I have been suffering from a whole host of mental health issues for a long time in my life. Some only popped up around college, some were probably there for most of my life and were just not diagnosed yet.
Lately I’ve found myself struggling with thinking about or describing to others things I like or don’t like or ways I go about life. There are some things I either used to like or think I should like but don’t at the moment. I might even come up with reasons to rationalize these dislikes that sound plausible to me. But then I stop and feel kind of disingenuous about it. Like do I not like a thing because that’s what my “real” feelings are? Or is it something due to one of my issues like depression and I might like the thing if I were finally able to find a treatment that worked. What is the difference between my intellectual thoughts and how my brain and body actually feel and behave?
Another manifestation of this has to do with the things that bother me about the world. There’s so much terrible stuff out there and I feel bad about that, but am I depressed because I feel bad about these things or do I feel bad about these things because I’m depressed? Would I stop feeling bad about wars or climate change if I weren’t depressed anymore? That doesn’t seem like it would make sense. I guess I’d just be regularly sad as opposed to clinically depressed?
Things get even weirder and more existential when I start to think about what we even are. Our brains aren’t just computers running software. We’re a collection of cells all doing their own things that somehow come together to perform larger functions that compose a larger complex organism. Not even all of the things that make our body work and affect how we feel are even technically “belonging” to to the body. Things like the bacteria in our guts are super important to our health and as I understand it, have an impact on mental health to some extent.
So what am I? What is “me?” Is it possible to separate my thoughts from my body? What does it mean to think things that are in conflict with your feelings?
Obviously this is a pretty vague topic and can be approached from a variety of perspectives such as biology, psychology, philosophy, etc. So I’m curious what people think about this.
if you are experiencing depersonalization or similar dissociative symptoms, psychologists and psychiatrists can be helpful
I don’t believe in the self, personally. It’s a myth. You are your body, flaws and all. Your consciousness and thoughts are a function of your brain, and if you interfere with or damage your brain, your consciousness and thoughts change.
I have a number of answers to give you and will write more as I have time, but a start with some of the shorter ones.
“The map is not the terrain” is a very important concept in general but especially so wrt the self. Your idea of your self is such a map, and as such is necessarily flawed and incomplete. A person is very complex, probably to complex to fully understand even if you had access to it. But you don’t fully have access to it, even about your self.
The complexities going into why you like a thing, why you react a certain way, sometimes why you do a thing, are not all inspectable to you. We have am enormous bias in modern culture to think of everything in terms of the conscious mind. This is usually incorrect. Most often we do things unconsciously and rationalize why we did it afterwards. Now these rationalizations may often be correct, and trivial. But the reality is that they are not observations about the workings of our mind but after the fact theories. In many non trivial cases they can be quite incorrect. (I can give examples, but this is getting long winded already.)
Sometimes, with phenomena we have limited ability to know, it is helpful to let go, accept that they are what they are, and just see what they do without getting too committed to expectations. Like with the weather.
I find this very insightful, and not a message i often see being spread about.
I conceive of myself as a decision-making process. I’m not my body and I’m not my mind and I’m not my feelings, but at the same time I am not myself without those things; they are the filters that give the (imperfect) inputs to my decisions and execute the (imperfect) outputs of those decisions, and with different filters I would make different decisions.
The above is a very Stoic way of viewing the situation, and you’re welcome to read more.
To address your own situation, you seem to be concerned with with what I’ll call “authenticity”: are these my real feelings, is this how I really think. Don’t be. Authenticity is a trap. Human nature is kinda shitty. You can be better than it. That’s not an act or a fake; that’s ethics.
Whether you feel depressed because the world sucks or the world seems to suck because you’re medically depressed, the answers are the same: Make the world better, make yourself better (by medication if necessary). It’s okay to have something wrong with you; we all do. But you gotta try to make it better. If I don’t wear my glasses to correct my nearsightedness, that doesn’t make me noble, just impaired. But at the same time, it may seem that the world outside my window is blurry not because I forgot my glasses, but because I need to wash the window. Sometimes one or another is enough, sometimes you need to do both.
You are right to doubt the concept of self. The closer you look at these things the more the distinctions we arbitrarily apply to life and to the “self” dissolve. I have experienced ego death on a few occasions, and what it taught me is that life and matter is all one. The self is just a useful illusion of the mind. You sound like you might be overwhelmed by something and I would be willing to bet that ego is the underlying cause of it. How you think about yourself does matter, just remember that you deserve the same love that everything does.
Your self is the private reservoir of knowledge and experience you draw on to interact with the world in a way that’s distinct from anyone else (and that couldn’t be predicted without access to that internal knowledge).
