Interestingly those who tend to be more realistic in their self expectations are more prone to depression.
False confidence may be the route to happiness or at least optimism.
False confidence may be the route to happiness or at least optimism.
Below is a link to a really really brief podcast that talks about the phenomenon. It's very interesting.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/91618...
And there are healthy and unhealthy types of “false confidence.”
There’s the confidence to take on and commit to (reasonable) challenges with the self-belief you’ll be able to conquer them, even if you have no relevant experience. Then there’s the odious, narcissistic type which functions purely on its own desires, rather than reality.
No, depression comes when you are only applying logic to life and essentially seeing that there is no meaning to it. Logic can not live without meaning, but life is tremendously bigger that our limited logic, regardless how fanciful we make it.
>False confidence may be the route to happiness or at least optimism.
No, this comes from the same point of view. Actually there is no route to happiness because it's here already. There are only routes away and making logic dominating in your life is one of them.
Depression is not a question of philosophy of your life.
Philosophy may help you approach the depression, but you can’t get depressed because life is too logical - you may get sad, on the other hand.
Can you elaborate? In my experience this is pretty much the only reason for depression, eg life does not happen how your logic tells you it suppose to happen.
Oh I strongly disagree with this assessment. I am not a psychologist, but have suffered from depression on and off my whole life, and I assert that depression is indeed a philosophical problem.
Depression, I think, is the experience of one's mind realizing that its model of reality (philosophy) is too flawed or incomplete to see a concrete path towards meaningful change in one's life, and attempting to build a better model.
This is evidenced by:
1) depressive realism. the mind is being careful to make more accurate assessments.
2) a preference towards inaction. The mind does not trust its model of reality, and is reluctant to take actions with unpredictable results.
3) similar behavior in children undergoing cognitive schema shifts.
Further, I assert that part of the reason society is unable to effect meaningful treatment (for lack of a better word) of many cases of depression is that society's baseline philosophy (empiricism) is part of the model known by the subject to be flawed, and so it has no pre-existing better model to guide the individual towards (though I contend such models do exist if actively sought).
Depression, in my experience, is overcome in only 2 ways:
1) The mind gives up and returns to its previous, known flawed, philosophy and simply rejects the information that highlighted the flaws. This is an unstable state prone to relapse for obvious reasons. In the worst cases, the subject seeks to actively destroy the source of such information. This, I suspect, is essentially the cause of religious or ideological violence.
2) The mind constructs a better model that allows it to once again place confidence in its prediction of the outcomes of its actions. This is more stable, but the new model may still have significant flaws that will ultimate result in a new round of depression.
Needless to say for anyone who has actually been through severe depression, the experience is intensely unpleasant. If a mind is unable to resolve the dissonance between its current model and reality, it may take desperate action to relieve this suffering.
Anyways, I guess what I'm saying is that if my hypothesis is accurate then you can indeed become depressed from trying to apply logic to your life and discovering that logic (empirical logic anyway) alone is not sufficient.
I hear your opinion of "logic" as "I have a passion for being right, and it makes me unhappy when I am not". Is that logical?
Are you an authority or somehow involved in research on depression? Or are you simply feigning knowledge on a subject you know little or nothing about?
The basic notion being that, that which we believe, is true. This is nonsense on the face of it. Being nonsense doesn't prevent it from being a seemingly fundamental and perplexing aspect of being a human.
Generalizable to: Life has no meaning, but we can give it a meaning.
>The world is like a ride in an amusement park
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/494647-the-world-is-like-a-...
>This theory remains very controversial, as it brings into question the theory underlying cognitive behavioral therapy, which posits that the depressed individual is negatively biased in their perceptions
CBT is simply a way of coaching the depressed into normative thoughts. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. But CBT fancies the whole thing up with a thin veneer of science-sounding words as a confidence trick. The theory is a tool for congestive dissonance where you don't have to face the fact mental disorders are defined by severe inabilities to function within contemporary norms.
-- Spanish Proverb
I agree, especially since the fools are the major source of things to weep about.
For many indeed this leads to some kind of 'happiness'. Buffering our inabilities with lying to ourselves about it. Why did we never learn to be truly happy while being average or even below average. Why did we never learn to tame the ego? It's a curse for life.