day 15 - 16/11/20 : the biology of misery

Since I started this blog challenge I've felt as if regardless of what I talk about, I need to wrap everything up with a nice little bow at the end and let things resolve themselves within a thousand words. Today, I wanna give myself permission to let things hang in the air a bit if you don't mind. So, let's trudge onwards.

You'd think after millennia of evolution, your body/our species would have eventually determined the uselessness of misery in the human psyche and at some point we would've mutated a fix for it. Alas, unlike me, our ancestors were too busy having sex and reproducing to think about this ethical question so lets revisit the age-old problem of The Big Sad. For the purposes of this, I'm not talking about lower-case sadness. We as humans fluctuate across a certain baseline of emotion at all times of the day. Moments of sadness serve to add definition and gratitude to the moments of happiness. What I'm referring to is misery. What is the genetic purpose for an animal that becomes incapacitated by their emotions?

Evolutionary Pscyhology attempts to shed light on precisely how the process of evolution relates to things such as mental disorders. To me, I can't help but think of it as a glitch. I'm a big fan of these swanky opposable thumbs and they were evidently advantageous enough to be selectively bred across generations of our ancestors. How come then we still experience such debilitating depressive episodes for no clear practical reason? The best way I can attempt to justify the existence of misery in the human condition is for the same reason that we have evolved a sense of pain. When you hurt or cut yourself, your brain sends a signal to your central nervous system that triggers that uncomfortable feeling that something is wrong i.e. pain. It's the way our body informs us that it's taken damage and that we need to find somewhere safe so we can heal. I'm assuming that misery operates similarly, but we swap out the physical stimuli for emotional stimuli. However, the risk here certainly doesn't seem worth the reward in my eyes. From what I've read, one working theory seems to be that our body employs this strategy of 'behavioural shutdown' (i.e. the big sad) to inform us to avoid the stressors (i.e. your trigger). The whack thing about this is how your body perceives a stressor. For example, how is someone with crippling social anxiety feasibly supposed to avoid social interaction. There's two other theories for misery I want to talk about though that make a bit more sense to me. The first is the Analytical Rumination Hypothesis. This approach theorises that depression serves as a sort-of troubleshooting sequence for your body. Your body's natural response when you sink into depression is disengaging from activities, an undistracted fixation on whatever it is that could be causing you stress and desensitising yourself to anything that might distract you from your thoughts. These are all responses that help your body to re-orientate its psychomotor to problem-solving in order to find the solution(s) to whatever is causing you stress. This theory makes a lot more sense to me but I still feel it falls short. If your brain operates like a PC in the way this theory describes it and your brain/PC keeps getting bug after bug, after some point you'd either bring it to the shop or just buy a better laptop, right? The last theory I want to talk about is how misery might actually be a form of dysregulated adaptation. While the above two theories both view misery as a natural adaptive response to self-recovery, this one poses that's its actually a maladaptive response. In this theory, the ability to feel pain and intense sadness are all cards in the deck of your body's catalogue of natural defence mechanisms. However, when these stimuli are triggered persistently, it sends your body's defence mechanisms off course and they become dysregulated. In this way, misery actually becomes a maladaptive byproduct of evolution as it grabs the deck of cards and throws them in the air as it maniacally exclaims, "Pick up, 52".

We're quickly approaching the day and age where we can edit our genetic makeup, to the point where we can chop and change all these quirks of evolution as if we're getting a sambo from the deli. I'm going to leave the questions of ethics and how this is actually a massively more complicated process than I'm making it out to be. So, take my hand and let's go into this genetic splicing shop. What are you getting? I think the majority of people would immediately want to edit out the multitude of physical terminal illnesses that affect us and cause us so much pain. So what's next on the chopping block; mental disorders, misery itself? Chop. Let's bring our perfectly spliced selves to checkout and get out of here, shall we?

But obviously, knowing humans and knowing me who are seemingly allergic to the multitude of happy moments heaped in front of them, this will not be the end. More misery and happiness will be hiding in the next corner. I suppose I should stop thinking as if the secret to finally ending misery lies in my genetic code or a carefully laid out theory. There's a short film called Happiness that has some salient points on our never-ending pursuit of happiness (although it's a bit too nihilistic about the rat race metaphor for my taste).

Once again, thank you for reading. Yesterday and most of today I was hitting the wall on ideas but I'm pretty happy with today's. Please consider donating to the fundraiser ! We're nearly at our $1,500 goal so we'll be increasing it to $1,750 and hopefully by the end of the month we could even hit twice our original goal which would really be something.