Milk and Honey on my Socks

So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.

I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.

What happened?

Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”

Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”

The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.

“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”

(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)

But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.

“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”

And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”

(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)

穿越千年才找回跟你在一起的回忆

“And they were reincarnated soulmates!”

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2242937-universal-basic-income-seems-to-improve-employment-and-well-being/

Increases high school graduation rates

Reduces:

Domestic violence

Alcoholism

Emergency room visits related to mental health

Road traffic accidents.

All while not disincentivizing employment for most groups (the exceptions being high school students, who were able to focus on their studies, and new mothers…who were using it as maternity leave!)

People, for the most part, want to work.

UBI would allow us to expand the definition of “work.” If somebody can live off of UBI, then they can devote themselves to things which we don’t currently value financially such as the arts, raising children well, etc.

There are so many people who are struggling with mental and physical illnesses, and chronic pain, who are still breaking themselves working because they don’t have another option - because it can take years to get on disability, and it’s not enough to survive on, so people keep going as long as they possibly can.

Even if it’s not a matter of disability, as such … people get burned out?

We’re not really built to do school and work with minimal breaks to the extent that we do.