Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals | Hacker News Reader

Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals

giftedbooks.com

31 pointshhm32 comments

>>When their intensity is combined with multi-potentiality, these youngsters become particularly frustrated with the existential limitations of space and time. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to develop all of the talents that many of these children have. Making choices among the possibilities is indeed arbitrary; there is no "ultimately right" choice. Even choosing a vocation can be difficult if one is trying to make a career decision between essentially equal passion, talents and potential in violin, neurology, theoretical mathematics and international relations.

I'm curious how others have dealt with this. When faced with seemingly equal career and life decisions how to you go about choosing what vocation or path to pursue.

Does anyone have any specific methods?

I flipped a coin to choose which college to go to.

I actually ended up going to the school that lost the coin flip, however.

Don't do any of them, and instead learn how to do things faster and learn faster.

Then get bored a lot... ;)

Up to now, I trusted my guts and went without much thought to the path with the best profits/effort ratio (that is, I usually chose the easiest, satisfying enough path). The good thing is that you avoid analysis paralysis (by not thinking too much) and prevent a lot of effort (as a kid, I used to be guilty of being lazy but today I understand that hard work is overrated anyway). On the other hand, you can end up in a dead end. So, from now, I continue to move through small steps (I don't believe in bold moves) but I also "look deeper in the tree"; I think about the next step as well when I look at a path, to avoid being trapped in a dead end (of course, I learned to do this because I ended up in a dead end recently). I have a vague idea of a few ultimate goals I'd like to achieve, but not a crystal clear vision so they're rather irrelevant to my small steps. But it's OK as long as the decisions I make lead to better opportunities.

Best book for a gifted existential crisis? "Man's search for meaning." I wish I had read it as a teenager.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

I read it. I'm not sure it's very specific about gifted existential crisis, or about existential crisis at all...

You don't think Frankl tackles head-on the meaning of existence? I mean, he's the father of logotherapy, which, as Wiki describes it, is "a type of Existential Analysis that focuses on a 'will to meaning' as opposed to Adler's Nietzschian doctrine of 'will to power' or Freud's of 'will to pleasure;'."

Can't get much more specific about dealing with existential crises than that, right?

Hmmm... yes, you're right, my mistake.

I think the book he wrote is even more interesting. My ex-girlfriend was exceedingly smart, but in her young life did poorly being judged as ADD and Dyslexic. I got the opposite treatment with gifted programs and expanded curricula. When we compared symptoms, though, we were generally the same.

I wonder how many children in "special" education should actually be in gifted education...

Existentialists should stay true to their natures.

http://madelyn.utahunderground.net/links/jeanpaulsatrecookbo...

Reminds me http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3503877302082311448

Scarey place to be. did anyone read this by a cibermole? Burnt-out programmers:: Existential Depression - the biggest threat to your brand? www.intrench.com

I read this almost a year ago, although it was posted on a different site. It's a pretty good read.

What's the point in reading this... everything gets Dugg in the end...

He advised parents to lie to their children about hugs :(

Someone should tell him (and the rest of the world) that immortality is coming.

It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition.

He also says essentially: they don't fit in, but help them feel like they do. Why not tell them that fitting in isn't such a great thing anyway, and they shouldn't feel bad about being better?

"It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort tradition."

I doubt it's arbitrary. It seems to be, as the article said, "a fundamental and instinctual aspect of existence". A lot of stuff is just built into us, and touch=comfort is a prime candidate for one of those things that's hard-wired into us. I doubt it's a culturally acquired/transmitted trait.

High level human personalities aren't hardwired. They are many layers of interpretation above any hardwiring. It's like imagining that which assembly language is under your Ruby makes a difference to which programs you can write.

(I would ask why curi's comment was down voted, but I'm afraid of my karma, so I won't do so)

This isn't a question of a high-level personality trait, but a question about the low-level firmware in our heads. The standard myth that we all grow up with is that everyone is born as a blank slate, and the child's environment shapes the person from scratch. This is only partially true, there's a whole lot about our nature that is simply fixed in stone (ok, neurons really) before we even take our first breath. Two obvious examples are the innate human calls of crying and laughter. The weird thing is that most of the rest of our minds are pre-determined by biological evolution too.

There's far less variation between people than we normally think; a whole lot of us is dictated by the low-level firmware we're born with. We're just acutely sensitive to the relatively minor differences between us, just like you can tell faces apart even though they're all basically the same.

If you're saying is that the relative weights vary between people, so while one person might be very comforted by touch another wouldn't care for it much, I agree with that. But this is just the small amount of variation between different people, the small amount that isn't fixed and can vary person-to-person. This is just a difference-in-degree, not a difference-in-kind. I doubt you can find someone who reacts to touch by immediately beginning to juggle knives or by sneezing. Now that would provide some evidence for the whole blank-slate hypothesis.

Evolutionary Psychology is fascinating stuff. As I said in another thread: "EvPsych basically makes one important observation and asks the natural question leading from it: Just like our eyes and hands, our minds have also been developed in response to evolutionary pressures. What were these pressures and how do they account for the features we see in ourselves, like language, love, laughter, crying, etc?" A good pop-sci book on the subject is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psyc...

How people interpret touch is definitely a high level personality trait that we can control. People often do. Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware.

A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)

"Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware."

Yes, this is all stuff that can be layered on top of the basic firmware. But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core? I'm not saying we're simple or whatnot, there's definitely many facets to our cognition that are all in there rumbling around. But we sure aren't blank slates that are programmed by the environment. I think a better analogy is that we have a bunch of knobs with certain ranges, and the environment & genetic variation together dial in these knobs to make us who we are. This provides plenty of room for the complex interplay between the different emotions, like the example you cite where someone is generally distrusting of people and dislikes touch. I bet even that distrusting person could feel close to someone who put in a lot of effort to build a friendship to overcome their initial hesitance, and feel comforted by this closeness. Again, it's a difference-in-degree and not a difference-in-kind.

"A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control, reinterpretation, etc)"

That's what the fields of Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Biology are about. :-) Check out that book I referenced in the parent post, it's pretty interesting.

If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?

Here is what I wrote on the subject a few weeks ago:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/488229/Untitled

(it's from email, the quoting got lost. the first 2 paragraphs had quoting)

wow scribd fails. it worked last night. email me if you want to see. (see my profile for addy)

But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core?

If I thought I was feeling something innate that would not be valid evidence I actually was, just a self-reported anecdote.

If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable answer?

The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)

Yes, that's an anecdote. It was meant to be an illustrative point, not a scientific factually valid point. You should read the EvPsych literature to get the scientific argument. I don't know enough about it to cite the papers, etc. Another book that looks at factors involved in the evolution of the human brain is The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon, http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Language...

"The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)"

Yes, memes exist, and they do quite a lot, but it's not like as soon as memes showed up, everything else went out the door! Even if we assume that memes had some ability to thwart further biological evolution, that wouldn't reverse all of the built-in stuff that existed at the point memes came on the scene. Everything that memes do is layered on top of the huge amount of pre-programming that we're born with; memes exist solely on the highest thin layer of a big multi-layered system. Don't forget that we're actually primates with primate brains, and mammals with mammal brains. Millions of years of mammalian brain evolution weren't discarded just because we invented a vehicle for meme transmission (language). That high-level idea transmission mechanism resides on top of a regular ol' primate brain, with all of its complex builtin emotions for survival, reproduction, social interaction, etc.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I can't put together a really convincing argument citing specific experimental facts and whatever. I'm starting to repeat myself ... shows how little I know about this stuff. You should read some of the stuff on EvPsych to draw your own conclusions about the validity of the field.

Check out this blog post on Overcoming Bias: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/evolutionary-ps.html

This branch of the thread seems like a good example of the existential questioning in the article. Some folks are comfortable with the idea of certain traits being hard-wired by evolution and/or God (depending on the person). Others seem threatened by the idea of an existence over which they do not exercise full control -- as if to ask "what meaning can be derived from such limited opportunity for self-actualization?"

I'm in the first camp. Sometimes I have some anxiety over my existence, but (as a Christian) it usually revolves around questioning whether or not I am living the right kind of life.

One thing I do know is that worrying does nothing to help the situation. Getting out there and doing something with your life does.

It shouldn't be a matter of which position we feel better about, or feel threatened by. We should evaluate this as a matter for reason and evidence.

I didn't say memes thwart biological evolution, I said they evolve faster. So any niche that can be, will be filled by a meme before our biology changes.

You are right this wouldn't reverse pre-existing stuff. But what pre-existing things were there? Reflexes? Check. Face recognition hardware? Check. High level human interpretations of touch? No.

You say memes are a top layer. That's what I said originally! And I made an analogy you have not answered: Ruby is a top layer, on top of an assembly language, and C. And the fact is, if you switch to a platform with a different assembly language, Ruby stays the same. The lower layers aren't important once you abstract them away.

You say we have a "primate brain" but aren't clear on what this means. We have a brain with universal creativity. No (other) primates have that. It's a different kind of thing.

Your basic assumption that DNA is unimportant is wrong.

Basic counter examples are:

Reflexes. The variation in human reaction to drugs. Down syndrome and other genetic defects.

It's the similarity in the basic human genome that lets most people assume we are blank slates. Generic mutation can alter an infant's reaction to their environment and people don't notice X-Ray's due to basic biology. Thus we are not blank slates even if environment seems to dominate the picture.

Reflexes are not high level human behavior. They are not part of our creative mind. Reflexes are built in, but that isn't relevant.

Sometimes I have a hard problem in front of me. I can't crack it. I go to sleep. I don't dream about it. I wake up. I know the answer. That isn't part of the concious mind and is pure reflex and creative.

I love the fact that you referred to "low-level firmware" in our brains. :)

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