Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

[Lemur]

isn't this just replacing depression with delusion? And if you know that's what you're doing, will the restorying work?

I would argue not delusion. A reframing of old thought patterns and behaviors to new thought patterns and behaviors that are better for our mental health is a key idea in cognitive behavioral therapy.

I watched a documentary recently about social anxiety / social phobia recently and a man walks into the therapist's office and the therapist asks him why he is here and he says "out of desperation." The therapist responded "No, not desperation. You're here because you're courageous." Despite your fear of coming to talk to someone, you still did it anyhow despite your anxieties. The man responded actually in disagreement. Something akin to "No, definitely desperation. I don't feel very brave at all." The therapist pointed out his negative thought pattern and told the man "You know. Both of these can be true. Desperation or Courageous. But only one of these will make you feel better." The man said he never thought of it that way and the therapist asked him again and he said "Well.. I guess courageous."

Point I am making is that many of us are sometimes stuck with negative thought patterns, conditioned responses, and other attitudes that don't benefit our mental health. I wouldn't, therefore, say its a delusion to pick a different narrative for ourselves. We could argue that an individual's overactive amygdala and out of whack hormones that are driving anxiety/depression is the greater delusion.

[ertyu]

"Depression is a temporary failure in our ability to rationalize away reality"

Robert Sapolsky on a podcast I listened to recently

[Ego]

I would argue not delusion. ...

Point I am making is that many of us are sometimes stuck with negative thought patterns, conditioned responses, and other attitudes that don't benefit our mental health.

+1

One of the negative aspects of journaling is its ability to harden memories that are not useful or good. Journaling and many other recent technological advancements make it easy to accurately capture our mental state from moment to moment and to then perfectly relive it in the future.

Memories get rewritten each time we remember them. Our brains evolved to rewrite memory inaccurately. This is a self protection mechanism. A healthy mind rewrites memories in ways that are beneficial to the future person. The hero's journey is the ultimate rewrite.

We evolved in a world where it was virtually impossible to harden memories and retrieve them accurately. Today technology makes it hard to avoid.

It is harmful and maybe even delusional to not allow this natural delusion.

[delay]

I mean, I guess that's a good intervention if it reduces depression and whatnot, but, like, isn't this just replacing depression with delusion? And if you know that's what you're doing, will the restorying work?

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. If my subconscious wants me to be depressed, I embrace depression. It takes a while to play out where you think endlessly negative thoughts about yourself and others. I know it's over when I start to laugh at my insignificance and speculations.

[7Wannabe5]

One of the negative aspects of journaling is its ability to harden memories that are not useful or good. Journaling and many other recent technological advancements make it easy to accurately capture our mental state from moment to moment and to then perfectly relive it in the future.

I'm usually amused when I read my old journal entries, this is likely due to the fact that I regard my own journey as more that of the comic heroine. Luckily, this perspective also aligns well with my recent adoption of strong version belief in no free will. We are all in possession of a number of qualities and the one that our consciousness seizes on as being akin to our purpose is not necessarily that which will be our legacy.

It might also be interesting to note that the actions we as a species most associate with pure heroism are largely reflexive and performed with no clear conscious intention. The likelihood that a human will jump in the water to save a drowning child or run back into a burning building has been clearly associated with high testosterone levels and zero ability/tendency to accurately assess risk to self/pros vs cons in the moment. Young, healthy human males (also in other species) are basically genetically programmed to take-one-for-the-clan/species in a knee-jerk manner in such situations. Of course, it is also the case that success in such efforts, although completely reflexive, will also likely increase one's sexual access to females. Therefore, there is a level on which activities other than journaling which are more likely to raise serum testosterone levels are more likely to result in a personal journey which is heroic.

[Henry]

I don't think it's possible to make it through life without a degree of denial. However, repeating some tropey "I am the hero in my story" mantra is delusion on two levels (1) its not true; (2) the demand to maintain the narrative for any extended period is impossible and the strain it puts on your system is probably worse for your mental health. It's just a carrot that your stick is demanding and the second your stick is disappointed that you didn't act or think like a hero it's going to whip your ass like it's a dog on the last leg of the iditarod. It's the cognitive version of putting lipstick on a pig. If I'm standing on the Golden Gate Bridge and thinking of jumping and some asshole comes up to me and says "But Henry, you are the hero in your own story" I'm going to respond "Just for that asshole, I'm fucking jumping" and I will just to make him pay for saying something so brazenly stupid.

[7Wannabe5]

OTOH, "you are the hero in your dog's story" is more difficult to disprove.

[Henry]

OTOH, "you are the hero in your dog's story" is more difficult to disprove.

I'm still jumping. But I'd have someone fetch me the dog and then take it with me. Nothing sadder than a dog lying in front of a casket.

[7Wannabe5]

Dog's Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, 'Good dog! Good dog!'

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

John Updike

[ertyu]

The Hero's journey discussion reminds me of this River Kenna post on the Hero's Journey that we discussed briefly a while ago.

That aside: there is a strand of psychologists that believes that identity formation and story making are the same thing.

These guys believe that "trauma" is interrupted story-making: eg they'd have people work on a "trauma narrative" after you process whatever there that needs processing. The idea is that the story/narrative of traumatic events doesn't get constructed properly, and to heal from trauma, we need to construct it.

In other words, the thesis is that making up coherent stories about our essentially random experience is essential to a helathy psychological life.

[Henry]

The idea is that the story/narrative of traumatic events doesn't get constructed properly, and to heal from trauma, we need to construct it.

If you want to tell victims of abhorrent war crimes that because the real, objective, existentially experienced and historical root cause of their embodied trauma has no authorial validity and therefore can be healed by a subjectively and artificially constructed narrative that they are the hero of their own story, that is your prerogative. Personally, I think it's rubbish. In literature it's called deconstruction ie there is no meta narrative which has led to our there are no real facts society. What's funny is that in psychology it's called gaslighting where there is a recognition that it has a pernicious side and that there are actual and real human costs associated with maintaining such a worldview.

[7Wannabe5]

Another problem is that too often in our culture the Hero's Story is really just the Winner's Story. As in why do I give a sorry rat's azz about another affluent white guy climbing a mountain? (Caveat here being I am currently somewhat problematically romantically involved with the old affluent white man who was the American boy chosen to be pal to Sir Edmund Hillary's son, so can zero-percent claim immunity to this form of cultural capital (sigh, life is complex...)).

That said, it has been my personal experience that rewriting my personal narrative from the basis of the reasonably happy stable childhood I had before my mother went completely cuckoo-bananas with bi-polar disease around the time I was 11 was very helpful in my development in adulthood. I've known others with similar experiences who attempted to completely boot-strap their own narrative by drawing a line in the sand at the juncture where they were able to self-author away from childhood experiences, and I think this usually proves to be less successful. I won't even go into those who had very stable supportive childhood experiences, but still wish to delusionally take full credit for their own success in life by drawing line in sand.

[suomalainen]

Yeah, I mean, point taken that narratives matter. Obviously they do.

Counterpoint also taken that maintaining a narrative that doesn't quite ring authentic can be counter-productive.

Perhaps it's not an either/or, but rather it's a both/and. Reframe narratives when they're unhealthy or negative, but don't go so far around that you end up re-becoming unhealthy or negative by trying to square-peg round-hole a real turd into a hero's tale. So maybe "negative to neutral" is a healthy delusion/restorying while "neutral to unicorns defecating rainbows" is an unhealthy delusion/restorying?

In other news, @gravy and I have this "secret garden" behind this garage/carport thing in our rental's backyard. We let it go kinda wild back there and there's this old rotting fence that has kinda bifurcated the space back there. It had two ~7 ft sections and a gate which spanned from the outer fence to the backside of the garage. The gate had broken off, so we cut one fence section down and moved it over to form two walls with the outer fence as the third wall. We bought some lumber for a fourth wall and bought a couple of roof panels to supplement the one lying on the ground in the backyard, so now the kids have a little playhouse back there and seem to like it.

It was interesting to have the thought that if we were retired, we could have probably found these materials over time for free somewhere, but as it is, carpe diem and all that with money as the lubricant.







Speaking of money, my (new) company announced some layoffs this week and so that generated some measure of angst and calculation on my part. A lot of companies in my industry are laying off people, so it's not really a surprise. Even my old company announced layoffs recently. In all cases, it seems like my particular area hasn't been / isn't going to be impacted, but it generated some interesting thoughts. One of which is: yeah, I don't want to get another job / work much more. The other is: I don't think I could cover the 4 years of child-support / alimony I have left without working. So, work I shall. But if I can just make it these four years, then getting laid off with 6 months severance has some appeal to it. But these thoughts always, always circle back to the very same sticking point: I have kids and my kids need health insurance. I can always just choose to die if I get sick and can't pay for care (altho @gravy prolly wouldn't let me, she's so controlling), but I couldn't let my kids die because I didn't want to pay for something. I dunno if there's an answer to that. Perhaps I'll always be a parent and it's a limitation I'll eventually have to come to accept. I wonder if parents have always been this way, or if it's a (first world) modern problem, where kids have become more "precious" and death has become less prevalent / accepted as a natural thing that happens. Something something medical industrial complex.

edit: added pics. It's no @ffj work of treehouse art, but it'll put splinters in the kids' hands just the same. Also, the japanese pull saws are awesome. This was my first time using them and so glad I tried them as I'm trying to avoid collecting power tools again other than some small very useful ones (screwdriver, etc).

[theanimal]

Why wouldn't you be able to get healthcare off the marketplace if you stopped working? Presumably, your income would be a lot lower than it is now, meaning you could have subsidized premiums and a plan for you and your kids.

[suomalainen]

I don't know the answer to that. I only looked once out of curiosity way back when. I do know that a friend of mine that retired paid like $50k for his family for a plan off the exchanges. Whatever it is, so long as it's more than a dollar, I know that it's irrelevant to me for at least the next four years (while I am paying child support / alimony). In four years, @gravy and I will have more options and can do a thorough analysis then.

[Scott 2]

$50k has to be an outlier. You lose the subsidies and cost sharing not buying through the exchange. Provided your state has decent plans, the exchange options are quite affordable. Your friend must have some special circumstance happening.

I just ordered my 2024 insurance today. I'll pay $240 a month in premium, 400 deductible, 3150 max out of pocket, PPO. Best doctor network in my state. The insurer negotiated in network rates are also the best I've ever had. Often 10-20% of list. The plan is made to be used.

I estimated income at just under 200% of the poverty line. That's my most tax optimal point. Staying under 150% would offer more value, otherwise. Because of how the subsides work, families get even better pricing per person.

If you're willing to do an HMO and more constrained doctor network, the premiums also get substantially lower than what I'm paying. With a couple kids, you might also find slipping into the Medicaid income band viable.

In short - if you get to a point where insurance and healthcare feel like the last financial barrier - it's a very solvable problem.

[Biscuits and Gravy]

Thanks for that info, Scott 2, it’s helpful to know someone else’s experience. We could also do a hot potato kind of solution: Suo works for four more years, then he and his kids go on my insurance, I work until his youngest is 27 (or on their own insurance), then I quit and my kids go on my ex’s insurance. There are options, but I think what’s being expressed here is Suo’s keen sense of responsibility and the spiritual chaffing he feels at wanting to be “free” but also wanting to provide.

The kids love the playhouse. They want you to build them a full-fledged kitchen in it now. Baby girl said she wants a working faucet. Good luck.

[suomalainen]

Thanks, love, yes, that's the duality that causes the immense suffering that defines my existence.

@Scott - yeah, I think my friend had pretty substantial income at the time since they had deferred his wife's substantial salary for 5 years and then were getting distributions over a ... probably 5 year time period, so in effect they were getting a low six-figure income from that plus whatever dividend or interest income plus whatever short term capital gains they were generating, so they didn't get any subisidies. Also, my friend is kind of a nervous nellie, so I'm almost certain it was the "best" (most expensive) possible plan. As it turns out, this is the friend whose wife spent a month in the hospital recently after a stroke, which also necessitated an air-ambulance ride, so ... yeah, life happens. We'll see what happens in a few years once the very large nut that is child support / alimony sunsets.

[7Wannabe5]

I will verify Scott’s numbers based on my own research. The problem is that you will definitely max out every year at around $8000 just for health expenses if you have a chronic expensive condition such as Crohn’s. So, the last third of my colon becomes my Rosemary’s baby dependent that almost doubles my total expenses.

[Scott 2]

The problem is that you will definitely max out every year at around $8000 just for health expenses if you have a chronic expensive condition

This depends. When I was navigating billing around an expensive biologic several years ago, I found a patient assistance program that effectively paid the patient's entire deductible. From a patient's perspective, it was cheaper to be on the $$$$ per month medicine. The drug company was also happy to spend $5k to bill insurance $50k.

Insurance companies were not happy about those incentives. I believe they made some attempts to close them. The landscape is constantly shifting.


US health insurance is expensive for high earners. The subsidy structure effectively rolls a tax into their health insurance premium. If you're going to realize 6 figure income, it's hard to avoid. And you probably don't have time to play games or gamble with healthcare access.