What is the meaning of life?

"What is the meaning of life?" has become endowed as the holy grail of existential questions.

But it doesn't have to be so holy or graily. Instead, my response to that question is with another question, "Why am I asking that question?"

The goal is to basically eliminate whatever is making you want to ask that question, and not necessarily to find an actual "purpose."

When the question "what am I good for?" pops up, it is likely because you are feeling unfulfilled. So then, it's simply a matter of pumping up fulfillment.

What makes you feel fulfilled?

If you don't have a ready answer, usually helping someone is a general solution to fulfillment.

Case closed. Throw away Sartre now.

Why pessimism is a bad idea.

"First, you are likely to get depressed easily. Second, you are probably achieving less at work than your talents warrant. Third, your physical health--and your immune function--are probably not what they should be, and this may get even worse as you get older. Finally, life is not as pleasurable as it should be. Pessimistic explanatory style is a misery." (Seligman's Learned Optimism, p. 53)

Basics of optimism

From Seligman's Learned Optimism

Basically, the optimist is different than the pessimist in three vectors:

1. pervasiveness - optimists view problems as not indicative of the entire situation, but local. i.e. a friend criticizing you is not indicative of his entire attitude toward you, but an individual critique.
2. permanence - pessimists think that problems are here to stay, while as optimism knows that problems, like everything else, are transient.
3. personal - optimists recognize their proper influence on events, and don't assume that all bad things happening to them are their fault. pessimists tend to blame themselves.

What if depression is much simpler?

From Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism

• What if depression is not something you are motivated to bring upon yourself but something that just descends upon you?
• What if depression is not an illness but a severe low mood?
• What if you are not a prsioner of past conflicts in the way you react? What if depression is in fact set off by present troubles?
• What if you are not a prisoner of your genes or your brain chemistry, either?
• What if depression arises from mistaken inferences we make from the tragedies and setbacks we all experience over the course of a life?
• What if depression occurs merely when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks
• What if we can unlearn pessimism andacquire the skills of looking at setbacks optimistically.
  

Example of the "cognitive spectrum" technique of cognitive therapy

At first I did not understand the "cognitive spectrum" technique from the methods of cognitive therapy used to change core beliefs.

Here is an example of this technique in action wherein I try to install the belief, "don't take things so seriously:"

*take these very seriously
- morality, good character

*take these seriously
- safety
- happiness
- helpfulness, compassion

*take these with casual seriousness
- money, health, environment
- securing a good, loving relationship
- quality of my art, writing, work etc.

*don't take these seriously
- petty conflicts, arguments, disagreements, power differentials, resource contention
- self-programming
- the opinions and criticisms of others

Before it seemed I would take every little thing with the same amount of terrible seriousness, like it was the end of the world. The cognitive spectrum splits the light of seriousness into manageable degrees, so that I can respond appropriately given the situation's position on the ladder.

Extra Cognitive Therapy Method -- Substitutes

In addition to the basic methods of cognitive therapy, I want to add "substitution" as another method.

"Substitution" is taking an irrational core belief, finding what utilities might be causing you to hold onto that belief, and discovering a new belief that provides a similar utility but is more useful to happiness.

For example, I have the core belief that "conflict should be avoided." This belief has caused me much pain by making me unnecessarily passive and unassertive. It has gotten to the point where I fall into dysphoria because I'm so concerned that my decisions will be met with the resistance and disapproval of others. The thing is, conflict is inevitable. All relationships cannot ever have perfectly matching interests, and so therefore it is expected that interests will be against each other, and someone will be hurt.

Telling myself that "it is okay that my actions hurt others" is difficult to swallow in some ways because avoiding conflict has been my way of being likeable and having friends.

So, in trying to undo the belief that I should avoid conflict, a substituted core belief would then be, "it is important to be nice." So while it is okay that my actions will hurt others, it is still important for me to be friendly and compassionate. If someone makes a request of me that is unreasonable, I can politely say no.

I came to understand the importance of substitution when I was initially undoing my conflict-avoidance belief. Initially, I started to be "conflict-seeking" and unnecessarily mean since all of a sudden it became okay to hurt others. This caused me problems, and almost made me want to revert back to "conflict-avoidance" until I decided to install a "be nice" imperative.

So changing core beliefs through cognitive therapy is like changing flat tires on a car. When you take off one tire, make sure you replace it with working spare tire so that you can keep on going about in good spirits.

Supression versus Repression

I've never really been a fan of thought-control.

Take the stream-of-consciousness: words pop in there, start conversations, and eventually fade. My form of "thought-control" has usually been just to pop counter words in the conversation, or argue with myself. So for example, if I wanted to stop thinking about how much I hate someone, I'll usually try to argue myself out of it.

Other forms of thought-control are distracting yourself, which I have come to employ lately.

Others are just letting the conversations fade. The conversations fade ultimately in the end, but you can accelerate the fading by just not stoking the flames of the conversation.

A form of thought-control that I haven't had much success with is nipping the thought in the bud, before the words pop in there. I think I should do this because from what people tell me, they seem to do it well. Like if I explain my over-the-top worries to people, they tell me "don't think about it!" I usually balk at those suggestions and dodn't trust when people say that. I always write them off like, "maybe they just don't have these thoughts."

Yeah, I should try to inhibit thoughts from popping up in there that I don't need, like jealousy, comparing myself to other people, or rehearsing what I say to people.

See, before I used to harbor this fear of repression. I don't want to blame my education, but from TV shows and what little we learned in psychology classes, it seemed like repression would lead to really terrible effects for the user, like schizophrenia.

Really, I have no idea how repression works, and I think I let that bogeyman bother me.

Because there's a difference between repression and suppression. Suppression is more like not listening to interfering voices in your head, or in trying to distract yourself out of the thought, or trying not to think something. Repression is more like an extreme version of suppression, where you really try to squash a thought out of existence.

I tried recently to do some suppression, and basically I think it's safe to do so as long as you use a moderate touch. You keep on trying to withold yourself from a thought, but if after a reasonable effort, it bubbles up again, then you just have to let it speak and hopefully the conversation fizzles out or maybe it requires attention.

Eventually nature will out, so you can trust that if you try to suppress too hard, you'll get plenty of feedback that what you are experiencing is repression. Suppression usually takes a little bit of up front effort, but once it's done, you're usually thankful afterwards.

Can Cognitive Therapy change my tastes?

Outside of marriage, one of the most committed relationships we have is with our tastes. By now, you've developed a stable set of tastes for certain genres of food, music, religion, and people. How do we acquire our tastes?

I want to know so I can understand how to change my current tastes.

I used to be a prolific web designer in the 90s, but then became on-and-off-again during college as my interests shifted into writing. Writing has yet to pay off, and so I'm going to return back to serious web design. Unfortunately, my return is met with some reluctance. Sure, I understand and still value the benefits that freelance web design entails: freedom, money, and technology. However, the actual task of preparing HTML and cooking Flash is no longer appealing in and of itself. As a result, my only motivations for freelance web design are the external rewards. This, for one, makes the part of the day that I spend working feel like "work" and not like "passion." Second, without a natural zest for picking up my web design tools, I am slower, less motivated, and my business suffers.

So, can I revert my tastes back to how they used to be in the 90s? I used to love the feel of HTML, the sense of satisfaction creating a complete interactive communication device (a website), and the gestalts of programming. Can I bring those back?

My first thought from Cognitive Therapy is to use the "cognitive spectrum" technique. Compare the target belief or task to something else in order to change the value that that object has. For example, to make web designing more attractive, I should try to imagine myself doing an activity that is a much worse alternative. Here we go.

Okay, I am bagging groceries at Whole Foods. A rich tarty lady gets mad at me for putting her tomatoes with her eggs and asks for separate bags for each one. I smile it off, but I get tense for the next 10 minutes, and then my manager says that I need to lighten up. And I do this everyday in the morning, and I have to wake up early. Or how about I'm doing data entry for a hospital. For 4 hours non-stop, I'm looking at a piece of paper while in a crappy fluorescent room, reading numbers, and punching them onto a screen, and it sucks, and I'm hungry, but it's not time to check-out yet

Hmm, this is weird, somehow I the negative vignette has the opposite effect. Because they are so laborious, I seem to want to do them more, to somehow dig in and experience pain. Not what I intended.

Also, I am scared to change my tastes. I'm afraid that I'll get sucked back into web design. That's what my heart says. My mind refutes though, "if I really want to do something other than web design, then I'll prioritize that. And I can't get "sucked in" to anything, since I pursue happiness with the fiber of my entire body."

Changing tastes and personalities is a weird process like that. How can you change the hand that changes? If I have a taste for something, how could I convince myself to change it, since my taste would interfere with my desire to change. Of course, once the change is over, that taste no longer has a hold over your desire to change, and is then moot. But the self doesn't really internalize that subtly and is stubborn to change.

Cognitive Therapy's "Self-explanation" (no. 7) method explained

Cognitive Therapy suggests "self-explanation" (no. 7) as a method for disputing irrational, core beliefs.

I understand what this means finally. Case in point...

One core personality bit that I'm trying to change is the way I interpret disagreements or teasing from other people. I had a conversation with someone last night that spurred me to feel very negative, and it was my internalized, habitualized belief that was causing the tension.

So, in my self-programming this morning, I vented in a methodological way. I explicated how, despite how I've been trying to acustom myself to haughty people, disagreements and criticism still visciously irritate me. I wrote in my diary all the emotions I felt, such as weakness, inferiority, and subservience.

By describing and laying out my core feelings, I could then re-framed my self-programming in such a way to accomodates those emotional qualms.

One re-framing was to change the terms from being "other-oriented" to being "me-oriented." I kept feeling subservient because I felt I was changing for other people's sake. Instead, I re-framed my self-improvement into a selfish activity: "I am changing for myself, my own benefit, not others. Ultimately, I bear the costs for being intolerant to other people"

A second re-framing was from "fixing my flaws" to "strengthening myself." Changing myself socially to meet other people's standards while others are not doing the same to me makes me feel like I'm a lame animal, trying to recover from my flaws. Therefore, I re-frame self-change as me bettering myself, not fixing a flaw. To help convince me that this was the right perspective, I reminded myself that I do have an inferiority complex. This complex creates a bias that makes me view myself in the harshest lights.

So by venting oven the belief, and why I still hold onto it, I was able to respond better to myself, and thus self-program more effectively.

core beliefs (from Cognitive Therapy, Basics and Beyond)

I read some more of J.S. Beck's Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond

In order to change your core beliefs, she suggests any of the following methods

1. Socratic argumentation - dispute the irrational belief as if you were on a debate team
2. Behavior experimentation - test the irrational belief in the real world, and see if it holds up
3. Cognitive Spectrum - ex. it hurts me when others tease me, but if I tell myself, "at least I can trust them" then it makes the teasing less hurtful
4. Role-play rational/emotional selves - play a back n' forth scenario between your mind (which is trying to change your belief) and your heart (which is trying to hold onto the older belief)
5. Using others as a reference point - look at others with your new belief, and derive inspiration from them
6. As if - pretend as if your core belief was changed, what would you then do?
7. Self-explanation - vent yourself, and then try to reframe or redesign your belief-changing approach to suit it
8. Metaphors/Fables - use simple lessons or aphorisms (like Aesop's Fables) to dispute your irrational core belief

Unhelpful core beliefs also generally fall into two categories:

A. unlovability - ex. "I'm never good enough", "people hate me", and "I'm different"
B. helplesness - ex. "You can't be happy" and "nothing has meaning"

How Aesop can help you grow

A personality is like a kitchen. Without the right utensils and ingredients, every meal is be bland and unsatisfying. Similarly, a kitchen can be unbalanced, such as my kitchen at home. At home, we are fed mostly rice and soup. Three thousand days of rice and soup, and your body and stomach will only think of rice and soup. Likewise, a personality that is shaped continuously in one direction will grow lopsided.

There are many ways that your personality can get stuck, like my diet of rice and soup:
- repeated biases from your parents
- a feedback loop with your friends (you choose friends that fit your personality, which then only amplify your personality)
- lifestyle selection bias (you choose to do things that fit your personality, which then, only amplify your personality)

If every interaction over every day is like an echo chamber, exposing you only to ideas and belief systems within your "comfort zone," after 20 years, you will find yourself as a cemented statue. In my case, I find myself with my wheel in the mud, as I get depressed, neurotic, and anal in situations that most people would not.

That which is flexible will not break.

In order to better stock my personality kitchen, I'm going to dig through Aesop's Fables. While these fables may seem like trivial kid's play, of these 82 stories, I guarantee that the majority are lessons you or I have not internalized. From vanity, to greed, to power, to tolerance, there is something to learn. Even these fables may not be enough, as they are from a Western perspective. Who knows what the Asians and Africans are cooking up.

(I got this idea of using fables to change personalities from Judith S. Beck's Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond. The theory is that a personality is founded on internalized core beliefs, and that metaphors or fables can be tapped to help change those beliefs.)