Last night I finished reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. A theme of the book is that a sense of meaninglessness is often a driver of depression, and that it is up to each of us to find our unique meaning of life in order to become fulfilled.
He was fond of the Nietzsche quote: “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how”, and he supplements this idea with his experiences in surviving Auschwitz and helping others in his clinical work.
It wasn’t a focus of the book, but he also specifically mentioned helping clients overcome “anticipatory anxiety”. For example, one client was anxious about sweating too much in public, which would cause him to sweat even more.
Frankl’s solution was simple and ingenious: PARADOXICAL INTENTION. Anxiety is a vicious loop, but one way to break out of it is to willfully intend the thing which you fear. In the client’s case, he decided to intentionally try to sweat as much as humanly possible. The paradox: he stopped sweating.
I guess my point is that the mental health epidemic described in the article may be an epidemic of meaning, and also that titular “anticipatory anxiety” is a cycle that can be broken.
This seems related to why AI/Superintelligence has made me so depressed in recent days. After reading the Aschenbrenner summary, I feel as if all "why's" are becoming irrelevant. I have all these projects, all these creative ambitions, but they seem silly if AI will be running/managing/curating/doing-everything for us in the future.
And concerning 'anticipatory anxiety', the past year in AI makes me feel like the future is NEVER GOING TO STOP being deeply/awfully unsettling. Every time I put a new fear to rest about AI, another "development" seems to pop up.
I have these games/projects I want to work on, but I just imagine AI creating all of it better than me. I imagine profound virtual realities that just make everything I'm doing (political/cultural simulation), seem elementary. I want these feelings to stop. I'm normally not THIS BOTHERED by AI. But I can't seem to find reassurance anywhere.
Where will 'meaning' be in 10 years? 20 years? For anyone?
Seems like you’re focusing too much on the end goal rather than the craftsman’s journey. You know… you could build these games not for others, but for yourself, and just enjoy the learning and building process itself as a craft rather than releasing a game for fame and fortune
Considering the sheer stupidity of most AI chat capacity right now, and the saturation of media by visual AI sludge, to the point that it's starting to turn so many people off, I wouldn't worry just yet. I'm a photographer, (art photography) and as far as I can see, the medium is still very much alive and well despite generative AI and all its numerous extra fingers, or not. I worried about the same at first, but much less so right now. Humans will continue to love and support interesting endeavors by other humans, AI notwithstanding.
I also work as a technical writer, and haven't yet seen much replacement of human writers for any higher-level content simply because programs like GPT either write with an absurd amount of contortion, or just hallucinate enough to be completely unreliable.
When mechanical machines were starting to the jobs of 1000s of people, a lot of people were anxious as well. Looking back at it, there was no good reason to.
Personally I'm quite excited about AI. I know that much of the work I do now/know will probably be automated after a few years, but there's always meta stuff that needs human agency and I believe that will never cease to be the case.
The meaning of life? Try to keep others as well as yourself happy, content, excited,... it really can be a goal on itself without higher meaning. For example, try to learn and to teach, you will get much appreciation in return.
> He was fond of the Nietzsche quote: “he who has a why to live can bear almost any how”, and he supplements this idea with his experiences in surviving Auschwitz and helping others in his clinical work.
It seems to me as though this "why to live" must transcend one's own life in order to have this effect. From this perspective, your epidemic of meaning might reflect a consensus world-view which is overly individualized.
No, I don’t think that’s correct. A person’s sense of meaning is often rooted in something social, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, many artists find meaning in creation. Not because the work product lives on or because other people appreciate it, but for the act itself.
Nietzsche intended to say the radical opposite, from Ecce Homo:
"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it"
For him there were no transcendent values, ideologies, gods, what have you. People weren't individualist enough. To him it wasn't about latching onto some cause but to, in his words, become who you are. Affirm your own will and say yes to the world even if you, like in one of his thought experiments, lived in the worst world imaginable, on repeat, forever.
It’s arguable that the chief through line of his corpus is the attempted overcoming of nihilism.
He viewed nihilism as one of the largely inevitable outcomes of the failing of transcendentals to provide meaning.
Thus he attempts to overcome modern ennui via the construction of a strictly immanent conception of the world.
Labeling him a “nihilist” is misleading. Owing to the conflation of nihilism with a dour, depressive outlook, many are surprised to find out that his writing is in fact consistently joyous.
I don't like appeals to authority as a reason for giving weight to what someone argues, but in the case of Frankl, it's hard to avoid it when it comes to his discourse about finding meaning in life and overcoming difficulty.
He didn't just survive Auschwitz, he survived multiple slave labor and death camps under the most hellish of conditions such as those the Nazi monstrosity created, all while seeing the murder and destruction of virtually all his family inside that machinery of death. This included seeing his wife and daughter die too.
None of this to even mention the total loss of his livelihood, everything he'd owned and the need to entirely reconstruct his life and health after surviving several years of hell. Neither was he so flexibly young as to be more resilient than some when it all happened. The man entered the world of the Nazi camps in his late 30s.
Despite all this he went on to be extremely productive and lived to the age of 92. A vast number of people who fall apart through suffering do so after going over less than a minuscule fraction of the traumas this man endured and never recover afterward. His was a remarkable personality for doing the opposite after so much worse.
Even Solzhenitsyn's life in the soviet GULAG was comparatively mild when held against what Frankl lived through. Primo Levi is another example that reminds me of Frankl, but he was quite a bit younger when he was put through Auschwitz.
The article focuses on over-parenting as a source of anxiety. I think it's interesting how much this view has in common with Freud.
According to Freud, people repress thoughts, memories, and desires. This repression is necessary for people to live in a modern, civilized context. But repression also causes negative emotion, including anxiety. In Freud, parents are key to initiating their children into repression. Over-parenting could lead to overly repressed children, which could in turn cause more anxiety.
Not only overparenting but lack of siblings as well. In big family you learn how interact with others, how share, how care. If you not learn this skills, later in life you struggle.
Your post points out the similarities to freud. I agree it's similar. I also think they are both wrong.
If this were true would you expect a child with a stay-at-home mom to have more anxiety/repression than kids with two working parents. Ten minutes Google search shows studies say the opposite or at worst that there is no effect.
Also, i think the way this relates back to freud is in the concept of the superego. Which indeed causes anxiety. And it is learned from the parents ego.
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Anxiety has often been interpreted as the consequence of an excess of freedom, of there being too much that might happen and not enough that definitely will. Existentialists and psychoanalysts agreed that anxiety has an anticipatory quality, stemming from the indeterminacy of the future. A person with acute social anxiety may have experienced many social situations that passed off without a hitch, but there’s no guarantee that the next one won’t be catastrophic. When this converts into somatic symptoms – racing heart, tightness of the throat, sweating – fears become self-fulfilling prophecies. Rituals and traditions are useful protections: they demonstrate that, contrary to our worst fears, in important ways the future will be like the past. By the same logic, modernity generates anxiety by insisting that change is constantly round the corner.
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Bang on. A lot of the material here is a re-tread of stuff already discussed here on HN, but it is still very relevant.
I get anxious often prior to intimicy because I worry of the strength and longevity of my "stamina" (so to speak).
However, each time I perform with the passion of 80 david hasselhoffs, running an tri-athelon; at 6'5" he one of the "tallest" in the land. Anticipitation anxiety is beatable. You can beat it. I'm beliefments.
If this were true all siblings would have similar anxiety issues, but I'm willing to bet this is not really the case. IMHO most mental illness is genetic, or at least the predisposition is, which can than be triggered by upbringing, but it can also be triggered at every other point in your life so... I mean... And Kids will spend a lot of that time in school; parents have to be pretty darn overbearing to get to the level of school-like schedule and behavior control, so again, all very dubious this is all down to parenting.
Yep, this. It cannot just be situational because of what you say. And I think the strongest evidence for it being genetic is what the article touches on - how drugs that target people’s seratonin and dopamine levels work.
