocks.  Obsessing and ruminating is a skill at which we are all tremendously accomplished, and admittedly that feels like mental work because it's exhausting and unrewarding, but you can no more ruminate your way through a life crisis than a differential equation.  So the parents unknowingly teach you to opt for <b>, and after a few years of childhood insecurity, you'll choose the Blue Pill begin the dreaming: someday and someplace you'll show someone how great you somehow are.  And after a few months with that someone they will eventually turn to you, look deep into your eyes, and say, "look, I don't have a swimming pool, but if I did I'd drown myself in it.  Holy Christ are you toxic."


"Well, my parents were really strict, they made me--"  Keep telling yourself that.  Chances are if your parents are between 50 and 90 they were simply terrible.  Great expectations; epic fail.  Your parents were dutifully strict about their arbitrary and expedient rules, not about making you a better person.  "Clean your plate!  Go to college!"   Words fail me.  They weren't tough, they were rigidly self-aggrandizing.  "They made me practice piano an hour every day!" as if the fact of practice was the whole point; what they did not teach you is to try and sound better every practice. They meant well, they loved you, but the generation that invented grade inflation is not also going to know about self-monitoring and paedeia, which is roughly translated, "making yourself better at piano."

"You don't know how hard it is to raise kids," says someone whose main cultural influence in life was the Beatles.   The fact that you will inevitably fail in creating Superman is not a reason not to try.   Oh:  I bet I know what you chose when you were 8.

The mistake is in thinking that misery and self-loathing are the "bad" things you are trying to get away from with Ambien and Abilify or drinking or therapy or whatever, but you have this completely backwards. Self-loathing is the defense against change, self-loathing is preferable to <mental work.> You choose misery so that nothing changes, and the Ambien and the drinking and the therapy placate the misery so that you can go on not changing. That's why when you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you don't immediately crank out 30 pushups, you open a bag of chips. You don't even try, you only plan to try.The appearance of mental work, aka masturbation.   The goal of your ego is not to change, but what you don't realize is that time is moving on regardless.  Ian Anderson wrote a poem about this, you should study it carefully.

Coincidentally, four days after Amy told her story I heard Howard Stern railing about an uncle who liked to play golf. "It infuriated me that he never took a lesson, never tried to get better. He was happy just playing, he didn't care if he got any better. It made no sense to me. How can you enjoy something and not want to get better at it?"  Answer: some people are happy with par.  He isn't, which is why he succeeded. The retort is, "well, I don't want to have to improve on everything, some things I just want to mindlessly enjoy." I sympathize, but I also own a clock, and there are only 24hrs in a day.  Look on how many of those hours go to true self-improvement vs. mindless enjoyment, and despair.

That hierarchy you learned-- and yes, it was learned in childhood-- applies toeverything, including addictions.  Addiction may be biological, but no one ever claims that getting clean is biological.  "When I hit 45, my testosterone levels fell which also lowered the dopaminergic activity in the reinforcement pathways of the brain, so I was able to get off dope."  Wait, is that true?  HA!   No.  It's a decision, made at that time in those circumstances.  I know it's a hard decision, but like every other decision in life it is ultimately a binary one.  Biology is pulling you towards 0, learning pulls you towards 1.

"All this happens at age 8?!"  Think of how many years you've since practiced that hierarchy.  "So after childhood, you're screwed?  You can't change?"  Oh, no, people change all the time, once they figure out how they're sabotaging themselves.  Now it's your turn."

12 June 2012

You must read this in either the voice of Elrond or of Mr. Smith:


"Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you."

 -V for Vendetta