Original Seeing

I’m not a Slytherin at heart, but I do know a few and getting into their heads has been a bit tricky. One of the more important Slytherin questions for non-Slytherins (esp. Hufflepuffs) that I eventually extracted out of their heads is the following:

“How do I accomplish this task while also benefiting my future self?”

Many people act selflessly in their actions while attempting to care for others or take actions purely for temporary gain and fun while not considering their own upcoming futures. Just because your current actions weren’t chosen or designed to benefit your own future, that doesn’t mean they can’t be slightly modified so that you gain power, status, wealth, or other value in the future as well.

Whatever you personally value (knowledge, love, pleasure, kindness, wealth, etc.) you can often turn that into opportunities to gain other possible benefits later on. You can choose to do an activity with a friend instead of alone, choose to do the action while observed or with a wider audience and number of people affected by it, or you can ensure that the action builds a skill that could actually be useful to you in the future.

I don’t suggest that you stop doing whatever it is that you want to do. By all means, keep doing whatever it is that you want! I merely suggest that you might alter things ever so slightly so that you gain even more benefit later on down the line.

I was talking to a smart friend of mine recently who wasn’t fully aware that this cycle was a thing. No one had fully pointed it out to them in simple terms. I’m posting it here to have something to point people to later or just have available in case other people are unaware that this is a thing.

Depression and anxiety are often self-perpetuating diseases because they push you towards action when you aren’t in a position to do anything and make you feel like you don’t need to take action when you are in a position to finally do something about it.

(Note: I’m not sure why this is coming up blurry. I’ll try to fix that at some point.)

The solution to this problem is to realize that you aren’t going to be fine in the future and that you need to get as much help as possible while you are feeling healthy before the next downfall into depression or anxiety comes back to bite you again.

A better model might actually be something like the sun. You can’t always see the sun, but even at night it still exists. It hides somewhere beyond the horizon waiting to come back out again and burn you as harshly as you’ll let it. Until you decide to act as if the monsters hiding behind the hills are always going to come back again, you may not make substantial enough progress on these issues to actually kill them for good.

I have a small amount of experience with anxiety and have spoken to lots of friends about the concepts involved. This portion of ideas about anxiety aren’t too common and are worth being aware of for people who have lots of anxiety in their life through anxiety disorders or other sources.

The model for anxiety that I think a lot of people with mental health issues operate under is something like the one below. We can call this Model 1.

Model 1 shows that as the amount of anxiety increases, the well-being of the person drops very quickly. The part of this model that I want you to pay attention to is the top left portion near the origin.

Under Model 1 people imagine that so long as there is only a sliver of anxiety in their system that they should be happy that things are not much worse. They try to tolerate it and don’t work too hard to remove that last sliver because they understand how terrible the real depths of the anxiety can get and that they are already doing “good” (for some value of good). One unit of anxiety is only something like -1 wellness on this model. That’s why I disagree with it.

A more realistic model for anxiety looks more like Model 2 below. A person’s wellbeing and ability to operate healthily has an large initial drop once only a sliver of anxiety has been introduced into their system. Even tiny amounts of constant anxiety can compromise a person’s ability to operate healthily, interact with others, and think as clearly as possible.

A person who is at 1 unit of anxiety will think that they are doing well compared to where they were when trying to function at 10 units of anxiety, but they miss the point that there are actual very massive benefits for moving from 1 unit back down to 0 units.

If you or anyone you know has lots of anxiety in their life through an anxiety disorder or something else, then I would strongly encourage you to ensure that the level of anxiety there is taken all the way down to zero and not left at just a sliver.

If you have a group where no one is caring for one another’s emotions and no one is caring for their own emotions, you’re going to end up with some bad consequences.

One of the various methods of thinking about forms that small communities can take is in how people’s needs are met. In a more communal setup, everyone takes care of everyone else’s needs. This leads to everyone’s needs being met because people can ignore large portions of self-interest while still getting their needs met due to the kindness and involvement of others. In more self-oriented societies, everyone primarily takes care of themselves. If everyone spends large amounts of time and effort on taking care of themselves and mostly ignoring the needs of other people, then most everyone involved would still get all of their needs taken care of.

The first obvious flaw in the communal setup is that it’s open to exploitation by someone who pursues self-interest as a net-taker while masquerading as a net-giver. The second flaw is that if after all is said and done there are not enough resources to go around and meet everyone’s needs, then everyone in the community will suffer badly for it. A matching flaw in the self-oriented model is that people who can’t take care of themselves and could only survive with the assistance of others will get left behind and starve/die/fail with no one taking care of them even if there are enough resources to go around.

In contrast to the two extreme systems I mentioned above, I’ve seen lots of small communities of geeky people in the US where a third option is chosen. These communities exist where no one takes care of the emotional needs of other people AND no one in them is taking care of their own emotional needs and wellbeing. Whether you prefer either of the two models I mentioned earlier, it’s obvious that this third model is the worst of all.

If no one is taking care of anyone else and no one is taking care of themselves, then everyone is going to starve out on the basic necessities to stay personally and psychologically healthy. I strongly suggest pushing any communities you are a part of away from this third model if you ever notice it occurring in practice.

The easiest transition away from the third model is most likely to move more towards the communal model than the self-oriented one. The buy in costs are lower since all you really need to do is convince one or two Hufflepuff-oriented people to start actively caring for other people. If those two people still need someone else taking care of their needs, then you can assist with that yourself or find another way to make that happen. (Two is a much easier target to fulfill than however many people are actually in your group). After that, try out other opportunities like getting people to form pairs or small groups where people start opening up more with one another and start building up emotional support. There are lots of ways to do this that are readily available online. Most popular methods include small group activities (2-4 people), alcohol, and shared misery.