My Life In the Bush of Ghosts
Here is an illustration of the manifold costs of ressentiment:
While sitting in a coffee shop reading, I overhear some guy sitting behind me running his yap about how "people who think there's a cure for cancer don't understand what it is" and how, apparently, it just happens like death and taxes. (Actually, it was worse: he threw in more painfully wrong biological reasoning into the argument.) Now, I could have turned around in my seat and . . .
A) Casually corrected him, using it as a lead into a potentially interesting conversation.
B) Snidely contradicted him, making him look like an idiot and myself look like a jerk.
But instead I just kept to myself. Why? Because my blood was boiling. I was extremely annoyed at this guy, and that feeling would have come out in my nonverbal cues even if I was nominally "polite". So in reality (A) stopped being a live option the moment my dander got up, and (B) would have asserted itself willy-nilly. Once the adrenaline is in circulation there's an irreducible amount of time needed for it to dissipate, and by then the conversational opening is past.
This is a trope that still crops up more often in my life than is healthy (albeit less than it used to), but to dismantle it I need to get behind the cognitive process that gives rise to it -- which is tricky, since it happens very fast.
I always get the "something is wrong" feeling before I can articulate the wrongness. The sort of rapid integrity checking I unconsciously perform on incoming information is powerful when it can be channeled adaptively, but becomes a problem when there's a lag between the detection of wrongness and what I do about it. If it's not getting channeled to motor output it just gets fed back into the cognitive loop and results in increasingly monomaniacal seething. Self-control becomes pathological self-frustration, which also feels wrong, leading to a growing snowball of wrongness, ergo dysphoria and tension until something else distracts me.
Distraction can be self-medication -- by breaking the Bruce circuit, you're kicking yourself out of a loop that's triggering a mounting cascade of adrenergic signaling and giving yourself the chance to drift back to baseline. ADD and anxiety are both a consequence of *not* acting on instinct -- not having instincts that adaptively fit you to your environment. This yields a nice way to articulate the distinction between ADD and ADHD: the latter type *does* act on instinct, even where it's maladaptive. It's tempting to guess that what differentiates the two is dominance of noradrenergic vs. dopaminergic signaling, which would gel with a lot of other facets of the syndromes.
So it's a double-bind: I must do something but I can't do something, cue gears grinding and general systemic freak-out. All I have to do is break one horn of the dilemma. One way would be to speed up my actions or slow down my perceptions, or both, so that they're more in sync. Another might be to change my categorization criteria: expand the "not my jurisdiction, nevermind it" category to include such situations, or come up with a new category to slot them into so that there's a seamlessly natural transition to behavior, cutting off the cascade before it starts.
Gotta go, maybe pick up this thread later.
While sitting in a coffee shop reading, I overhear some guy sitting behind me running his yap about how "people who think there's a cure for cancer don't understand what it is" and how, apparently, it just happens like death and taxes. (Actually, it was worse: he threw in more painfully wrong biological reasoning into the argument.) Now, I could have turned around in my seat and . . .
A) Casually corrected him, using it as a lead into a potentially interesting conversation.
B) Snidely contradicted him, making him look like an idiot and myself look like a jerk.
But instead I just kept to myself. Why? Because my blood was boiling. I was extremely annoyed at this guy, and that feeling would have come out in my nonverbal cues even if I was nominally "polite". So in reality (A) stopped being a live option the moment my dander got up, and (B) would have asserted itself willy-nilly. Once the adrenaline is in circulation there's an irreducible amount of time needed for it to dissipate, and by then the conversational opening is past.
This is a trope that still crops up more often in my life than is healthy (albeit less than it used to), but to dismantle it I need to get behind the cognitive process that gives rise to it -- which is tricky, since it happens very fast.
I always get the "something is wrong" feeling before I can articulate the wrongness. The sort of rapid integrity checking I unconsciously perform on incoming information is powerful when it can be channeled adaptively, but becomes a problem when there's a lag between the detection of wrongness and what I do about it. If it's not getting channeled to motor output it just gets fed back into the cognitive loop and results in increasingly monomaniacal seething. Self-control becomes pathological self-frustration, which also feels wrong, leading to a growing snowball of wrongness, ergo dysphoria and tension until something else distracts me.
Distraction can be self-medication -- by breaking the Bruce circuit, you're kicking yourself out of a loop that's triggering a mounting cascade of adrenergic signaling and giving yourself the chance to drift back to baseline. ADD and anxiety are both a consequence of *not* acting on instinct -- not having instincts that adaptively fit you to your environment. This yields a nice way to articulate the distinction between ADD and ADHD: the latter type *does* act on instinct, even where it's maladaptive. It's tempting to guess that what differentiates the two is dominance of noradrenergic vs. dopaminergic signaling, which would gel with a lot of other facets of the syndromes.
So it's a double-bind: I must do something but I can't do something, cue gears grinding and general systemic freak-out. All I have to do is break one horn of the dilemma. One way would be to speed up my actions or slow down my perceptions, or both, so that they're more in sync. Another might be to change my categorization criteria: expand the "not my jurisdiction, nevermind it" category to include such situations, or come up with a new category to slot them into so that there's a seamlessly natural transition to behavior, cutting off the cascade before it starts.
Gotta go, maybe pick up this thread later.