23Oct09 | About Mental Health: The curse of knowledge

Why mental health is more important than physical health?

With physical health we know what to do. We know we need to get in good food, exercise, sunlight, and sleep. We can get lazy, we can get unmotivated, we can ignore our bodies, but at least we almost always know what to do.

Mental health is serious, way more serious. Very few people know what to do when they’re feeling drained, fewer people speak about it, and even fewer people seek professional help. Mental health is not a luxury. It’s a priority. Many years from now I can probably forgive myself for anything except not optimizing for that.

I’ve come to realize more knowledge often comes with more burden. When you get to know more about things, you also get more alone in doing so. I’ve come to appreciate silent people because you can’t really figure whether they know everything or they know nothing, could be anything between.

And if we can experience this on the small scale with the little experience we have in our twenties, I can imagine what it’s like for older folks at their 50s or 60s – As you get smarter, the world gets darker. I am in no way condoning any negativity, but I am also probably not that smart.

I believe if you're getting smarter, you're not getting any less-human, so in theory you're still the same human with the same range of emotions but now with a bit more logic applied to your daily decision making. So you still need somebody to listen and understand, but, the smarter you get, the harder this gets.

I believe I’m dumb in so many ways, and I definitely can not say "I was happier when I was dumber" yet, but I feel like the statement is inevitable. Like if you have some basic high-level sense of life & people, every piece of knowledge you gain from this point on is a step on that road.

Imagine you knew the secret of everything, the intentions of others, or finally figured out a mental model behind how the universe was built, … – Imagine you could possess this type of answers, what would you do then? How would you live?

“Truth is like poetry, people fucking hate poetry” – Adam McKay

"If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely" – Carl Jung

I think big part of our normal lives is that we won’t ever have answers to some certain questions. But see that’s only a taste of the infinity of it – Proves the point that ultimately every step on that road is just dark & lonely. If anything, I learned to be more outgoing. I don’t take a stop as much as I used to do. I stopped forcing answers, but rather embracing my dumbness if need be.

At early years of adulthood you may think the list of questions like these is finite. Then only through time do you realize that the number of things that don't make sense doesn't actually make sense. So you stop asking, because it’s just too many open loops for your brain to handle, posed at exactly the same time your attention budget starts shrinking. Because attention gets more scarce as we grow, and nothing can change that. We need money to live and we need to live to be happy, and we need to be happy in order not to be walking dead. Now imagine a scenario where you're not outgoing.

The reason I’m coding a mental health app is because that’s the type of digital blueprint I’d want to leave. I can imagine using it everyday for the rest of my life, not because I made it, but because I could be the happiest man on earth if I spent the rest of my days talking about my interpretation of the world in my journal notebook.

If there’s just one topic I’d choose to know about above all else, it’d be “Human Consciousness”, and I found that my life has put me in a prime position to solve for that & gave me technology as leverage.

Why “Human Consciousness”?

It’s the basis for both: Human-to-human interaction & Human-to-computer interaction.

It’s the holy grail of Artificial Intelligence, and the only reason we find meaning in things.

I don’t find anything as particularly interesting as practices that dig in deeper states of mind.

It’s the most thing that makes us feel human, and the fittest tool to sharpen our intellect.

In September 2021, exactly two years & one month ago, I wrote a post that’s more or less similar to this, but I removed it a week later. Partly because I felt it didn’t properly convey what I had to say. May be my choice of wording was poor, may be I got a bit better at articulating what I do know – But the feeling was pretty much the same. Road to knowledge is not easy, and your journey could get lonely if you didn’t do anything about it.

It wasn’t until now that I decided to rephrase what I had to say 2 years ago, but with much more conviction. Partly because those were 2 years of fighting against the waves. It’s generally much easier to buy in & be a follower than be an independent thinker.

Independent thinking comes at an absolute toll.

I once read:

“We can do truth, but a human doing truth is like a dog standing on its hind legs—it’s a real effort and we’re not in our element”

Our “element” became so much contaminated to a point that is beyond restoration.

Crazy to think about how much effort is needed everyday just to fetch the truth behind things.

Lies come easy, with different flavors and through different mediums: People & media.

Our primitive collective mind is taking over almost all walks of life.

Instagram feels like a showroom of false positives. You don’t know who’s what.

Lies became so advanced that even a master bullshit caller would find it hard to dismiss them.

LinkedIn feels like the facebook group of my engineering class from long ago at a night of a final exam:

1. People are discussing normal stuff but in much more complex nuance & jargon
2. People are switching into panic mode due to FOMO on things to do, know, or be
3. You can safely ignore the discussions yet proceed to do perfectly well at matter at hand

I can’t put into words the consistent fear I’m having everyday of falling victim to the algorithm again. It’s alarming and scary. Sometimes I think I can do nothing about it. You just blink, lose the tinniest bit of focus, and you catch yourself in a whirlpool of lies.

The news is literally promoting aliens! Times have come when sci-fi is now breaking news.

I mean where did all of this come from? Was the world that stupid all along?

I don’t know where this ends, but I don’t want to be a part of it, neither me nor my kids.