That’s awful! I hope one day your situation improves. That sounds so difficult. (Bc this is the internet, have to clarify: not sarcastic!)

Personally I’m fundamentally disconnected from any meaningful relationships with living things (people, animals, plants, the landscape) and addicted to the internet as a replacement. The only times I haven’t felt the way you described is when I had social scaffolding around me. (And the wherewithal in terms of time and energy to pursue “self-actualisation.”)

I don’t know, I always think about an extremely competent woman living a self-sufficient traditional lifestyle with all the skills to survive who just stopped eating after her grandchildren had to run away abroad. A life is a complex thing and it takes a lot of things to be tuned just right for a person to be functional. It’s even too simple to say “we find meaning in social relationships” or whatever, we just need the right system of incentives and comforts and pleasure and pain and there’s no single formula.

I was self-actualising when I had love, understanding, time, and money. Now I’m missing some parts of that package, and none of them are things you can just will into existence, especially not at the cost of other things.

This is the single best piece I’ve seen about mental health in mainstream media. Thanks for sharing

Good response, thank you! I found the article I posted interesting but I have no horse in the race about whether AA is effective or not. Seems pretty convincing that it isn’t.

I find theorising addiction both unfortunately directly relevant and applicable and abstractly extremely interesting. I recently read an article which was satirical (but seemingly not entirely so) arguing that alcohol (and, consequently, addiction) is a disease of civilisation, Gilgamesh-style. But Amazonian foragers and horticulturalists (to my knowledge) get loaded on manioc beer (and seemingly did so before Old World contact), not to mention dolphins and elephants getting high on all kinds of shit. Fair enough that in a natural setting there are systemic limits on these things so addiction doesn’t often arise. So, how, why? And what roles do different kinds of intoxication (or other non-intoxicating addictive states) play? A million questions for a million different answers, all important in their own way. Gets at the fundamental questions of pain and pleasure and why and how we do anything at all in life.