simont | My own worst enemy

I was having long thoughts again this morning on the way to work. It occurred to me that pretty much all the things I'm most afraid might go wrong with my life are internal to my own mind.

Falling inconveniently in love is perhaps the prime example: this has been a major source of woe to me in the history of my life. When I was a teenager and an undergrad I had a pretty much solid pattern of falling for someone I couldn't have, angsting about it for too long, eventually getting over it (usually by making a fool of myself in front of her), and then repeating the cycle with someone else. I don't seem to have been making quite such a career of it in recent years, but it still happens to me occasionally. And as if to make up for the relative infrequency, the last time it happened (a couple of years ago) it was worse than ever: it turned my brain completely inside out, disrupted my life utterly, and prevented me concentrating on absolutely anything at all – and it was only by great good luck that the worst of it only lasted a week and not months. So I still think of it as a clear and present danger to my mental equilibrium.

My other big worry is about losing my ability to do useful things with computers. Not so much my actual programming skills and knowledge – I've proved to myself any number of times that those are deep-rooted enough to survive practically anything I can do to my brain, up to and including balance-impairing quantities of alcohol – but the powers of concentration and focus that are necessary in order to apply those skills and knowledge to achieving any worthwhile goal. At work I don't feel as if I'm concentrating as well as I used to (although this may simply be because my job has been changing a lot in the past few months and I'm not used to it); in my free-software activities I seem to have been flitting about doing small and silly stuff, and it's difficult to imagine myself ever again having the time or energy to achieve anything of the magnitude (or the usefulness to society) of PuTTY.

Added to those there's a list of more minor mental worries: fear that the anxiety attacks I suffered a few years ago in the wake of a stressful life event might recur, fear that my ongoing difficulty convincing myself that I really locked the front door when I went out1 might be a symptom of the onset of some sort of OCD-like inconvenience. And, of course, fear that all this unnecessary worrying isn't good for me!

What strikes me as odd about this is that it's not as if there aren't plenty of things that could go wrong with my life in a purely material sense. I now own a house which might fail in difficult and expensive ways; I have a slightly rickety body which might at any point choose to develop some new and exciting ailment to help make a mockery of the idea of Intelligent Design; and there's always the background risk of things like car accidents, people close to me dying, and so on. For some of these things the actual risk (probabilistic expectation of the total damage to my life) is probably higher than the purely mental phenomena I've listed above.

But none of them scares me nearly so much as the mental risks. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because I perceive (with dubious accuracy) my mind to be under my own control, so that if it does something wrong or unhelpful then it's in some sense my fault, so I feel as if I should be taking extra care in pre-emptive avoidance. Whereas many of the material and physical risks to my life are things which it's easy to see as basically unpredictable, so while they could strike me at any time there would be less of a feeling of having ‘done it to myself’, and more a feeling of ‘them's the breaks, these things happen’.

1. Which seems to be worse in the new house, incidentally, as a result of the way the front door lock works. I plan to get a new front door, since the behaviour is annoying for other reasons too, but haven't got round to it yet.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

And also you probably have a lot of your self-worth wrapped up in your brain. If your house fell down, well, you're clever enough to sort something out and you've only been a member of the house-owing classes for a few months. You've been a member of the brain-owning classes for years.

Err, something like that *waves arms around*. For me, brain stuff going wrong would be more like the end of me, where-as other stuff going wrong would just be things I had to deal with. But this comment has probably ended up more about me than about you.

That's OK; it's not as if it's off topic to talk about yourself after I talk about me! Comparing notes is a perfectly reasonable response to a post like this. :-)

Yes, you could be right. My brain is an irreplaceable part of me, but one can always find somewhere else to live, so threats to the former are more scary.

(Though if irreplaceability was the criterion, illness worries ought to be fairly high on the list too: my body is as irreplaceable as my brain. But I suppose the thing about illnesses of the body is that one can at least live with them, usually; it would make my life more inconvenient to have to live it out of a wheelchair or using dictation software, but it wouldn't stop me being me. Which is back to your point, I think.)

My brain is an irreplaceable part of me, but one can always find somewhere else to live, so threats to the former are more scary.

Except that your brain has altered itself over the last ten years. You're not the person you were at college, you're just similar to him, and you're certainly very much unlike the person you were as a five year-old. So you're only the you you are now.

This isn't going to help much, but what you describe is so totally part of the human condition. With certain substiutions, this could be my own mental dialogue.

Life is made of risk, nothing is for certain. That's what insurance is for, not just the overpriced stuff you buy from companies but the little insurances one creates for one's self, like savings, a support network, eating healthily, checking the front door etc etc. And you do all of those.

The hard thing, is once you've checked that the front door is locked and you are on your way, is to remember to look at the leaves turning colour and wave at the neighbour as you walk past and book the theatre tickets so that you are in for a sublime evening etc etc. Coz life should be made of those things too.

*hug*

On the other hand, Simon, you may be a lifelong geek who's so used to seeing his mind and indeed quite a lot of the world as something that is ordered, systematic and controlled that entirely normal human failings like "argh did I leave the oven on" and "argh did I lock the door" are deeply worrying to you. It's not OCD, it's just who you're used to being - though you might reasonably conclude that the person you're used to being is a tad on the anxious side and likes to have everything in order.

atreic has half a point, but I don't think it's self *worth* you have wrapped up in the systematic functioning of your brain, I think it's identity; you define yourself by it. And one of the things that worries people most is the thought that they might have to change how they think about who they are, because none of us really know what's in the howling void outside our primary identities.

I'm a little curious here, so please ignore me if you think it's nosey.

Without wanting to add an extra level of fear to your life, I note that you view all these things in terms of mental ailments/issues. What about neurological conditions - do you fear them separately, not at all, or just as a general part of the "argh, what if my brain doesn't work?" angst?

I'm not entirely sure where one should draw the line between neurological and mental conditions, although I suppose that a problem which could be conveniently traced to (say) a chemical imbalance which had arisen from some external cause would certainly fall on the former side of the line.

Things of that nature – chemical imbalances which aren't a problem generated by the mind but whose effects happen to impair its functioning – don't worry me particularly. I mean, I'm aware that they could happen to me just as they could happen to anyone else, but I don't lose sleep over it.

I think all the things that terrify me are the things where the mind manages to get itself into an undesirable state simply by the normal means of processing its input, thinking and adapting itself.

Isn't the falling inconveniently in love always thus disruptive? Even falling conveniently in love entails a period of mental and emotional upheaval. So fortunate that the disruption and pain was brief and that it doesn't recur frequently; though uncomfortable situations which are also infrequent loom larger, as one doesn't build emotional immunity.

I think most if not all intelligent people fear things which affect their mind - Intellect is one's Power, no? And you have much power. It's a shame if the petty vicissitudes of daily life should distract from it; one begins to see the value of being an anchorite... or perhaps a guru, with disciples who will bring food and do the washing-up and test programs...

Here, have a *hug*

"At work I don't feel as if I'm concentrating as well as I used to"

How recently have you had your eyes tested?

It always surprises me how small a shift in my prescription affects my vision.

(Forgot to add) and my concentration.

Did you forget because you weren't concentrating? :)

Some of the things you describe I think fall under the category "getting older". Which doesn't make it any more pleasant, of course.

It's winter, nobody is concentrating well. Also, will it terrify you if I say you are not 20 anymore and people have their peak mad programming/mathsing/similar ability around that age? Peak wisdom and ability to design large things has a much later peak at an age older than you are, helpfully, so you will become even more brilliant at designing programs, then you can pay a bunch of teenagers to do the tedious debugging bits :D

Beg to disagree on the generic comment "It's winter, nobody is concentrating well.", although not on the specific application to

simont of whose seasonal preferences I have no idea, since I'm one of those awkward people who can't concentrate when it's sunny and hot, and too light etc...

My experience of "did I lock the door properly?" has been that it's a function of general anxiety levels. I still do it occasionally - but in the last six months or so, I've only actually been back to check the door upon leaving the house twice, and both of those were on foot, from within a hundred metres. For comparison, I spent the preceding three years in a maddening retail job with my S.O. mostly overseas care of visa woes.

I do get the urge to go back more often than that, but more careful reflection does usually reveal an impression of the door being locked properly which I've not yet discovered to be confabulation.

This is of course in your list of minor worries, but possibly it's useful to know.

(Hi. Friend of

oneplusme and

damerell. Nice to finally have something to say here.)

My own worst enemy

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject