Tag: Psychology

Joker: Folie à deux – The Dark, Twisted Fate of Internal Conflict

The polarizing reception of Joker: Folie à deux shows how deeply we are attached to certain fictional characters. Whatever might be the reception of this film, the character design and writing of Arthur Fleck in Folie à deux will go down as one of the best representations of the psychotic villain in the history of cinema. Even though the film doesn’t cater to the fan service, it will definitely become one of the best depictions of the inner conflicts of a mentally challenged person swinging between reality and delusion. There is an interesting mental dilemma of identity common to both the Batman and the Joker. How they chose to deal with it made them who they are. The movie also points to the importance of inner compass for a healthy mental state altogether with surroundings nurturing empathy, kindness, appreciation, and love.

Character study of Todd Philips’s Arthur Fleck in Joker: Folie à deux

Recently Joker 2 or should I say Joker: Folie à deux released in theaters and people almost lost it. Most of the movie goers especially the comic book fandom was highly disappointed. There is another side of this same movie experience where people are really appreciating what the film presents in its narrative even though it is not completely loyal to the source material. Some are praising the liberties the film makers took to show the world what it means to become the truest of the villain of them all and why villains are praised more (maybe they deserve to be praised more) than the hero, even though hero wins in the end (this emotion is strongest in terms of the batman villains to be honest).

I am taking the side of what the Joker duo-logy presents itself to the audience rather than its correctness to the source material or the fan service. It is really a daring move from the creators of this second film to use all their creative power to show the world how dangerous character of Joker could be in real life. When I am saying this, I know fans can say that its just a movie and we only watch it for the sake of the entertainment; we do not want every movie to be a lesson on good or bad, right or wrong, truth or lie. But trust me when you are completely in the mood of bliss and entertainment, engrossed in the world created, even a lie would seem true and a wrong would feel right. It leaves an impression on our mind. A great entertainer can convince you to twist the ideas of certain truths in a person’s mind. Advertisements are a crude example to prove this point. Movies, cinema, stories are a potent media to change the minds, perspectives of the masses in an impactful way.       

Mark my words, after few years of “marination” this movie will go as one of the best materials to study the writing and the design of a psychotic person. The movie will definitely regain its value as the ‘cult classic’ in coming decades. I am not saying that people are fool to not appreciate this film; I am saying that some of the things which disappointed people are actually way ahead of their time, people will take time to get comfortable around them and appreciate them.

The ability of movies like this to create a polarization of opinions amongst audience shows how potent the medium of cinema and storytelling is! We are humans – we love stories (especially those which unsettle us)

I am taking this opportunity to show appreciation for how the character of Arthur Fleck is written in this Joker Duo-logy. This is not the critic of what the comic book says and what could have been done in a right way to make movie goers happy. As the makers of these movies had already said, it was pretty clear that we are not in for what is generally expected from the mainstream, fan-worshiped representation of Joker from comics. 

This is a story of a failed Joker to be very clear. The ways in which music and singing is injected in the narrative is highly effective. Most of the people found the musical aspect of the movie unnecessary and stretching but it had a proper intent. It is not draggy in any sense. You must understand how a psychotic person’s mind works in order to appreciate the whole movie.

(The fact that people despised this way of representing the Joker of Arthur Fleck, shows that most of us are sane and good-hearted people.)

I will be deep diving into the psyche of Arthur Fleck’s Joker and there will be heavy spoilers (if you care) I will try to touch the nuances in the character design of this Joker and why it all should make sense. For that you must accept that this is not the Joker which ‘our’ Batman had.

This is the Joker who found his way back to sanity but the society rejected him. (I will discuss this in detail further.)

Last warning – SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Me and My Shadow

The cartoon poses a question – if a person has multiple dissociated personalities inside him and one of the hibernating personalities made him commit the crime which is not who he is generally; then how should the person be punished?

The answer has many aspects.

If we are pardoning the person because he is psychologically challenged then the masses who are watching this proceeding would consider that even a heinous crime can go pardoned if the person is not sane. This creates a gray area for the real perpetrators to commit more heinous crimes. Judicial system is well aware of such consequences that is why an example needs to be put in front of the masses.

To show men that crimes can be pardoned, and that punishment is not their inevitable consequence, encourages the illusion of impunity and induces the belief that, since there are pardons, those sentences which are not pardoned are violent acts of force rather than the products of justice.

Cesare Beccaria

Next question-

The mentally challenged person who committed this crime is also a human being in the end. If we go on giving capital punishments to every human being fitting in similar situations, then what human part are we supposed to preserve of the humanity through law and order?

The answer lies in the psyche of this psychotic perpetrator.

The answer is what this psychotic criminal considers himself. Trust me this is not an easy choice. Bear in mind that this in not a normal sane person we are talking about. It is more difficult when such person is carrying multiple personalities inside him. It is difficult for such person to submit to only one identity out of the many he carries inside. One of the reasons for a person to undergo personality dissociation and have multiple personalities is to have a coping mechanism to outside events. Same was the case with Arthur Fleck, the personality of Joker was his coping mechanism against the society. They are polar opposites. His problematic childhood is the key reason.

Who is the real Arthur?  – The interview with Dr. Beatty

This interview with Dr. Beatty should justify why the movie ultimately becomes a musical in overall. You will understand from this interview that the real opportunity for the personality of Joker to shine out was in the Murray Franklin show. Arthur was actually intending to commit suicide on national television but knowing this would eradicate the existence of the other personality – the Joker takes the charge of Arthur’s ‘body’. There he kills Murray and makes statement and vents out all those emotions he had suppressed. That is exactly why Arthur is not concerned and doesn’t remember that he murdered some people in that show; he associates to the music of the show on that day. Because in that musical moment he felt free.

Also, keep in mind that Arthur has other personalities other than Joker. His mother’s mirror personality is also inside his head. The changed accent of attorney in which Arthur talks with Mr. Puddles in not just a performance to mock the court, it is a personality Arthur created so that he can defend the adverse external conditions which Arthur is incapable of handling.

It’s not just about Arthur and Joker.

Joker’s (Not Arthur’s) Smoking Addiction

From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux

Psychotic person resort to a habit which helps them to relieve the suppressed emotions or identities. It could be any small habit and mostly would seem harmless. In this case it is smoking. In the first Joker movie smoking is just a way to release the tension in his mind but as the Joker’s personality gets the hold of his ‘body’ the smoking intensifies. In the interview with Dr. Beatty when she asks Arthur if she can talk to the Joker inside him, the gaze that Arthur throws at the recording camera is more than enough to let us know that the smoking personality was the Joker himself. (Joaquin Pheonix is just perfect here!)

There is also a moment in Arkham Asylum when Arthur is watching Harvey Dent’s statement implying that only a fool would consider Arthur a martyr, this further reinforces Joker to consider himself more powerful and influential. He is smoking there too.

Before going live in interview with Paddy, Arthur’s attorney Maryanne tells him to stop smoking in front of the camera during the interview because it makes him look like a ‘cavalier’ – reckless. This is exactly where we should get a clear idea. The Joker is reckless, carefree – ‘cavalier’. Smoking becomes an extension of this very idea of recklessness that Joker has in his personality.

But for the good of Arthur, he controls Joker inside during interview. The moment he realizes that it’s just to create sensation, the Joker takes control and again smoking starts.

When Arthur’s private diary is being read out loud in court and when Ms. Dumond is testifying, saying that Arthur’s whole identity that his mother created was fake; you will see that Joker is just there absorbing everything because all these things are very uncomfortable for Arthur to handle. Arthur cannot handle such public humiliation and identity crisis. Joker is truly his coping mechanism.  

There is also a scene where the Joker breathes out the smoke into the Harley ‘Lee’. It is very dramatic and feels like they are exchanging their very souls, their identities. Now they are inseparable.

From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux

(Todd Philips deserves appreciation for creating such characteristic moments throughout the movie. There is one moment in the start of movie where Arthur gets a lip cut during shaving and the blood drop flows down his chin creating a sad face. It is impressively symbolic of the state of the mind Arthur is in. Applauds to Todd again!)

The ‘Kick’ Dance

From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux

The most characteristic attribute of Joker being present and active in Arthur is his dance. The specific step of kicking fiercely in the air is very poetic. This kick shows how reckless Joker is. The Joker is literally kicking the society which led to the downfall of an innocent person like Arthur, the society which created Joker himself. It is a tight slap to the degraded social system which led to the formation of such psychotic character.

Very subtle but the ‘kick dance’ has its purpose in the whole narrative and character of the Joker. Later ‘Lee’ mirrors the same dance showing that Joker and Lee are now in sync.

The Musical

I have never ever seen the medium of musical to demonstrate the state of the mind of the character especially a completely negative character. (I am not a big musical fan) Whenever I have tried to appreciate the musical it feels to break the continuity of the realism of the narrative and dreaminess of the character or given scene. Although there are many good examples where musical just fits in perfectly.

But, this musical in completely negative and dark setup is very impactful. I know most of the moviegoers absolutely thrashed the musical approach and underwhelming utilization of Lady Gaga but trust me it was all intentional. It was supposed to make you uncomfortable.

The unsettling musical is actually a peek into the psyche of Joker and how uncomfortable his character is. It’s a warning to those who glorify Joker as villain or consider him an anti-hero.

Every musical had clear purpose and it also landed perfectly. You have to be slightly ‘mad’ and must fool yourself for the given moment to appreciate importance of musical in the whole narrative of the Joker. I will reiterate that people not appreciating the Joker musical is a subtle proof that the real society we are living in is still in a healthy mental condition in overall. If you didn’t like the musical, it is totally fine, and that was the intent of the creators.

Joker strongly associates himself with music, that is the pivot of his identity. Music allowed him to express freely and also supported his recklessness. The moment he discovered ‘Lee’ in music session that bond with music got further reinforced. That is exactly why his delusions, their delusions are fully filled with music.

Now, it’s lyrics appreciation time:

The opening cartoon song
Everyone needs love
There are already enough mountains

What Arthur helplessly wanted was appreciation and love from his people around. “Mountains” used here and used extensively in further narrative of the movie indicate the hardships, difficulties in everyone’s life. Even after these difficulties, if you are loved you can come over these mountains. Sadly, exactly opposite happens with Arthur.

In later parts of the movie, where Lee says that we will build a mountain from hill. She is actually saying that we will raise chaos everywhere and make other people’s lives difficult because they deserve it.

The Arkham Asylum musical  
From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux
For once in my life, I have someone who needs me
For once in my life
I won’t let sorrow hurt me
Not like it has hurt me before
For once I have someone
I know won’t desert me
And I am not alone anymore
For once I can say this is mine and you can’t take it

This is Joker singing in Arkham realizing that people may consider him a martyr and he has also got the company of ‘Lee’. The sense of belonging to something for a person like Arthur through accepting the identity of Joker made him feel invincible. This is exactly what is sung in this asylum scene. Arthur wanted somewhere to belong and someone to care for him in the end.

The ‘B-Ward’ movie scene –

When the patients are watching the movie where Arthur and Lee are sitting together there is musical which goes like this:

We are all entertainers
Everything that happens in life
Can happen in a show
You can make’em laugh
You can make’em cry
Anything can go
Anything

We must understand that there are lots of creative choices while making a sincere film. Even though it feels useless, this movie musical scene has a purpose. It is exact reflection of how Joker thinks. For him it is all a performance, it makes him free, same goes for Lee. But sadly, society questions Arthur if he is doing a performance and not Joker. The very lyrics here show why Joker is reckless. This delusion of performance enables him to remain carefree, reckless in the ‘real’ reality. 

The Hotel Arkham Dance –
From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux
In our minds, we’d be just fine
If it were only us two
They might say that we’re crazy
But I’m just in love with you

This shows how pivotal ‘Lee’ is for Joker. She fuels him. As Arthur is meek, loveless and innocent nobody appreciates him, loves him or cares for him. Being bold, carefree, dashing through Joker, at least he gets ‘Lee’ to love him, appreciate him. The identity of Arthur needs something to lean on, to fulfill his humanly needs – mental and physical. These needs would only get fulfilled if Joker comes out as dominant one. If not Arthur then at least Joker would make this personality free. This song is just about that. Even though delusional but Joker gets all the mental support to justify his personality in reality through ‘Lee’.

The interview with Patty

Before this interview Arthur has full control over the Joker, he has suppressed him to demonstrate his innocence. But the moment Arthur realizes that this interview is just happening for the sensational content, he loses it all and allows Joker to take control. (while starting to smoke characteristically in front of the camera!)

I’m wild again
Beguiled again
A simpering whimpering child again
Bewitched
Bothered and bewildered
Am I
Lost my heart but what of it
She can laugh and I can love it
Although the laugh’s on me
I’ll sing to her
Bring spring to her
And long for the day
When I cling to her
Bewitched
Bothered and bewildered
Am I

Here, Joker is making statement that he is the in-charge of Arthur’s body thereby his complete identity. When he realizes that Arthur will not get any help and it is just a sensationalism in the society, Joker shows the society that he is not alone anymore for the society to take care of him, He has someone who care for him now. This is his way of telling the society that it can go ‘freak’ itself now. The society pretending to help him to create one more drama is a conniving move for Joker. So this song is the final warning to the society that he doesn’t need this pity help from the people. He has his ‘Lee’ to love and appreciate him.

From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux
Lee’s makeup song

Most of the scenes when Joker and Lee are sharing the screen while singing are the delusions running in the mind of Arthur. In the third act of the movie when Lee is singing alone while applying all make-up, she is alone. This is where the reality of what Lee is becomes clear.

What a world, what a life 
I’m in love
I’ve got a song that I sing
I can make the rain go
Anytime I move my finger
Lucky me can’t you see, I’m in love
Life is a beautiful thing
As long as I hold that string
I’d be silly so and so
If I should ever let it go

 This clarifies that Lee is manipulating Arthur to reinforce the Joker in him and using him to justify her own delusions. She knows she has all the strings in her hands to create the delusions she wants with Joker.

The Guard’s humming in Arkham asylum in the last part of the movie

When Arthur truly accepts the reality and rejects the persona of Joker he is actually on the path to new and healthy life.

When Arthur is sitting in front of the TV in asylum after this event, the asylum guard Sullivan sings this near him and another guard asks him not to sing this again.

We are not crowd 
My echo, my shadow and me

The guard is hinting Arthur that reality is the only thing where we truly exist. Whatever Arthur thought of himself having a different personality to take charge of his body while committing a crime is just a lie. It’s Sulivan’s way to mock Arthur to show that he will get the punishment in the end by court.

Another guard fears that this might trigger Joker to defend the joke on Arthur that is exactly why he tells Sullivan not to sing it in front of Arthur again. This also shows that Arthur is really trying to bring himself back to reality as this doesn’t trigger him. There was some hope for his recovery.

The Cognitive Dissonance – inner conflict for real identity

From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux

During the proceedings of the court when the events of Arthur’s childhood are brought in light again to prove that the Joker is a defensive identity that Arthur has created to cope with the trauma and adversities in his life, you will understand that what Arthur lacked was clear identity.

The identity crisis actually led to the creation of intense defense mechanism through the creation of his shadow as Joker. There are specific reasons behind this:

  1. Arthur learns that what his mother told him about his parenthood was a lie
  2. He learns that even though his mother told him that his purpose was to make people happy, she was not a big fan of his jokes. Ms. Dumond in her testimony clarifies this, which shakes Arthur to core
  3. Arthur had created his whole personality around making people happy. The career choice to become a standup comedian was all driven by this sole thing. This is what defined his life

But the moment when Arthur realized that all the truths on which he created his life and his character were lie, he undergoes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a state when a person enters in paradox about the truths that made him who he is today.

Same cognitive dissonance happened for Batman when he learnt that his parents also took help of the very criminals he is fighting against today to hide their family’s dark truths in the past.

My point here is that both Batman and Joker underwent the state of the cognitive dissonance, the identity crisis, what they stand for. How they came out of this cognitive dissonance made them hero and the villain.

Batman chose to move away from the only motto of vengeance quoting that ‘Vengeance cannot change the past’. Batman then decided to stand as a symbol of hope for the degrading society.

Arthur – Joker in this case blamed society for the very state of mind he is in now. And there is nothing wrong in it. The very situations, events, people that Arthur got exposed to, made him chose that side. If he would have got proper support from the society and people, there really was a hope for him.

That is exactly why you must appreciate the act of Arthur to not become Joker in the end of this movie. Although the guards of Arkham had beat him to show that he is really weak in reality and Joke is not the reality. Arthur arguably had less privilege than Bruce Wayne to chose the right side and even after these hardships Arthur in this movie choosing reality of Arthur instead of delusion of Joker is a bold move. This makes Arthur’s character transformation far bigger, better and glorious than the transformation of Batman. (I am not saying that Joker is superior than Batman morally. I am saying the mental efforts that Arthur took to reject his Joker personality are way bigger, humongous than the mental efforts that Batman took to redefine his identity.)

There is very symbolic moment of Arthur running away from the Joker persona in the end of the movie to show how badly he wanted to escape that delusion.

From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux

You know what? This is exactly where the city of Gotham went wrong. People wanted an agent of chaos. Not the guardian of hope. Chaos is more sensational and attractive.       

The Society and The Sensationalism

You should closely observe how Arthur behaves in the interview with Patty. He has dialed down Joker perfectly. But the moment Arthur understands that these people are not here to help him or work with him, they just want something sensational to show to the people watching TV, he loses the hope for the society. This is where Joker truly gets reinforced.

The way in which the character of Arthur Fleck is designed by the writers, it is a result of the overall failure of the social systems. The rising unrest in common people led to the reinforcement of Joker in Arthur Fleck even though he knew that he committed crimes.   

Common people of Gotham somehow, anyhow wanted the rich and powerful people to be held accountable for the problems they were going through. Even though it was a group motive it was a very selfish motive. Joker doing certain murders was just a sensational direction people wanted so that they would get this feeling of redemption against the corrupt system.

From Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux

Arthur was just a person in need of fame and appreciation for who he was. Only sad thing was that people only loved his Joker persona. That is exactly why Arthur chose the delusion of Joker to satisfy the delusion of redemption from riches for the society.

The real Folie à deux is not just about the shared delusion between Joker and Lee. It is between Joker and the society. It is between Todd Phillips’s Joker and the fandom. Deep down we too wanted this Joker to do some scandalous acts, exceptional crimes, and sensational interviews. We paid for the movie tickets to see the chaos that Joker creates in society thereby glorifying him as one of the best villains.

But, in reality we cannot handle such sensationalism. On surface it feels great while reading some spicy news, conflicts in our day to day lives but the moment they start affecting our very lives we know how horrible these things can turn out.

This movie actually made an effort to show how twisted a psychotic criminal is inside even though his life may seem sensational and happening outside.  

The Loneliness and Kindness

There are many moments where Arthur clearly says that all he wanted was someone to understand him and love him for who he is. The only reason Arthur submits to Joker’s persona was the fact that this is what the surrounding around him wanted from him. The DA wants him to be the Joker so that they can punish him. This would also make him a martyr among the common people of Gotham. People of Gotham wanted him to be the Joker because it was their way to vent out their anger for the riches and powerful of the city. Harley wanted him to be the Joker because he symbiotically supported her delusions, he was ready to do whatever she wanted.

You will realize that there were also some moments where this was possible, it was possible to tell Arthur that he is not alone. Some events actually do happen but not everyone is thinking the same about him. That is what creates conflict in Arthur’s mind. There is a scene where Arthur is singing a book with good intent but the moment the guard mocks him, Joker takes over and signs maliciously.

You see this is intense when the person is challenged mentally, such people are ready to resort to any part of their persona provided that they get what they long for. That is successfully depicted in the psyche of Arthur Fleck.

Conclusion

A society on moral, social, political decline – a degenerate society – a society on the brink of collapse – will always reject Arthur and welcome Joker.

It is very evident from this duo-logy that the surroundings, society plays a crucial role in the character development of every person. We chose certain attributes of who we are based on what we actually want. This is decided by how society responds to our actions. Based on the such selected attributes, then our behavior, action on such attributes and the reaction from society on such action mold our personality. This is roughly how our personality, our identity is created. If we are fully dependent of society to define who we are, then our personality would exactly reflect what the society. That is what happened with Joker. Arthur was completely empty inside. You will see this when he accepts all his crimes honestly while ending with a Joke.

- Knock, Knock
- Who’s there?
- Arthur Fleck
- Arthur Fleck who?

It shows that Arthur accepted that he was nobody. Society just poured inside his empty jar of personality, made him the agent of chaos.

That is why having an inner compass is very important in personal development. Our internal beliefs may sometimes get challenged and it is completely fine to change them, upgrade them. But the moment one starts to pivot his/her identity purely on outside factors it may create internal conflicts, mental conflicts. That is where Arthur lost his battle for personal identity. Even though the ideas are fictional they prepare us for the adversities occurring in reality, that is for me is the real power of storytelling. May everyone in reality find their true identity in a healthy and sustainable way.

We are full of biases and we are always in search for the things which reinforce our internal belief system. It is a normal human tendency to justify one’s identity. Those who are ready to change and modify their understandings about the surrounding are closer to the reality and those who are stubborn to change their belief system will get hit by the reality until they have learnt their lesson.

This Joker movie indirectly keeps on highlighting how difficult it is to gauge what goes in the mind of a mentally challenged person. Most of the time our instincts repel us from such people but what such people need is a sense of being loved and sense of belonging. If they are felt loved in reality, maybe there is some hope that they will let go of their delusions. Being kind is the only way.  

For me the movie actually presents a choice in front of the audience for the fate of the Joker. As a human being Arthur coming out of his Joker persona was a very healthy and hopeful character development. But that is not what we wanted from him. We, just like the people of Gotham city wanted him to create chaos. This movie shows that hidden dark part in our minds. I am not saying that all of us are sadistic. I am saying we all have a dark part in our psyche and its normal. Everyone should be aware of their own darkness to remain mentally healthy. It improves decision making.   

My favorite moment from Warner Bros. Joker: Folie à deux

Further reading:

The Batman- The superhero who ‘unlearned’

A Modern Prayer to Perceive ‘The Silver Linings’

The acceptance of our dark side is the only way to start a new journey to the real happiness, fulfillment. Achieving real fulfillment becomes way easier and manageable once we start acknowledging our dark emotions, feelings of sadness and sorrow. Running away from such “low” lying emotions actually intensifies them in the abyss. Actually, such emotions have great contribution in the refinement of our character. Empire of the Sun’s new song called ‘Happy Like You’ talks about the acceptance of our dark side to make our personality whole for creating a newer and better version of ourselves.

Empire of the Sun’s song “Happy Like You”

The best piece of art can be attributed to the multiple perceptions, interpretations it creates in the mind of its subjects despite keeping its physical structure constant.

The beauty of a masterpiece is that people have their own opinion about that piece and nobody is wrong. The mere subjectivity and the possibility to invoke personal feeling in the mind of the observer or the enjoy-er of the art is the power every one of us has naturally. Most of the time very few of us unlock that power in a better sense. Music is one such power.

Recently, I came across newly released album named “Ask that God” by an Australian electronic duo called Empire of the Sun. All the songs on this album are banger and are complete redefinition of what the Empire of the Sun stands for. In my personal opinion, it is a crime to compare all the songs to choose the best one, (but you already know why I am writing this). One song that is looping in my head continuously and has occupied a larger portion of my brain for many days is “Happy like you” (this only shows that the song has conjured me thereby maintaining my previous point of not comparing good songs with each other).

Luke Steele and Nicholas Littlemore of Empire of the Sun

Actually, bringing the poetry into the bastardized territory of prose should be a crime, for it de-beautifies the very reason for it being so wonderful. But, in order for everyone to appreciate the multiple subjective point of views and its connections with the multiple facets of life it is trying to explain, a poetry must undergo its ‘deconstruction’ into prose.

That is the crime I am committing here. If there is any songwriting, poetry, lyrics meaning police anywhere, tell them that I am here waiting for them to tolerate all this prose I have written hereon.  

Jokes aside, I am deep diving into the song and its music video.

The song

The song is written by Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore of Empire of the Sun.

Happy Like You lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

You’re revolutionary
You’re like a phantom taking a leap
You’re heart is legendary
Bet you are feeling so high 
You have a higher power
Telepathic talk to me
Make me whole again
Whole again whole like I used to be 

Happy like you 
Happy

The poet is asking the higher power for something that would make him feel complete like he was before. He is praising the power of this higher power so that it can bless him.

The words used by poet like revolutionary, taking leap, legendary heart are used to describe this higher power reflects what he exactly wants from the higher power. He wants to regain a lost part of his personality he was before going through this hardship. He wants the higher power to take the leap to come out of the sorrow, transcend the current state and bring about an “internal” revolution in a way.

Telepathic ability indicates the poet’s trust in the higher power. Poet knows that this higher power is his final resort to all that exists. That is why this power knows everything already and there is nothing required to be expressed formally to get things done.

Ultimately, it is a request to regain that precious part of the poet’s personality, that happiness which defined his whole personality.

Won’t you humanize me
Use all your wisdom 
Show me joy in everything 
I’ve been clouded by machines
Lost my way deep inside another screen

The rhetorical question posed by the poet is a slight indication of what he lost during his difficult times. He lost the things which made him human. He lost the ability to see the silver linings.

This is the exact spot we must understand that the person lost his personality in depression and mental battles. But why? and how?

Immediate forthcoming lines show what happened. The screens and “machines” indicate the influences of the mechanical world on our daily lives and the added powerful effect of social media which led to a dreadful state of depression.

It’s an irony that when we are ‘liking’ certain things on social media from other people’s lives, a deep-rooted sadness, envy, hatred is getting born out of the one-to-one comparison of lives. Everyone is conscious of these emotions due to social media but the penetration of social media, screens everywhere is so regular and normal that we are subconsciously (now mechanically) ignoring these emotions which take a toll on our minds when we are shocked with something really sorrowful.   

All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you 
All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you

 Once you pass through such horrible emotions of sadness and depression you start appreciating the person you were, how happiness made you the better version of yourself. This happiness made you feel like the greater, higher power itself. That happiness actually made you feel closer to the higher power. The poet urges the higher power to make him who he was before and just in the ways the higher power carries itself.  

You’re revolutionary 
Telepathic talk to me
You are imaginary
Bet you are feeling so high 

Wish is a dream that comes true

The most difficult part of coming out of the depression is that it starts in mind of a person with such an intangible, non-physical thought/ idea and then it starts to affect the real events, objects, people around him/ her. So, even though fixing the reality around such person can help to come out of the depression; uprooting the deeply settled feelings of sadness, grief, sorrow has immense impact in the person’s fight against depression.

That is exactly why the wish to become happy shows that the poet whole-heartedly wants feel happy. The ‘wish’ indicates is readiness from inside to be realize happiness from intangibility to reality thereby highlighting the use of the expression “dreams that come true” here.

Time is a song that forms you 
Oh I hope you

The expression of ‘time’ which formed this higher power implies the time which need to given to person to heal when he/ she is in hardships. Give it some time, it will pass too. The poet has understood that over the time even though it will seem difficult but over the time every sadness will fade away. It’s just an ask from poet to the higher power to get the patience, courage for passing through this hard time.    

Won’t you humanize me
Use all your wisdom
Show me joy in everything
I’ve been clouded by machines 
Lost my way deep inside another screen 

All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you 
All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you

Ultimately the influence of social media on our lives and the mere algorithmic, mechanical nature of our lifestyle is leading lives of many really happy people to a depressed, sorrowful life. The poet asks the higher power to make such people complete again and happy again just like the supreme power is. It also means that once we become happy and complete, we will become that supreme higher power again.   

From a simple explanatory point of view on any poetry/ songwriting, the song gives an impression of the man’s urge to regain his happiness, his identity when he is in the conundrum of depressive emotions and thoughts. The impact of depression is great because the factors causing it are within our hands (or I may say fingers’) reach – the social media and the screens.

I think the songwriters have taken this excuse of the depression from social media to show what an urge to overcome any depression means for any human being; what it means to redefine the personality and also complete the human being in a bigger picture.  

The video and its symbolism

The phone call –

The video starts with a phone call. The girl receives a call on her landline and then the frame shifts to a guy (Luke Steele – Emperor Steele) in a dark with a red hue and dark hat. This is indication of her having a call with her inner self. The low-lit room shown throughout the video is the metaphor of she having discussion with herself and her inner thoughts and emotions. The phone call is proof of she handling her emotions by herself, it is her own conscience calling her.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
A low-lit room –

Watching reflection in mirror and hand movements on her own body shows she is interacting with herself. It is like a self-talk one has with themselves while figuring out what needs to be done. The low-lit room shows that dark part of our personality which also need acknowledgement. Even though the song calls for the person to be happy, this low-lit room has bigger significance. It is an indication that the real happiness comes with our acknowledgement of our darker side. Darker not in the sense of negativity but more in the sense of left out emotions which also need proper attention.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
The colors –  

Even though the music video looks colorful with some dark theme, the choice of colors used in this video are specific; there are characters, colors to the people shown in the video. Hot, cold, and warm / Red, blue, yellow, greens sometimes – indicate respective emotions and the interaction of the girl with those emotions. It is like she is trying to understand them and accept their presence to find the answers.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
The window –

In the early part of the song, you will see the girl peeking through the blinds to see what’s behind the glass. It’s literally her peeking into her dark side of the mind.

There is a glass window with blinds between a person and the girl. The person can see her doing all her activities. What girl sees is only her reflection, this absolutely support the symbolism of her having an internal conversation about the overall depressive state of her mind.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
The sadness, grief –

You will see one person (Nick Littlemore – Lord Littlemore) with the black tears seemingly away from the window in certain snippets of the video, who appears and goes withing few moments. This is that deep rooted feeling of sadness which the girl is trying to acknowledge. One person closer to the glass window observing the girl’s activity is her conscience and the grief is away from the glass lying in the deep abyss of her mind. I say the guy closer to the window is her conscience because it has symbolically shown with multiple colors and hues showing the variety of emotions one carries in themselves.  

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV

The rain in the end symbolizes new beginning, renewal.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV

The creators of Music video deserve special applause

A deep dive into this ‘prayer’

For me this is not a simple song, it’s a prayer and I have a very strong reason to justify my point. A prayer from a literal, grammatical point of view is a request to higher powers which have better control of the reality than us. We surrender to such higher powers to show that we are humbled and are in a need for help through such prayers.

This song may not have that feel of “conventional” prayers, hymns due to its electronic and not so ‘religious-feeling’ notes, melodies but there is no written rule on the ways to compose a prayer anyways.

On first thought it’s weird, how can a prayer in electronic music make sense spiritually?

I say why not! I would say the composition itself dares the modern listener to appreciate the feeling of awareness of our higher self – hidden inside our own selves. It is like tapping into that unconventional, unexplored hidden, darker part of our own conscience.

The song mainly focuses on visiting and acknowledging the darker parts of our mind, especially when we are in deep sorrow. Abandoning such dark emotions thinking that they are not part of your personality actually intensifies them and when you are feeling weak and defeated – these emotions will easily cover your whole personality.

My point to call this song a pious prayer is that it makes the listener, the singer acknowledge their emotions. Good or bad whatever they are, they together make the personality whole. It also makes them to accept their urge to improve themselves in life. Even though we are asking the higher powers to grant us the powers to become our better version it is actually we – ourselves acknowledging our darker side to improve and build upon them for the better and evolved version of our selves.

The most important act to come out of any negative, depressed feeling is the acceptance of the fact that they are an inseparable part of our personality and only this time they have charge over our personality and we can take control from them anytime we want. You can only cure a person who really want to be cured and live ahead. The feeling to come out of such sorrows has to come from inside and it becomes easy once we accept our darker side of emotions, feelings.

So, the best way to handle any challenging emotional state, any darker emotional state is to first acknowledge them. Acceptance of something wrong or abnormal is the first step to effectively work on handling them. It becomes very difficult to accept that we ourselves are the originator of our emotional responses and its totally normal. We just feel that it is difficult to control our emotions because mostly they are triggered by the external stimuli and that is where the real trick happens. You see, the illusion that our emotions are uncontrollable is created by the assumptions that one need to control his/her surroundings to achieve what they want to become happy. That is why when such person fails, they are immediately drowned into the feelings of sadness. This also does not mean that you should always control your emotions and avoid expressing yourselves.

What I am trying to make point about is that the moment we start segregating our emotions as good and bad we end up in an illusion of happiness instead of the real happiness. Instead of avoiding and dumping, controlling your sad, dark emotions deep down, their acceptance as one more normal part of our personality helps us in a better way to achieve the real happiness.

Being sad justifies the moments of happiness and that also does not mean that you must remain sad – suffer more to be happy in bigger ways. You see, all happinesses in the world are same. Actually, they are not even same, they are subjective – to be precise, there is nothing to compare between any type of happiness. But due to the social media and the screens, we are always trying to compare our happiness with other people’s happiness. That is where the origin of the problem lies.

Looking on the other side of the shore same goes with the sadness; no two sadness must be compared. Acknowledgement itself is more than enough.

Working on sadness is like hugging an annoying crying kid; just a tight hug without any intent. The kid will stop crying.

Once we have accepted all our emotions as a natural part of our personality then only can we have the chance to recreate our personality. This requires humbleness and in most cases when people are thrashed with the reality and the sadness, when they are helpless the final resort is the spirituality where the help from almighty is requested. The moment you attribute this power to any object especially human-like object the religion starts taking shape (that would be topic or another discussion!) But without diverting the topic, only when we are humbled then we seek help from others. Prayer allows you to do that without any feeling of shame. That is exactly why I feel this song is a prayer. It allows you to accept your darkness, understand it and asks you to use it to create new happiness.  

I will stick to Kierkegaard on this, we have to understand that when we are praying to the higher powers to handle our lives in a better way, we are actually asking the forces lying inside our own selves which hold the capacity to create the better version of ourselves.

We are capable of creating better times for ourselves on a condition that we acknowledge every part of who we are. It is just our mechanical nature to categorize certain things as good or bad sad and happy which takes charge of our whole personality.  You will appreciate this more once you closely observe the stories behind the creation of all types of the masterpiece humanity has ever seen. All those great things had that unconventional, hidden dark side which triggered the creation of something totally new and radical.

So, in order to become truly happy, one must accept their dark sides that is where the potential to have completely new beginnings lies.

Losing the ‘Grip’ on Escapism

Escapism creates a void in our perception of reality so that new ideas, creative ideas would populate this void for living life with a new perspective, new approach. The healthy escapism is the most important tool, a therapy for many successful creative people our world has ever seen. Once this escapism takes extreme side it may lead to addiction, procrastination and delusion. Freud’s ‘desire to destruction’ and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire help us to understand escapism in better ways to face the reality head on.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one

Albert Einstein

It is very interesting when we start questioning how we understand, feel and interpret the reality. The reality in which we live in has infinitely many facets which we experience through equally diverse emotions. We as human beings are hardwired for seeking happiness, happiness creates the environment to nurture, grow and multiply. Bear in mind that only growing and multiplying is not enough to guaranty the survival of our species. Adaptation is one aspect to ensure the sustenance over the course of time. Adaptation means getting exposed to adversities, sadness, imperfections of reality to create the strong enough coping mechanisms. What would happen if are continuously in the phase of seeking pleasure and turning our faces away from the challenges of the reality? How we justify our own death (figurative) by our own hands when we submit ourselves to such dark pleasures, addictions, dark temptations in spite of knowing that they are harming us? There is just one perfect song to point us towards such emotions.  The song is called “Grip” by Seeb and Bastille.

The song was written by Espen Berg, Dan Smith, Thomas Eriksen, Mark Crew, Simen Eriksrud and Joakim Haukaas.

Album art for Grip by Seeb, Bastille

Grip – The Lyrics

As the night time leads into the day
And tomorrow spills across the sky
While the sun's a harsh reminder why
We are feeling barely human

The overall emotions this person is experiencing are the emotions of distaste and hatred towards the things which are inevitable. He knows already that it is going to be day after this night, the sun will rise up and he will have to face the day helplessly. The “harsh reminder” here highlights that the person doesn’t want to face the day, the reality, the responsibility and wants to escape to the night where he was someone better than human – someone invincible.

 ‘Tomorrow spills’ shows that the thing/s which this person was trying to postpone, avoid has finally come. The spilling action shows the unwanted eventuality. The things which the person is trying to avoid are the sufferings and problems which for this person are mocking him for his humanistic limitations.  

This rise of the day is a reminder of his humanly limitations and the sufferings which never end. The person is well aware of the sufferings and hence is cursing the Sun for reminding him about his limitations as a human being. The transition of night into a sunny day is also a metaphor for the veil falling down. The veil of enjoyment which was masking the suffering, imperfections, sorrows, problems of the reality.

I really loved the word play to show how the person hates the day which never comes – ‘tomorrow’. It kind of points towards the ‘procrastination’ to avoid the pain of imperfections and the pain, the suffering accompanying with the life itself.

We don't know what's good for us
'Cause if we did, we might not do it
Who knows where our limits lie?
We won't discover 'til we push it

These lines explain the expression “Ignorance is a bliss” in the most perfect way. The person wants to ignore the things which are good because deep down he knows that they come with hardships. That is exactly why he says that even if he knew what is really good for him, he won’t do it; he knows doing the right is always the most difficult path. It’s like running away from the reality and reject it because it is full of pain, problems, unsettling consequences and imperfect.

The next lines show that the person is not completely delusional and detached from the reality. He knows that being a human being with unlimited capacity in the world of infinite possibilities, he can do anything and succeed at it. He is aware of the fact that he just has to expand his boundary to make impossible things possible. This is the moment when you will appreciate that the person expressing his feelings here is aware of everything that is right and wrong. It’s just that he just wants to be happy and maintain that state by rejecting the painful reality.    

I should just walk away, walk away
But it grips me, it grips me
But I should call it a day
And make my way
Oh, it grips me
'Cause the devil's got my arms
And it pulls me back into the dark
But I should just walk away
Walk away, oh it grips me
Cause the devil's got my arms

The person knows that he should completely let go of the things which are deviating his life from reality but now he has found one pity excuse. The person thinks that it is difficult to lose the hold of joyous, illusive but pleasurable darkness. He is ready to ‘call it a day’ get over with this pleasurable but illusive, dreamy life but somehow his mind has found an excuse of the devil which holds him back. It shows how addictive the dreamy, pleasurable alternate reality which is far from the ‘real’ reality, the life his mind has created which is full of pleasure, happiness and he is whatever he wants to be in this dreamy world. Grip of the Devil is just an excuse for him to tell others that he is not solely responsible to stay in this ‘unreal’ illusive life, this shows his lack of accountability. He is blaming the devil for him not facing the reality and taking charge of the course of his life.   

We got drunk on this unholy wine
To deliver us from our old minds
A promise of a better time
'Til we're feeling barely human

Wine in Christianity is a symbol of abundance, enlightenment, celebration, and blessings of the God. The ‘unholiness’ of the wine shows the overuse of this abundance which points to the addiction. Addiction is the worst use of the means preferred to gain pleasure. That is why the holy wine once intended for enlightenment becomes unholy when exploited and overused unnecessarily. The promise of better time is the reflection of what a person suffering from addiction feels, he tries to repeat the act to extract the pleasure – a short lived one. This short-lived pleasure makes him feel something better than human. Once the effect starts to fade out and the person regain the consciousness of weakness of human nature, he again resorts to this short-lived pleasure to regain the better humanly experience.

These are the exact emotions an addictive person goes through – this could be any addiction.

I would rather forget
And wash my memory clean
Oh, I would rather forget
And wash my memory clean

The person knows what mess he is in and the escape is also difficult. He just wants to remove all the traces of what he really is and surrender to the world of the devil.  (‘Cause the devil’s got his arms). He is helpless and just want to reject the painful reality while remaining into dark but pleasurable devil’s night. It an intentional submission the “dark side” to avert the pain of reality brightened with the Sun.

Escapism – Sadness, pain, procrastination and addiction

Escapism lies as the core theme of this song. We humans are pleasure-seeking animals. Remaining in joyful conditions promotes safety, continuation of the species from the evolutionary point of view. That is why we are hardwired to escape from adverse, life threatening, sadness inducing, fear inducing events. Fortunately, we are rarely exposed to wild animals and life-threatening situations as our primal ancestors did. But this instinct has not left us completely. Any event which simulates sadness, fear, great challenge – our response is somewhat still primitive. But as the technology as progressed so much, our ways to escape the hardships of the real, imperfect life have evolved drastically.

Please understand that escapism is not a bad word. But once it shifts to extreme use, abuse then addiction takes over and the person starts hating reality and submits to dreamy, delusional world created by him or someone else.

Reading, writing, painting, doing some happiness inducing activities/ tasks are simple examples of a “healthy escapism”. Such escapism creates a void in our perception of reality so that new ideas, creative ideas would populate this void for living life with a new perspective, new approach. The healthy escapism is the most important tool, a therapy for many successful creative people our world has ever seen.

Now coming to the other (dark) side of escapism – it’s a highway to addiction and constant search for dopamine hits. Deep down we know how we are all addicted to something. It’s just matter of who is affected by them in worse ways. Social media, their algorithms, the culture of overconsumption, the capitalistic urge to prioritize wants for getting social approval, submission to addiction to escape the problems are the real-life challenges that we are facing today due to the technology.  Technology is meant to provide an exoskeleton, an augmentation to improve our lifestyle but this same exoskeleton is weakening our muscles thereby crippling us. (The crippling of our minds.)

Escapism is not a new phenomenon, rather is has an age-old history only the ways in which we try to escape the reality have changed over the course of the time. Creating an alternate reality was always one way to alleviate the painful effects of reality. But, the tools that we have today are more potent and can immediately lead to the state of addiction.

You will see in the lyrics of the song the that the person is well aware of what wrong choices he is making, that it is not good to submit to the devil and the night but now he is so addicted to this alternate reality that he has started hating the reality and don’t want to experience it.

Such is also the way of procrastination. We try to delay the activities knowing that the had to be done anyways but won’t yield the perfect, beautiful results that you want. Procrastination thus creates an illusion of safety until the threat becomes imminent. Procrastination is also healthy unto certain limits to create a space of new approaches but if your fear of creation, action is preventing yourself to postpone their impact on reality thereby residing yourself into your dreamy world then such alternate reality is useless.

Reality is painful – but that is not the only thing it is!

We escape from reality so that we can come back to fight the reality with better tools and ideas not to completely run away from it because in the end reality will catch up with us with far gruesome, dreadful face and consequences.

We are highly prone to our conscious submission to the alternate reality because it creates a potent illusion of safety and comfort. This is because we think that living a fulfilled life means living a life of happiness, whereas upon close inspection you will appreciate that life has never given itself to either sides of the existence – neither good nor bad. Life keeps oscillating between these two and creation, destruction, growth, adaptation happens in between those waves. Buddhism talks about the roots of suffering in attachment. We humans are highly susceptible to immediate attachment to any living or non-living things (which are the parts of reality). Our attachment to such things then leads to the fear of their loss and thereby loss of familiarity and comfort which projects the ultimate fate of the reality as imperfect, painful and hostile one. Once we let of such attachments, we can have a full control on the escapism in our lives.

Once we start to see happiness as a process instead of a stage, we will truly appreciate the beauty in the prima facie unsettling imperfection of reality – this is the same real life, the reality where we actually exist and can truly contribute to affect our and other lives in better ways. It is not that painful as we have thought in our minds.

Also, even when you have achieved that only goal in your life, that full happiness, in the end you will again be miserable because you are going to be clueless about what comes next, what to do next!

I think confrontation is the opposite of the escapism because of the same reasons. Instead of the escaping from unsettling reality for short time again and again, and it catching up with us in the end, why not face it in first place and be done with it! This requires the attitude of rejecting the ultimate purpose of life attributed to the search for happiness. The reality is neither happy nor sad.   

Sigmund Freud – Beyond Pleasure and Desire to Destruction

Sigmund Freud in his early developments of psychanalysis was the strong proponent of the ideas of human beings as the pleasure-seeking animals. Freud actively promoted his ideas of psychology based on the thought that our actions are always intended to maximize pleasure, procreation, and preservation and avoiding pain. He called this force as “Eros”

Freud’s early ideas hence are always pointing towards that continuous search for pleasure (Lustprinzip). But once the world war started Freud went under immense emotional pressure as his two sons were soldiers in war, he also saw soldiers residing to traumatic war experiences. In coming years, Freud lost his beloved daughter to Spanish flue. Here he felt really miserable, guilty and painful that he is able to survive while his daughter died.   

This is where Freud brought in the idea that humans also have a death drive, destruction (Thanatos) where doing nothing helps to cope up with the intense sadness of the reality. This idea was introduced by Sabina Nikolayevna Spielrein – one of the first female psychoanalysts. Under extreme pressure humans may chose to do nothing as doing anything will end in pain.

So, Freud evolved his idea of human psyche as an interplay between the urge to live and urge to die.

The person in the song submitting to the dark, harrowing addictive pleasures shows this same urge to destruction even though he knows that they are not good. We are ready to submit ourselves to darker illusions because of this same desire to die, to destruct ourselves because sometimes reality feels more brutal than death.

When one is exposed to unknown events in life, the urge to pleasure will seek excitement, adventure and adrenaline, dopamine, knowledge from it while for same life event the urge to destruction will resort to confusion, danger, fear and submission to familiar, warm and comfortable environments.

Freud received huge criticism for these ideas too. Freud also mentioned that this death could also be figurative – as the complete distaste towards everything in life and becoming inanimate – a living dead body.

The idea of clearing memory in the end of the song shows this side of desire to destruction to me.

Important thing to come out of these ideas is to appreciate that life never favored any side – good or bad. Life is always multifaceted. There is always something good in bad and bad in something good. Good and bad always coexist.       

Mimetic Desire – Responsibility and accountability

René Girard a French philosopher of social science pointed towards a very innate pattern in human thinking which is called as “Mimetic Desire” in philosophy of social science. He pointed out that even though we may think that our drives are totally created from inside and we are the sole, absolute creator of such desires (like calling ourselves God, the Creator) these are mere effect of our surrounding, they are not created from something absolute. We are always sorting people, things around us to create a place where we say that “we belong”. This helps us to create and justify our identity. The moment someone creates and points towards something as problematic, unsettling then rest of the people also use it as a “scapegoat” to put the blame of anything bad, wrong happening with them.   

We as human beings and social animals are always looking for something to blame which creates an object to blame for difficulties in our life. This grows faster when it happens in group.

According to the ideas of Mimetic Desire given by René Girard, people make scapegoats when the truth, the reality makes them uncomfortable – the reality they don’t want to acknowledge. They desperately lookout for things, groups, people to put blame and make this illusion their reality where they find comfort. People do this because they somehow want to release their anger, tension.

The creation of devil is the same thought. The person in this song is well aware of the truth of reality but as his desires are to always seek pleasure in any possible ways, he finds a scapegoat of “the grip of the devil” to justify his addiction and bad actions. Religious, political beliefs have many examples of such scapegoats.

Responsibility and accountability are very important aspects when we are talking of such ideas. That is why it is very important to rethink our ideas when we are trying to justify them with something delusional.

Conclusion

The key idea to tackle extreme escapism is to accept the imperfect nature of reality. The reality may be fearsome, difficult and unsettling but it is also hopeful, happy and comfortable. Your actions in reality will bring you closer to good experiences rather than submitting to unreal, delusional short acts of pleasure. It’s not the grip of the devil that is holding you in the night, it is you yourself who contain this devil inside who is holding you back. Let your angel overpower your devil to bring you back into the reality. May you grow with every pain inflicted upon you to make you even stronger than you were before. May the creation provide you the physical and especially mental adaptability to handle and appreciate the reality – the only real place where you truly exist.     

Official video shows the transitory phase of a teenage boy who is trying multiple ways to gain pleasure thereby moving away from the awkwardness of reality to become “cool”. But once the balance of pleasurable acts tips to the wrong side, he submits to the pleasurable but dark and devilish side of his personality. This is where he submits himself to the devil.

The video intricately shows the fragile nature of adolescence and the high impact of the choices made in this phase which could have lifelong effect of the personality.   

There a also one lyrical video for this song where you will see fruit butchering (I don’t know why but the producers have made it look very tempting!)

Also, the credit goes to SeeB for adding their iconic style of falsettos to make the listeners feel the grip of the devil in a fantastic way.

The creators of “Grip” Seeb and Dan Smith from Bastille

The song video

Lyrical “fruity and juicy” video

Listen on spotify

Anxiety – Ugly (But Precious) Gift From Evolution

Anxiety serves to prepare a person for threats. Anxiety just like pain is one uncomfortable but effective way to cope up with the adversities in life, that’s how we build strength, resistance and deeper understanding of the surrounding for better and more precisely predictable future.
The remarkable concepts like smoke detector principal and optimal threshold in signal detection theory developed by modern psychologists/ psychiatrists help us to draw a line between a healthy anxiety (adaptive function) and unhealthy anxiety (pathology) and show ways to handle/treat them effectively.

Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far

Jodi Picoult

Survival, Fear, and Anxiety

Every living thing if not have any goal in their lifetime would at least have sole goal of existing, surviving. Nobody wants to die and all of us always yearn to live forever but we know our limitations and hence are always on the quest of justifying the finite existence granted to us. Even if we are certain of the end closing in, our instincts are evolved in such way that many of the times, we bear the ability to cheat death. Humans have further extended cheating the death using science and technology.  Technology augmented our lives, reduced the risks of death, created a safe environment to grow, increased our chances of survival.

The fear of death and uncertainty of future is the key driver in our improved survival instincts and excessive use of technology to achieve it. We plan for things in advance, create backup plans if something would go wrong, have risk assessments before the execution, understand and decide according to the cost benefit analysis. That is what makes us humans and also separates from other species (although rest of the surviving species are also smart in their own ways to increase their chances of survival like viruses – but hopefully humans have other ways to overcome them)      

So, fear in a way triggers the actions to ensure survival. Anxiety – a sophisticated form of fear which prepares us in advance even before the fear causing scenario is supposed to happen. Simply put anxiety is an anticipatory type of fear to increase the chances of survival.

I am talking about fear and anxiety because they are bugging my mind for many days. Recently I watched Inside Out 2 movie and the it really delivers. The narrative has successfully presented how all emotions play a vital role in creating our personality in whole. Anxiety was new and important emotion presented in this movie. Every moment where anxiety came in focus it was fully relatable to me. Once I was done crying in the end the anxiety never left me (figuratively!), I felt a strong urge to understand the anxiety on deeper levels and what the domain experts have to say about anxiety.

The discussion heron is not a movie review rather I have made some attempt to summarize what the real-world scientists have to say about anxiety. I won’t be giving you the tricks, counseling and recommending any medicines to cure anxiety disorders. (Trained professional, experts are the best people to do that – “I AM NO EXPERT”)

My focus of the discussion is to question why anxiety exists in first place when we have an emotion called fear, another question is how to interpret the anxious emotions and what leads to anxiety disorder, where does the root of anxiety lie and is anxiety a bad or negative emotion? If it is so then why? and if not – then why?

While posing such questions and researching articles I came across some beautiful ideas, experiments and theories established by professionals in the field. I will throw light on these ideas in the coming discussion.    

The fear is real! – is it? – Defining anxiety

As I already mentioned that fear of death, the unknown and urge to live long are always fighting with each other. Humans rather every species existing today in nature mastered this battle to some extent and have ridden on chariots of evolution to augment – change themselves to adapt with the surroundings and improve the chances of survival.

A deer completely aware of its surrounding, grazing in the open grass fields can distinguish the rusting of leaves due to winds and rustling due to sudden movements of an apex predator like tiger. When the exams are on top of tomorrow, we are ready to sacrifice the night sleep to crack them (engineers would resonate more with this!) We know that the pain of failing, fear of failing is worse than painfully covering syllabus overnight! The fear is there and the anticipatory response is also there, only the level of sophistication is different.

Why I say sophistication? It is because due to the advancements in our lifestyles humans are rarely exposed to the real life-threatening scenarios like animal do (still today). Our fears are now more anticipatory. I would say most of our fears are now classified as anxiety.

Wikipedia goes like this for anxiety –

“Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events.”

So, the key differentiating aspect between fear and anxiety is the anticipation. Anxiety is a prospective emotion and a forward-looking emotion. Whereas fear is the emotional response to current threat. Fear makes us act immediately; anxiety keeps us ready for future threats. Fear will immediately decide fight or flight whereas anxiety will create plans, strategies for both and also calculate which one is more probable. (now you can appreciate why anxiety is more intense in over-thinkers, the analysis paralysis is one mild example of this.)

Anxiety is also an emotion important from evolutionary perspective as it has helped the current existing species to remain existent. The ability to anticipate future and preparing for it in advance gives competitive edge in survival.  

Why Is Anxiety Good?

While reading about anxiety I came across a very good paper by Dr. Randolph M. Nesse.

Dr. Randolph M. Nesse, UoM

Randolph M. Nesse is a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Psychology in University of Michigan. The ideas and theory he created to understand and identify anxiety and its intensity are very important and interesting.  

Dr. Ness developed the smoke detector principle to control and quantify the medication used to fight with anxiety disorder. (He poses very simple but important question the opening of the paper that “Is he medicating his patients too much? is he harming them?”) The fundamental doubt Dr. Ness had was if the anxiety is evolved during evolution to improve our chances of survival, then why are we forced to reduce its symptoms and effects? Why are we using medications, therapies to reduce these symptoms, effects of anxiety. What if the patient is too anxious for given thing and that thing is too real to happen but the doctor dumbed that emotion down? (Dr. Ness calls it down-regulating the mechanisms causing anxiety)

The core of his thinking is that if we keep on “down-regulating” our anxiety which is an evolutionary gift to us, we might never be able to gauge the future in better way and prepare for it in advance to improve our chances of survival. (this is an exaggeration of the scenario but it proves a point)  

This calls for the quantification of anxiety. Which Dr. Ness did through the smoke detector principle.

The Smoke Detector Principle – How Much Anxiety Is Too Much?

Dr. Ness in another paper talks about the mechanism which is a feed-back system between the animal and its surroundings, which selects the emotional response to improve the chances of survival. The emotions we have today are the result of such evolution to maintain “homeostasis” – the balance among our bodily system to survive and function properly.

According to his ideas, anxiety works like a smoke detector.

The anxiety response is always trying to maximize the chances of survival and escape from a life-threatening situation. When we set a smoke detector it will go off even when the fire is not that extreme or if there is just some smoke which can be a controllable one. The smoke detector is designed to never miss a single fire causing situation. This ensures complete confidence in smoke detector that it will save people from every life taking fire scenario. But, it’s the same mechanism of smoke detector which forces people to evacuate frequently even when the fire or smoke where controllable or life threatening.

The frequent emergency evacuation even when it is not required is the same problem with the extreme intensity cases of anxiety. Always having armor ready for combat may sometimes make the soldier to lose the agility.

The patients with anxiety disorder have lowered sense of real threat. Their system triggers too many false alarms.

Dr. Ness established various techniques to quantify the levels of anxiety. The responses from anxiety include increased heart rate, rise in certain bodily chemicals – stress hormone secretion which can be easily measured as signals using instruments. Thus, the smoke detector principal paved a way to quantify the anxiety and understand what triggers the anxiety disorders in patients. It helps to understand how and why a level of anxiety is healthy in normal person and what level of anxiety is unhealthy and needs drug administration, therapy, how it can be administered by altering the setting within and around the person.

The core reasons why we need not to be intensely anxious about common life threats are as follows as Dr. Ness explains in his papers:

  1. Regulatory mechanisms have tendency to make errors and be extra defensive about situations
  2. We do not need to always be extra defensive to avoid given threat. (A machine gun in a bulletproof enclosure is not required to kill a mosquito.)
  3. Our body and surroundings have multiple layers of defense for almost all common threats. We are evolved and have survived in that way.
  4. Our environment is much safer than it was at the time we evolved

Types of Anxiety Disorders

Now that we have understood what is the nature of anxiety and what is its mechanism. Here are some important anxiety disorders to outline. Huge amount of information is available in literature, internet websites on these:  

  1. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) – too much worrying about ordinary things, problems like money, work, health, relations, family, and anything possible or imaginable, it may not exist in reality.
  2. Hypochondriasis – People suffering from this often worry about the health condition when nothing is wrong with their body. The word comes from feeling of stomach pain the person experiences even when everything is alright.
  3. Specific phobia – fear of anything but specific without any reason. It’s the fear for certain thing even when it does not pose threat.
  4. Social anxiety disorder (SAD) – In this scenario people intensely fear the public situations, humiliations, embarrassments, criticisms.
  5. Separation anxiety disorder (SepAD) – People in this case intensely fear the loss of person or a place
  6. Agoraphobia – it is fear of being in situation where there is no exit door, or escape strategy. Fear of using public transportation, being in large crowds are some examples.
  7. Panic disorder – these are outburst of all the collective or intensive fears, they come quickly and last for short time.
  8. Selective mutism (SM) – in this case the person is extremely fearful of initiating a conversation, does not speak to specific people or in specific situations or conditions even when they are forced to talk by humiliation or mocking.  

Post traumatic syndrome disorder (PTSD) and Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were once classified under anxiety disorders (now not under anxiety disorder in DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders)

Signal Detection Theory For Interpreting ‘Anxiety Like Responses’

One good paper in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry by Bateson et al. shows how the smoke detector principal can be used to decide the boundaries of different levels of “anxiety like-responses”. This paper talks about signal detection theory and optimal threshold. The beauty of this paper for me is the mathematical model it establishes to explain psychological events. A single formula will help you understand the difference between normal anxiety and anxiety disorder.  

With the smoke detector principal, we can now appreciate that not every common threat needs full armored protection. The signal detection theory in this paper shows where a person draws line when they overestimate or underestimate anxiety.

It talks about “optimal threshold” to show a threat response in given situation. Optimal threshold is a mathematical parameter which is function of probability of the occurrence real event and vulnerability of the individual.

The signal detection theory says that the superposition of response signals for given background noise and response signal from real threat give us the quantified judgement of how intensely the anxiety is triggered compared to the practicality of the threat – this quantified judgement is called optimal threshold (λ). Lower the threshold more intensely the anxiety will be triggered for given disturbance – background noise.

Figure 1 : Signal detection problem, how the optimal threshold can be calculated. (Credit: Anxiety: An Evolutionary Approach, 2011, Bateson et al., Canadian Journal of Psychiatry)

Equation 1: optimum threshold (Credit: Anxiety: An Evolutionary Approach, 2011, Bateson et al.,Canadian Journal of Psychiatry)

Here,

 λ = optimal threshold

 pnt= probability that there is no threat

 pt= probability that there is real threat

wfa= cost of false alarm

wmiss = cost of a miss

Once this equation comes in focus the discussion becomes interesting. The ratio of pnt to pt mathematically quantifies how practical the threat is. The ratio of wfa to wmiss mathematically quantifies what will be the cost if the anxiety trigger is accepted or rejected – will the subject live or die. This ratio shows how we trigger anxiety response. If the cost of responding is nothing for even a simple threat scenario, we will choose to trigger that response, same would happen if the cost of losing is ultimately the loss of life, we would trigger any possible anxiety response to avoid it. The authors call this ratio as individual’s vulnerability.

The ratio (pnt/pt) can be seen like this. If the surrounding really is hostile and consists of events which cause many life altering events than the safety ensuring events then the pt (probability of threat) will be way higher than pnt (probability of no threat and safer environment). In war situation where multiple bombings, gun firings are happening around you the probability of threat happening (pt) is way high than it not happening (pnt). The optimal threshold will drop immediately and anxiety triggered will be very high.

The ratio (wfa / wmiss) can be seen like this. If the person is way stronger to handle given threat, then the person will need no effort, investment or cost to trigger any reaction alarm to even a false threat. Consider the example where you are about to be bit by mosquito, you know the efforts to slap many times until the mosquito dies are not worthless, you will try many times to kill it even when you know it will swiftly escape, you are less vulnerable in this scenario. But now when you are about to be killed by John Wick (!?) you know for sure that even a pencil will do the job for him, any environment is hostile for you, you are vulnerable here, the value of losing life (wmiss)is way high than the cost of attempts to save it (wfa). Your optimal threshold will immediately drop down thus triggering intense anxiety.

Once you generate enough data for such optimal frequencies you can easily distinguish the healthy anxiety responses and anxiety disorders. I loved how these two factors (probability of threat and vulnerability of an individual) can predict the levels of anxiety in a person. This equation explains and can also quantify why pregnant women have heightened awareness of their surroundings, why people get insomniac after constant mental stress, why restless people are always in the mode of action and fight, why reclusive people hesitate to visit foreign, unknown places.    

Your Surroundings and Mindset Matter!

Figure 2 : Three levels of vulnerability, here optimal threshold and probability of event can be correlated for difference in the anxiety responses (Credit: Anxiety: An Evolutionary Approach, 2011, Bateson et al., Canadian Journal of Psychiatry)

It is really interesting what the authors have achieved and established in this research. They compared three different levels of vulnerability and explained them using given plot.  The thing to highlight here for anxiety disorders is that they emerge from the environments which always keep on presenting high probabilistic practically threatening scenarios. The anxiety disorders also emerge when the individual feels more vulnerable.

Higher the vulnerability lower will be the optimal threshold and intense will be the anxiety response.

As shown in research, in the uncertain times of Covid-19 people who were locked in their home had no disorders, were not exposed to the virus also felt anxious and faced some anxiety disorders because of the environment they were in.

If the person feels less vulnerable and stronger then even for given strong life-threatening events the optimal threshold will be higher thus the anxiety triggered will be lower.

Are you noticing where this is going?

This is a mathematical model which shows how a healthy, supportive, and safe environment and also a strong mindset and better judgment of reality is important for handling challenging situations.

For a person suffering from anxiety disorder, it becomes very important to make sure that they know that they are in a safer environment and are cared for. It is very important to make them feel safe and understood. Creating a system of critical thinking and reasoning can also help the person to have a sense of strength and high resistance to vulnerability, this also goes for physical strength. The vulnerability is not only mental it is also physical when it comes to reality.

You will now appreciate why teenagers and trauma patients are more exposed to anxiety disorders. Mostly and generally in teenagers it is due to the uncertainty of many new things happening with them simultaneously and in trauma patients it’s the constant bombardment of life-threatening events in hostile environments.

Conclusion

Anxiety serves to prepare a person for threats. The emotion called anxiety is an evolutionary gift to ensure long survival of our species but as it is also related to our primitive instincts, we mostly let anxiety overpower other emotions in seemingly safer scenarios. Strategy and anticipation are the gifts of anxiety but if overused they will end up in imparting unnecessary caution and overprotective attitude which inhibits adaptation to changes there by slowing evolution of our species. Anxiety just like pain is one uncomfortable but effective way to cope up with the adversities in life, that’s how we build strength, resistance and deeper understanding of the surrounding for better and more precisely predictable future.   

The remarkable concepts like smoke detector principal and optimal threshold in signal detection theory developed by modern psychologists/ psychiatrists help us to draw a line between a healthy anxiety (adaptive function) and unhealthy anxiety (pathology) and ways to handle/ treat them effectively.      

These theories show how we can quantify seemingly intangible emotions like anxiety and way to handle them. If you can measure something effectively you can control and predict it effectively. All credit goes to such brilliant minds!

References, Image sources and further reading:

  1. Fear of the unknown: One fear to rule them all?, 2016, R. Nicholas Carleton, Journal of Anxiety Disorders
  2. Natural selection and the regulation of defenses: A signal detection analysis of the smoke detector principle, 2005, Randolph M. Nesse,Evolution and Human Behavior
  3. Natural Selection and the Regulation of Defensive Responses, ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, Randolph M. Nesse
  4. Anxiety: An Evolutionary Approach, 2011, Bateson et al., Canadian Journal of Psychiatry
  5. The relationship between perceived stress and emotional distress during the COVID-19 outbreak: Effects of boredom proneness and coping style, 2021, Yan et al., Journal of Anxiety Disorders
  6. Long-term effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy for youth with anxiety disorders, 2018, Kodal et al., Journal of Anxiety Disorders
  7. Anxiety, National Library of Medicine, www.medlineplus.gov
  8. Anxiety Disorders, National Institute of Mental Health
  9. What are Anxiety Disorders?, American Psychiatric Association
  10. Anxiety – Wikipedia
  11. Randolph M. Nesse, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan
  12. Everything You Need to Know About Anxiety – www.healthline.com

Alienation and Creativity

Creation for capitalism, consumerism and pleasure maligns its true purpose which actually is to create joy and a sense of belonging, comfort and safety. Alienation is the end effect of such capitalist processes where people have isolated their humans side for the rat races and FOMOs. Pure creativity, empathy, connect with nature and self can help use to preserve that human core and come out of the alienation.

How true forms of creativity can help us to reconnect with our human core

“On The Train Ride Home” by The Paper Kites

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I found –

Maya Angelou

Humans – the creative animals

I think creativity is the most important quality granted to human beings. Nature in itself is the ultimate and the best creation which at the same time is also the creator of many things. Animals, non-human beings too have the gift of creativity to certain extent but human beings have outperformed in using this gift of creativity. We are always creating something, we have tools, we have automated processes to create anything we can understand. This creation of things has led us to becoming the most developed species on the planet. Creation can be in any sense – creation of music/ art/ cultures, families/ society, factories/ industries/ conglomerates, institutions/ organizations, cities/ metropolitan, governments, policies, supply chain, and what not! All these creations are intertwined to prove how advanced the human species is. You must also remember that once a process of creations starts generating fruitful outcomes it gets automated to optimize, to improve the efficiency. Most of the times we forget that some creative processes are not meant to be optimized because value of their outcomes is not materialistic. The concept of efficiency and/or optimization is purely materialistic concept. But as we are progressing ahead as the species, most of our creation processes are getting robotized, where materialistic outcomes are more important than the process of creation itself.  

Young generation has crucial role in deciding the future course of our species, especially when we have this great tool of creation – our creativity itself. People of my generation (millennials and Gen-Z to some extent) are the key creators of this time who will decide where our future will lead us. This generation is completely busy in various ventures of creation to justify their own life. But, as I have mentioned before, our creation processes have become so mechanistic, so robotic to gain more, extract more materialistic outcomes that this young generation is getting more and more detached from the real purpose of creation in its true spirit. The consumerism and (crony) capitalism has thrown today’s youth into a forced state of alienation in spite of being living in crowd, densely populated resourceful, glamorous cities. We are lonely in spite of being surrounded by the crowd.

This loss of attachment from the spirit of creation has led to the alienation of the today’s young generation – who many times go through the feelings of isolation, meaninglessness, directionless, confusion – it’s not just a normal existential crisis through which every young generation of their times goes through rather it’s the blurring of the true spirit of living in today’s young generation. Please keep in mind that it is not mistake of this same young generation. The system, society, institutions have evolved in such way that the creative processes are getting designed more for materialistic optimization instead of getting created for the real upliftment of the human civilization. Feels like we are losing touch of the real purpose of our being.

An Australian indie rock band called The Paper Kites released a song called “On the Train Ride Home” which in my opinion tries to touch those feeling of “alienation” which our today’s young generation is going through. Deep down we all know what we really want, we know what our core is but the systems in which we are living today have made our lives more and more mechanical, even though we are in the process of creation that creation no more belongs to us, that detachment, that alienation, that freedom from the vicious capitalistic cycle is what we are yearning for in the end. This is what this song for me is.

The Paper Kites
L–R: David Powys, Sam Bentley, Sam Rasmussen, Christina Lacy, Josh Bentley

I will dissect this song from the point of alienation; for me that is what it is all about.

The lyrics of the song is credited to Samuel Bentley, On the Train Ride Home lyrics copyright: Wonderlick Pty Limited

(It’s a song which needs to be treasured, hidden from others so that no one spoils it and I know I am committing a personal crime by exposing it. But such creations need more exposure and deserve proper appreciation too.)  

Waiting down at the station
I don't remember, think it was late then
Standing, always so quiet
We're like elevators filled up with strangers
No sound, no hallelujah's
Still I was praying on the train ride home

The starting of the lyrics creates an imagery of the person waiting for a train home. The complete separation from the surrounding has made this person to forget vivid details, it shows the mundane-ness, the separation from surrounding to just reach a safe, calming place which is home. The feeling of loneliness in spite of being in the crowd shows how there is no emotional connect between people. Elevator filled with strangers shows that people are closer and more connected, more accessible but they are not closer emotionally. This is exactly today’s situation, social networking and internet brought us so close that we can ‘poke’ our friend living in another hemisphere within few seconds and still we will see people craving for true connections more than ever. No hallelujah’s shows the loss of spirit, loss of soul in people who are part of this – physically close but emotionally isolated crowd.

If I can't get the things I want
If I can't get the things I want
Just give me what I need

Here, the person is aware of the difference between wants and needs which shows that his/ her separation from home to go to the crowded place to create a better resourceful life was not the ultimate goal. This is the only way through which this person can live a life. The system based on the cycles of consumption has narrowed down the meaning of living a life to mere survival. One can get as many things by obeying this cycle of consumption but it will not satisfy the hunger – the emotional hunger, that intimate craving of humanity. The distinction and use of wants and needs is a very smart way to show how the person is trapped in the system to survive but deep down they know what actually makes a fulfilled life. That is why person asks for basic fulfilment if not all what they desired.       

Our words fill up the pages
Fill up the days with psalms for the ages 
Still those vows that we all speak
We break them like concrete
And just make our words cheap

This part of song shows how words have lost their worth. Words in the sense the sense of commitment, sense of loyalty to keep the promises. The piousness of the daily prayers, the vows are less cared for. This expression shows how insensitive we have become to just gain the materialistic means, to survive.

This is exactly where it struck me that this song is not just about average existential angst every young generation goes through; this song is more about the alienation of a person where system does not value real creativity – which gives our lives meaning. The system now has been maligned with the materialistic efficiency. Consumption has become more important than the end effect it creates. Mention of “wants” and “needs” thus highlight the culture of consumption here.    

I want someone to grow with
Songs I can sing to, and I family to cling to

The song tries to conclude with the ultimate pursuit for living a better life. Why are we all doing the things which we do? Why do we go on job? Why do we work all week, live paycheck to paycheck without any greater purpose – in spite of knowing that we hate this work at its core? Why knowingly, intentionally are we craving for more and more materialistic pleasures?

I think it is because of the recent vile cycle of consumption. I have a reason to justify this. Somewhere we know that the process of creation in which we are involved is not doing justice with our pure humanistic core.

As a human being all we crave for is the mutual growth, sense of fulfillment, love and intimacy for each other in this limited time on the earth. We know that ultimate goal of creation should be this humanistic goal, but the moment the creation loses this human touch we suffer from alienation, a sense of directionless, sense of being confused, a sense of trapped inside an infinite maze. This is the exact moment when the person craves for home, family and intimacy.

The train ride home is that craving for being the real human being who values emotions, commitment, love and happiness of the loved ones.

But If I can't get the things I want
If I can't get the things I want
Just give me what I need

The person understands that in this seemingly flashy, attractive, glamorous but mechanistic, mundane, lonely and unemotional life there is some hope that they at least will be able to preserve their human core. The request for the “need” over “wants” is the cry for that preservation of the human core.

Alienation

What urged me to completely (and maybe blindly) associate the lyrics of this song to alienation is how Socialism defines the concept of alienation. Karl Marx identified how a process of creation thereby value creation could isolate its creator from its creation. This isolation of creation and creator once intensified removes all the human, emotional attributes from the process of creation and here the brutal capitalism starts. The creation is now mere a mechanical, boring routine of materialistic revenue creation where humanity has no value.

Karl Marx on alienation

Karl Marx presented very beautifully the purpose of creation in human life. It is what separates human beings from other animals, non-humans. We are always involved in creative process which have a personal purpose, a meaning. That is why our creations and it’s end results are so intense and are way different than how other non-human creative processes. The moment such processes start demonstrating the separation of creator, the process of creation and the end-product of creation, capitalism/ consumerism start peeking their head out thereby slowly eliminating what made such things processes humanistic. This exactly is alienation, there is no sense of home, comfort or belonging.     

Marx defined four types of alienation in his discussions:

Alienation of an object –

A factory labor stitching the designer clothing does not bear the capacity to own it and enjoy it. Even though the labor holds the skill and knowledge to create that fancy clothing the system is rigged in such way that the emotional connect between creator and creation is lost forever.

Alienation of process –

The process of creation has become so mechanical, so repetitive to improve the efficiency and to increase the output that humans involved in them have also became mechanical, unemotional. Today’s young generation working in mundane jobs, the jobs they hate only for the paycheck and the job without any personal purpose is the example of that alienation. The separation of creator from objects makes the object accessible to anyone but this accessibility is not equally distributed because the input to output ratio is highly skewed. The value that is created in the creation of the object does not reward the creator in any good way thus creator – the labor remains poor. This also make the creator to lose the faith in the process thereby leading to the alienation of the process.

Alienation of species-being –  

The moment this mundane, highly optimized process does not bear any real humanistic purpose, the creator no longer follows the process to reach a better position in life spiritually, intellectually through the process of creation. It’s like the human creator has become a machine giving throughput. A sense of being a better species is lost forever – this is another form of alienation.

Alienation between humans –

Once the creator no longer has a direct connect to its creation, has no faith in the process for better pivot of meaning, has no sense of humanity, the value for another human life is lost. It is not because the creator or this person demeans or belittles others, it is because the creator himself/ herself does not consider their efforts their value of better worth, hence same treatment is given to people in their surroundings.

There is one famous snippet of a speech from Gabor Maté, a Canadian-Hungarian physician who has done work in ADHD, trauma, childhood development.

Gabor talks about broader scope of alienation which somewhat is based on the Marx’s idea of alienation.

Alienated from nature –

We as the human species no longer have that connect with nature which has resulted in its deterioration. You might have seen that there are still some tribes living in the remotest, inaccessible areas round the globe which are completely in tune with the nature and have preserved it. Today’s consumerism has detached our objects of consumption from their consequences on nature thereby destroying it.

We have to somehow re-establish that connect with nature otherwise nature has its way of adjusting things (we are seeing its effects all around the globe). And remember that this re-connection is also linked to we being the human beings. I mean, who doesn’t like lush greenery, pristine rivers and remarkable biodiversity!

One of the first condition of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.

Leo Tolstoy
Alienated from work –

The works we are engaged in are rarely driven by a meaning or a higher purpose. Even if it has some meaning it is immediately inked to some materialistic thing, there is nothing wrong in it as far as survival is concerned but at least this awareness should push us to work for the things with higher humanistic, spiritual purpose, that is our real core as the creative beings. The alienation from work has led to depression, anxiety, emotionless feeling, numbness among every one of us. We are replacing this meaninglessness by other material means which involve how we look, what we possess. Such means of damage control are creating more damage to who we are and what we work for which defines us. You will see, the economy we live in highly focuses on associating meaningful experiences to materialistic products.

Alienated from other people –

The moment we lose the hope and connection between our surrounding we are losing some human part in ourselves which dims down our perception of humanity for others. We trust very few people or almost no one, the relationships rarely have that depth, that intimacy. Social structures based on the depth of relationship are dwindling. The mental illnesses are emerging due to the lack of social emotional support system, growing intolerance, apathy on global level are also effects of that.

The start of the song where it mentions people filled in the elevator, disinterested and having been lost their spirit is the same alienation.

We have to start forgiving people again, create safer environments where we can express ourselves without any prejudice. It is scientifically backed that putting trust in people and treating them with high worth makes them trustworthy and high performer (see Pygmalion effect) In the end, everyone of is craving for someone to rely on and also someone who will make our sacrifices worth of the hardships. Associating positivity of self-worth to being appreciated and being respected for who we are is hardwired in our human circuitry. Our existence gets redefined to higher standards the moment other people (even single person) recognize it. (History has examples where people did impossible for far lesser people who believed in them without expecting anything in return)  

The urge to cling to a family, sing a song to someone, grow with someone mentioned in the song is asking to escape from such form of alienation.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night

Margaret Mead
Alienated from ourselves-

We have lost the connect our inner self, our curiosities, our inner child in the pursuit of the consumerist ends. The disconnect with the surrounding and numbness to the processes in which we are involved is furthermore deteriorating our inner human core. We rarely listen to our gut feelings, instincts because presence of lots of data, information around us creates a false sense of understanding of the things around us. This is alienation from ourselves, we don’t even trust ourselves – a simple advertisement or targeted influence is enough to make us buy that next thing that we don’t even want.

The part in the song where it talks about making our words cheap is the alienation from self. There is no concept of morality and inner compass in such alienation.

We know deep down what exactly is happening with us and around us but the system rarely creates conditions to come out of that.

How to de-alienate?

The desire to know your soul will end all other desires

Rumi

The core reasons of alienation lie in the loss of empathy, loss of higher meaning/ purpose and loss of responsibility/ commitment (committing to something to change the course of life requires higher sense of responsibility). We are empaths by default as a human being, so it is imperative to preserve this attribute even if the surroundings force the opposite. I know this is difficult when we are responsible for multiple things and people, but you are also responsible for yourselves. It is worthless if you win, achieve something great while losing yourself in the end.

The creative processes whose outcomes are not attached to any material means are thus the purest paths to avoid such alienation in the times of high consumerism and negative effects of capitalism. High consumption is an addictive form of alienation which can be nullified by pure creation. Consumption will give pleasure but creation will give joy.

The prayer to ride home in the song is the hope that we will again meet ourselves in spite of such extreme disconnect. Pure creativity is the answer to such prayers as far as the process elimination of alienation from our life goes.

What separates human beings from rest of the animals is their creative ventures otherwise we are exactly like all other living things. We are the beings who engage in multiple activities of creation which are driven by conscious intent, a reason. This ability to create something has led us to become the technically advanced species on the planet. If we establish the connect with our inner core through meaningful creation, the victory over all forms of alienation is possible.

True creation is all about connecting to every possibility there is.

Such deep concept of alienation expressed in a wholesome and soulful song by The Paper Kites truly deserves more and more appreciation and recognition. Words failed me to express how it made me feel (that is exactly why I didn’t control my words count, where few verses of this song did the same job. No wonder poetry is highly potent than prose!)

The song-

Appreciation For the Flow of Life

We, the population of billions round the globe are always trying to create our own version perfect life. What is perfect is purely subjective and thereby has infinite interpretations but there is something very fundamental – common which flows through all of us. It can help us to find the real perfect life. Wim Wender’s masterpiece “Perfect Days” shows how we can appreciate the inherent imperfections that life has and how to appreciate the life and the consciousness to experience it in better ways.

Wim Wender’s Masterpiece – Perfect Days

Seeing life through the lens of practical optimism

What Is a Perfect Life?

The answer is very personal and subjective. Someone (rather most of us) wants to retire with huge corpus, someone wants true love, someone wants their dream job in that dream company, someone wants to travel the whole world, someone wants to follow their passion, someone wants to create something, someone wants the ultimate power/ strength, someone just wants happiness, someone wants knowledge of everything, someone just want their neighbor to turn down that noisy speaker, someone wants to spend time with their loved ones, someone just wants to be left alone, someone wants a fixed routine where there is predictability , someone wants surprises every day, someone just want to lay down in the bed for the whole day, someone wants to eat whatever they want (without gaining weight!), someone wants a healthy body, someone wants to remain young forever. Billions of people and their infinite definitions of perfect life!

In short, even though we have our associations of a perfect life with certain objects, things, qualities, people in life, the common thing about them is that we want them in the way we desire.

So, a perfect life for anyone is a life on their own terms, things would happen in the way they want.

Is your life perfect? I am sure that there are very few people (rather gods, saints, sages, divine people) who would agree that they have perfect life.

Wim Wender’s Perfect Days Movie

From Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

This Japanese masterpiece led by Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama-san is the perfect depiction of how we try to define our life as a perfect life in our own ways. The personalities, the characters, their choices, and the life they have is designed, intertwined in the narrative in such subtle ways that the whole movie could be discussed as a philosophy of life and the time will fall short. And even after that you would think that it is just a documentation of a normal life of a public toilet cleaner.

Even though the movie is multifaceted like life and can be discussed in greater depths, I will try to touch on the core and simple idea of the perfection in life in the forthcoming discussion.

The discussion will make more sense if you have watched the movie before, this is not a movie synopsis. Even though there will be spoilers ahead, the movie is all about how it made you feel, rather than what you knew about it. (Which is also why movies/ stories are so important, they make us feel that part in us which we never knew we had already)

The discussion will be driven by the major noticeable events in Hirayama-san’s life. 

What We See From Surface? – A Life of Complete Failure

The (Mundane) Routine and the (most) Disgusting Job

Hirayama-san works as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. There is nothing else to describe anything exciting about this job! He travels from location to location to clean the toilets where you will see the interaction between Hirayama-san and the people around him in such ‘workplaces’ as belittling, demeaning. It’s a job that no one appreciates. 

When we understand that Hirayama-san lives alone, you will find this routine more boring, mundane; being a toilet cleaner adds another weirdness to it. It’s a low paying, thankless job where you will never get recognized for the job you do.

There comes a moment when his junior, his subordinate – Takashi resigns from his job without giving any notice and Hirayama-san has to cover all his locations that day. It’s a disgusting low paying job with possible non-rewarding overwork.        

Low on Money

Money-wise Hirayama-san looks like a person with below average necessities and below average job to fulfill them. Even though he is not poor, he is not hopelessly broke; it is just a very basic life lived on basic income. But you will see that his life is just on the edge of poverty the day when he pays his junior – Takashi to go on a date with his love interest – Aya-chan. As Hirayama-san pays Takashi all the amount he has and when his car stops in the middle of the road due to low gas, he has to sell his cassette to get some money to reach home. On the same evening he eats the cup noodles as he has no money. He stays in the low lying, cheap house, the only coffee he drinks is the regular vending machine coffee.

Failed Relationships

Hirayama-san is a loner. There is nothing exciting about his life from the relationships point of view. No wife, no children, no one to take care of him if something goes wrong. There is a moment when we realize that his father suffering from dementia is in nursing home and he never pays him a visit. Hirayama-san also doesn’t go well with his sister – Kieko. There is certain disagreement (probably the toilet cleaning job) between him and his sister which is why his niece – Niko is prohibited to meet him.

There comes a moment when Hirayama-san sees his (supposedly) love interest – the owner of the restaurant – Mama hugging some man affectionately. Hirayama-san is not shown openly in love with Mama but the interactions between them show that they have some deep connection, deep affection for each other. Hirayama-san’s heart gets broken when he sees that there is already a man in her life. Heartbroken Hirayama-san buys beer and cigarettes that day to numb that pain.

If you go by the standard definition of a perfect life – Hirayama-san’s life is not perfect. It is not even a good life per say.

What is the Reality? – A Life filled with Richness in Every Experience
The Discipline and The Dedication

You will notice that Hirayama-san is a very diligent and disciplined person who cleans the public toilets in Tokyo. Even though he is a toilet cleaner he has a discipline and routine like an army general. Whatever may happen he always sticks to his routine, even on holidays. His van is equipped with every possible cleaning equipment to make sure that he does his job with perfection. There is same level of dedication for every cleaning job he does. He is never ashamed of the job he is doing.

You will appreciate this more when Takashi asks him that even if the toilet is getting cleaned now it will eventually get dirty. You must note that this is the same discipline why Takashi respects Hirayama-san and considers him dependable (although Takashi himself is reluctant to remain in that job)

From Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

But, imagine if no one cleans the toilet regularly, how dirty will it get. Same is about life. Pardon my analogy of toilet with life but even though seemingly full of randomness our life needs a routine diligence, a routine discipline to take care of our overall health – mental, physical and/or materialistic. These seemingly small, insignificant routines decide our habits and these habits eventually decide who we are – especially when the times are difficult. Our responses to random, unplanned, unfavorable events in life are completely dependent on the how we react to routines. Our habits are the baselines to decide the reaction to unfavorable events.

You must appreciate that even when there are many sad moments in Hirayama-san’s life he always sticks to his routine. This ‘boring’ routine ensures the mental peace that even though many things in life are going wrong there are certain things which have gone perfectly in the given day.

You know what they say, “If you want to change the world, start by making your bed.”

That is why routine is very important psychologically, it is like a subconscious support system to tell our brain that at least some things are going well.   

The Hobbies

Even when Hirayama-san is continuously busy in his toilet cleaning job, he is always in sync with his surroundings. He has that eye of a professional photographer where he is always trying to capture a perfect moment of light and shadows and reflections around him. His job is not preventing him from pursuing his passion.

What this shows is that one must have access to certain intangible experiences which are present all around us to have a healthy living.

So, an ideal hobby is the activity which is accessible to us in any form to elevate our perspective about the world we live in. If listening to music is your hobby, even when you lose your music player, or you have to lose your cassettes (like when Hirayama-sells his cassette for gas) the music in you cannot be sold, you can still reminisce that tune and hum to it.

Even when you have the cheap, outdated camera you can still appreciate the picturesque beauty of nature and the interplay of things in it with your eyes and creativity.    

Hirayama-san’s cassette collection is not an outdated relic, rather it is shown as a valuable classic item. It is wonderful because our hobbies provide this unfair advantage through their intangible nature to outweigh the tangible, materialistic possession. (it’s like as seemingly nonsensical painting made from paints and canvas worth some hundred bucks becomes invaluable because how it touches that intangible aspect of your life.)

Hobbies thus are a powerful tool to bring real wealth in life – this wealth can also create materialistic advantages if used in proper ways. (Some people turn their passions into a career)

Please note that hobbies are not always meant to bring in some materialistic benefit. In Hirayama-san’s case collecting saplings, watering plants is just for his mental satisfaction, it also shows his caring – nurturing side. Some hobbies, most hobbies are meant to carve out your best version. This best version can take care of everything materialistic and non-materialistic.   

Hobbies also help you to create a deep meaningful relationship with the people from different walks of life. You will see young Aya-chan’s appreciation for Hirayama-san on his taste in music. His niece truly values her uncle for making her aware about photography, reading and music, the restaurant owner Mama appreciates his intelligence for his reading habit.

Hobbies provide an access to the pleasures – priceless pleasures which are difficult to trade with anything that is materialistic in nature. Habits make you passionate about something, anything. We are human beings because we are passionate.

Routines bring in that predictability, certainty and thereby comfort in difficult times whereas hobbies ensure that we are always open to appreciate the beauty in novelty, randomness when our routines become mundane. 

Meaningful Connections – Loneliness vs Solitude

A relationship can be predetermined or could be in our hand. And both are equally important in life.

Even though Hirayama-san does not go well with his sister he knows that their worlds are totally different. It does not become a reason to envy his sister. (His sister is shown having a car with Chauffeur) He also teaches his niece about the closeness of relationships despite having differences very well.

Hirayama-san is depicted as lonely person but there are many relationships which are an integral part of his life. The restaurant owner – Mama who is always appreciating him for his intellectual ways despite knowing that he is a toilet cleaner, his deep connection with his niece who hasn’t met him for many years (he almost finds it difficult to recognize her when they first meet)

You must appreciate that despite being a complete introvert, a lonesome person – Hirayama is very effective in establishing immediate and intimate connections with unknown people. Being an introvert does not mean that the person is shy, it just means that they are highly selective and they mean it when they do or say it. (hence, this is one of the most consistent depiction of introverts in movies.)

You will see Hirayama-san immediately comforting the lost boy in garden (even though the boy’s mom treats him badly indirectly), playing tic-tac-toe with some unknown person, recognizing the homeless person whenever he appears, having good relations with the caretaker of the garden where his has his routine work time lunch, the bookshop lady appreciating him for his taste while selecting the books, he is also able to bring calmness to the cancer diagnosed Tomoyama – the ex-husband of Mama –  the restaurant lady.

This shows that you can remain as a single existent person and still you won’t miss life. You will not miss life because you are at peace with who you are and what you want to do with your life, otherwise this same single existent person is engulfed into loneliness. 

Hints of Stoicism

There are many instances in the character of Hirayama-san where you will find the principles of stoicism. Stoicism appreciates the order of nature and not resisting that order. One must be flexible to appreciate the ebb and the flow of the life which is the core of stoicism. If it is in the nature of the given thing, it will eventually happen, how you respond to such things is the only thing in your control.

Conclusion

As the life is multifaceted so is the interpretation of the movie perfect days, but I will try to highlight certain important takeaways.

A River will eventually end into the vast sea, but that doesn’t stop it from flowing

From Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

When Hirayama-san is talking to Niko about the difference in his and his sister’s world, he gives Niko a life lesson. This simple message has become the popular highlight of the movies all over.

Next time is next time. Now is now.

But this statement comes from the following discussion where Niko is trying to find her place in the world of her uncle and her mother.

The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected some are not.

And the analogy of river and the sea/ocean is used to justify this scene.

So, even though our lives, our worlds are sometimes connected and sometimes not they are eventually meant to end into the vastness of the overall one existence thereby losing their own identity. But that should also not bring in the fear for the end of our distinct existence. Because even when the destiny of the river is to meet the ocean in the end that does not stop it from flowing.

That is exactly why Hirayama-san tells Niko that you will eventually find the world where you belong and maybe you will have you own isolated world but that should not remain your concern, your concern should be – “are you living in the current moment?” that is where you belong.  

If you keep on justifying your life based on how and where it started from and how and where it will end you will miss many precious things, unnoticed and underrated things, moments, people in current reality which would have made your life actually beautiful.  

Instead of fearing for the end in the future, let us first appreciate the current moment.

One Suffering is equal to many sufferings and many sufferings combined is one suffering

The discussions that happened between the ex-husband of Mama called Tomoyama and Hirayama-san is the most unnoticed message of the movie I would say. Actually, the movie is filled with so many messages that this is normal.

Tomoyama tells Hirayama that he regrets that the terminal cancer he has will prohibit him to live the life to the fullest. There were so many things Tomoyama wanted to know but won’t be able to know only because of this cancer. He also feels sorry that he left Mama and come to realize her worth only when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It’s like only when the life is getting snatched away from us is then we start appreciating life of others especially the people we loved.

The doubt Tomoyama presents to Hirayama hence is very symbolic here.

Tomoyama - Shadows...
           Do they get darker when they overlap?
From Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

I think the gist of whole narrative of the movie lies in this moment, where they both find out that even when the shadows overlap the darkness remains the same!

Do you see what is happening here? It is like ‘even the darkest clouds have silver lining’ – type message that is portrayed here.

The shadows represent the suffering in our life.

You will feel sad when you have a problem in your life, you will be sad on the same level when you are having multiple sufferings/ problems. I have a proof for this.

You cry on one problem as the biggest problem of your life and then you see another person having practically bigger problem than yours which pushes you to think that yours was nothing given to the suffering that person has right now. It is all about how we define abundance, how we define satisfaction where the life itself is infinitely abundant like the light.  Any single shadow of suffering or many shadows of suffering will create same darkness when they overlap but the light of life is far brighter than that.

And where there is light of life there will be shadows of suffering.  

So, this works both ways,

When you have one suffering it will affect only this current moment. If you remain in this moment, you can certainly work over it. 

And when there are many sufferings combined together, they too can affect only this current moment. If you act on the current moment then only can you pass to the next one. It’s one moment at a time. That’s how you live. There will always be many problems, shadows while we live but to live is the highest privilege, the light of our existence.

This is why the movie ends with the term:

KOMOREBI – the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by the leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment.

From Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

Whatever big problem/suffering, whatever big victory/ happiness/ fulfillment/ satisfaction there is, they both exist only in that moment. You just have to pass through them all the time and appreciate the life granted to you.

This too shall pass.

Nobody can steal from you how you experience life

When we say that many sufferings and one suffering actually impact our lives similarly, we are allowing infinite possibilities, infinite perspectives to take action which are far more positive than these tiny, petty problems.

The problems seem big than the infinite possibilities because we try to limit our lives to remain in our defined ways, our own set standards which we create by comparing ours with the lives of others.

We try to fit the aspects of life on some measuring scales defined by this materialistic society where many beautiful dimensions of life are lost forever.

That is why you must try to create the places, moments, people, habits of your own choices which are not soiled, stained by the comparisons with other lives. Try to connect you moments with something intangible using your hobbies, routines, relationships. You will lose things associated with them but you will never lose how they made you feel. You can share that, amplify that with others but nobody can steal it from you, because you were the originator of that experience.      

Any type of Life and the consciousness of it being granted to us is a privilege

We are always trying to justify our pain as the bigger pain than others and glorify our own best experiences over the experiences of the others but we keep on forgetting that it is the same life flowing through all of us.

A perfect life is a life of appreciation for the privilege of getting a passage through life and its awareness instead of valuing the materialistic privileges like money, fame, career, relationships, lifestyles, possessions.

The life is a spectrum not a side.

We will always have many reasons to cry about our lives over other people’s seemingly better lives but believe me only one reason is enough to justify the grandeur of the life that is granted to you and through you. The so-called imperfections assigned by us to our own life look really petty in front of the infinite possibilities that the same life has to offer.

That is exactly why, appreciation of what good life has offered and the courage to deal with what bad there is in the life is important. Appreciating the imperfections of life is the perfect life. You live it through moments one by one thereby creating your perfect days.   

Cover image from Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

Dune: Psychology in Science Fiction

Our identity is heavily influenced by the surroundings we live in. A healthy understanding of the gap between ‘labels given to us by our surrounding’ and ‘what we consider ourselves at core’ defines how we perform, how we behave in given situations. Frank Herbert effectively used these ideas of human psyche in his Dune Saga. The antihero story of Paul Atreides indicates psychological ideas of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and Pygmalion effect. It is interesting to understand how our minds are so sensitive at the levels of self and group simultaneously.

How Frank Herbert used human psyche in the creation of Dune’s antihero?

We saw how some fantastic philosophical ideas come alive in the character arc of Paul Atreides. The discussion hereon is the extension of the previous philosophical one, now we will dive deeper into the psychological aspects of Dune Part Two.

There will be heavy spoilers for Dune Part Two hereon!!!

Existentialism in Dune Part Two

As Paul gets more and more involved in the events on Arrakis with Fremen, he finds out what needs to be done, he finds clarity and purpose. He is renouncing the leadership in the early part because he does not know what to do with it. The moment he decides to become the Lisan al-Gaib, the moment he finds the purpose of his being, he gets the clarity.

According to Existentialism, there is no other meaning to the life but the meaning you give it yourself. Existentialism says that man is born free and can chose any actions to live but in the end he/ she will feel like they lived for nothing. They will remove this ‘existential angst’ only when they decide what they want to do with their life. The moment people consider themselves responsible for the events and consequences in their lives, take deliberate actions to achieve them that is the exact the moment where they find the meaning in life. Then everything, every action every decision starts to make sense. You feel like you exist for something.

This existential journey of self-discovery is exactly what we see in Paul’s journey to become the Mahdi. Avenging his father’s life becomes the ultimate goal of Paul in early moments but later on things take different turn. This is existentialism on personal level.

Fremen of Arrakis are the best example of existentialism in masses. The Fremen people are able to sustain in the hostile environment of Arrakis not because that is the only choice. They also have a strong belief, a hope that someone from outer world will save them one day and make their planet the Paradise, the Lisan al-Gaib will come to save them. Although Paul and Jessica know that it is a story properly planned by Bene Gesserit, although there are also Fremen who oppose this prophecy (Chani is one of them) still it gives them all hope, a reason to live for, a reason to survive for. Everyone makes sense of this prophecy in their own ways, their own belief systems.

Do you see what is happening here?

There is one group who is religiously putting their faith in the hope of the messiah for their survival and on the other hand there is a group who dismisses this idea and think that they themselves have to take care of their survival. The messiah will be one of them, not someone sent from the outer world.

We know what happens in the end. But from an objective point of view we see that people create there own perspective for survival. It doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong in the end. What matters is whether is guaranteed the survival of Fremen. No wonder Jessica considers the artificially planted faith for Lisan al-Gaib among Fremen as an act of giving them a hope.

In either way, some sort of meaning would ensure survival of the Fremen.

The meaning of the life given to us is the meaning we assign to it.

The Prophecy – A Perfect Example of Confirmation Bias

The Prophecy plays key role in deciding the fate of key characters in Dune Part Two. Although we are aware that the prophecy a highly detailed plan to get the hold on Arrakis there are certain moments which fool us in believing that the prophecy might really be true. There is one justification for the correctness and validity for the prophecy. Somehow any powerful member from Bene Gesserit could have unlocked the exact power to see the future like Paul or Lady Jessica this person who could have seen the future and made this prophecy. We get no such signs in the narrative, but the story has enough resources and reasons to make it a valid point.

The event of Paul riding an elder worm, the worm stopping for Paul and Jessica in Dune Part One while crossing the dessert, Chani’s teardrop bringing back Paul alive (although she is manipulated to do that) are such events which confuse us when we try to reject the Prophecy. Either Bene Gesserit were too good to plan the people and resources for making the prophecy a reality or the person who made prophecy also unlocked the powers which Paul unlocked.

It is very interesting when Fremen come in one-to-one contact with Paul and Jessica. They are so influenced by this prophecy that whatever Paul may do, they attribute it to the prophecy. In early part at Sietch Tabr when Stilgar (who is one of the fundamentalists) is having discussion with the Fremen elders, we are given a hint of this strong Confirmatory Bias in Fremen, especially the fundamentalists.

Stilgar – I saw things.
Elder – Stilgar, your faith is playing tricks on you.  

This is an indication to how a blind faith could drive people into looking for signs and making sense from anything that supports that faith.

You must understand that, the existentialism makes life as a meaningless affair – we try to calm our mind/ our senses by assigning a meaning, a perspective to make sense out of the creation. Cognitive Bias lies on the negative extreme of such existentialism. An existence where we are only accepting the events, signs which support out beliefs. This also the transition region where spirituality is converted into pure religion. Stilgar is the perfect example of one such religious follower suffering from Cognitive Bias.

It is also very understandable for the people like Fremen who have nothing hopeful to live and nothing to pivot on, the idea of savior from outer world fuels them to continue the fight for survival.  

There is subtle hint that Paul may not be the only messiah that Arrakis might have seen. The Emperor in his discussion with Princess Irulan mentions Muad’Dib as “some new Fremen Prophet”.

Confirmation Bias is the prejudice where we try to accept the proofs which support our beliefs and reject those which don’t. Fremen people demonstrate such high levels of confirmation bias because Arrakis is the only reality they live in. People living outside the Arrakis like the emperor, Bene Geserit very well know that this is an intentionally planned act. And they very effectively implant such prophecies over the generations. It also shows how difficult it is to reject and go against the conventional beliefs especially the religious ones.

Did you ever have had an encounter with people who tell that this was already written in the older documents, scriptures? When we made certain scientific breakthroughs only then we are seeing them clearly mentioned in older writings, how is it possible? It feels counterintuitive but I would say going by the data instead of the intuition always helps to break such biases.

It feels against our mind because our mind only accepts that which will support the current beliefs. If the current belief gets falsified then our mind will start looking for another belief system which is much more like an existential angst – the existential confusion and the sadness that comes with it. If one meaning is falsified the mind must stick itself to a newer one otherwise life will feel worthless.

Image source: sketchplanations.com by Jono Hey

Cognitive Dissonance and Identity – What Makes Paul to Seek the Ultimate Power?

The confirmation bias is more powerful when it comes to the questions like ‘who you are?’, ‘what is your identity?’

Generally speaking, you are the best person who knows who you are (except your parents and some people close to you). What would happen if you are presented with the data, proofs which indicate that your parents are not your parents, your friends are not really your friends? They are just some paid actors (just like in the movie Truman Show).

Paul is portrayed as the Prince belonging to the House Atreides which is powerful and believes in fairness, justice, and the truth. The ideas associated with House Atreides support constructiveness, upliftment of those who are getting used for others’ benefits. Paul also strongly associates himself with these ideas even when his house is attacked by Harkonnens. He never tries to take advantage of the Fremen beliefs for personal gains. That can also be explained by one of the reasons he has to reject the Fremen Prophecy.

Then what makes Paul to accept this prophecy even when he knows that there are more proofs to reject the prophecy than to accept it?

It is when he knows the truth about his identity. The moment when he drinks water of life.

Upon understanding the ultimate truth, we come to know that Paul’s mother Lady Jessica is the daughter of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Paul understands that he is as Harkonnen as his villainous cousin Feyd-Rautha.

This is where his identity of Atreides filled with justice clashes with the cruel and much more powerful identity of Harkonnen. You can see him telling his mother that this is the way they survive – by being a Harkonnen.

When a person goes through such uncomfortable events where his/ her beliefs clash it creates a in harmony. These are the events where the person is confused about what exactly he/ she should believe in. As the early beliefs which were true for him, on which the person lived whole life were inherently false what defines him now?

Paul faces this cognitive dissonance about his identity. He himself is a Harkonnes – the Harkonnes whom he was considering the villains of his life and the lives of the Fremens.

What identity would Paul chose makes him the hero or the antihero in the end.

And Paul chooses the Harkonnen identity which make him the antihero. Please understand that he could have chosen a fair Atreides or Fremen ways to fight for the cause. The circumstances created around Paul supported him to become as ruthless as the Harkonnens. The Emperor and the great houses denying his ascension further fuel his wish to remain ruthless to justify the actions. The moment Paul associates himself with the Harkonnens, he justifies his urge for power as a valid one. Paul forgets his Atreides roots which could have made him the hero of the Dune’s story.

The Pygmalion Effect – Is Paul Really the Messiah?

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

One factor in Paul’s journey to become the leader of the Fremen and ultimately the Emperor can be largely credited to the support system created around him. It is clear that he goes through many hardships and sacrifices to achieve his goal but you cannot deny the inherent public support he receives through Fremen. It only because of the support from the Fremen people you will see Paul build the confidence even though in Dune Part One this was the exact person who tried to deny future leadership in front of his father.

How a person refusing leadership of his own house later accepted the leadership of the most controversial group, that to in very adverse conditions? Leading house Atreides was Paul’s birthright, an easy one. But, leading Fremen in clear opposition of the House Harkonnen, the emperor and the great houses was one very daring act to follow. What gave him all this strength?

The answer is – Pygmalion Effect

In psychology, Pygmalion Effect is the effect where high expectation from a person lead them to perform highly and effectively even in adverse condition.

Pygmalion word comes from the story of a Greek sculptor called Pygmalion who falls in love with his sculpture so much that the statue comes to life.

It’s like worshiping the rock can make it a God which could ultimately is believed to fulfill wishes.

The Bene Geserrit propaganda very smartly takes advantage of this idea. They create such support system around Paul which create one powerful leader in the universe who in his early life was not considering himself worthy.

Pygmalion effect highlights how the environments in which we live, how the people around who put their trust in us can boot our performance. According to Pygmalion effect, if a high performing person can deliver poorly if the environment and people are not supportive, it also is true the opposite way, any low performing person would deliver exceptionally when he is trusted by the people and the environment around him.

Pygmalion effect is also known as Rosenthal Effect in psychology.  Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted a study on classroom students where they found that the students who are inherently reinforced to be the smarter perform better whereas students who are told that they are worthless already show under-performance.

Pygmalion effect shows us that we internalize or identity based on the surroundings we live in. No wonder they say that when you want to be a great man be in the company of great people. This internalization of or beliefs lay the foundation of our performance. That is exactly why so many Fremens believing in Paul gave him the power to stand against the Harkonnens, the Emperor, the Great Houses – entire Universe.

This is exactly why Pygmalion effect is highly associated with the self-fulfilling prophecies. The declaration of such prophecy irrespective of the knowledge of the future conditions people to create ways for such prophesied person; the person who show some signs aligning with the prophecy gets a boost which ultimately follows the prophesied path as the environment now completely supports that path – that is the path of least resistance leading to the glory.

Supporting environment creates high performers

Paul could have chosen another path to fight just like Chani chooses in the end but the Pygmalion effects kicks in, leading him to become the antihero – a high performing powerful antihero.    

You should appreciate that Pygmalion effect also shows how the opposite and downgrading environment will create a villain. A famous and itching question can be answered using this explanation. If baby Hitler was killed way before, would it have prevented the occurrence of the future world war? The answer is – NO. The conditions were developed in such way that even after killing baby Hitler someone else would have risen among that much hatred who would have led to the end effect, the name would have been different but the acts would be roughly same and inhumane. That is why our environment is an important part of our identity, even if the environment is hostile, what we consider ourselves at the core is equally important.

Nonsupporting environment creates low performers

(You can see that, even in adverse nonsupporting conditions of cognitive dissonance and identity crisis, a person can chose to remain good, can choose one identity over the other. I have discussed such scenarios in pop culture before. Read more about that here.) 

The Prophecy – Does ‘Free Will’ Really Exist in Dune?

The identity which Paul chooses after a cognitive dissonance about his origin and the Pygmalion effect from his environment make his the prophesied Lisan al-Gaib. Now it feels like it truly was the plan all along. This goes against the idea of free will.

Existentialism is based on the idea that as man is born free. It is in his mind, his responsibility to assign the meaning to his/ her own life. The ways and reasons for which Paul consistently rejects the prophecy is because he knows he is not ‘the one’. He knows that he is the son of Leto Atreides and should avenge his father’s death, hence his only purpose was to use the ‘desert power’ to defeat the Harkonnens and the Emperor.

Paul despises everything that is connected to the Prophecy. It is his interest in Fremen people and purpose of completing the vision of his father which drives him into becoming one of the Fremen. You will see Paul rejecting the idea of him being the Messiah in the early discussions with Chani.

The creation of prophecy and instilling the faith into Fremen for Paul indirectly always pushes him into doing what is expected. Paul never makes any decision out of the box. There are chances where he could have created other opportunities but the people around him, his blind followers could never let that happen. Paul is center of attraction for everyone that is why he is always bound to do what they want, otherwise he knows that he will lose that advantage and desert will immediately consume him like any common outsider. The advantage of being the center of attraction of your followers is that your followers will justify your every action; But in the end, you will also be bound to their expectations.

The powers of Bene Gesserit to manipulate people to do what they want, the unfolding of events leading to the war during the Fremen rebellion against the Harkonnen, the necessity to prove injustice with Leto Atreides to the Great Houses ultimately make the realization of prophecy possible.    

That is exactly why Paul gets tied up in the expectations of Fremen, his own self-respect and his own duty as a son. He knows he can avoid this path but chooses that path because that is how he will have ultimate power.

On the other side you will see Chani, she is fighting the same war but can chose her own ways to accomplish that goal. Remaining out of the focus of the religious followers gives her more freedom.

Lady Jessica also falls victim to the prophecy. Stilgar informs her in Sietch Tabr that if she doesn’t become the Reverend Mother she would have to die and Fremen people won’t save Paul. Even when she knows that the prophecy is false, she accepts it as a way to get things done according to her wishes. But again, the pressure from the faithful Fremen followers force her to follow the prophecy. Things doesn’t go right for her in the end. Lady Jessica also faces the cognitive dissonance like Paul about her origin as Harkonnen and chooses the predefined path of being the Reverend Mother.

One must appreciate how Frank Herbert created the story of Dune where the psyche of person drives the narrative. Frank Herbert was heavily influenced by Carl Jung’s archetypes and Dune reflects those archetypes. Dune also gives the psychological justifications behind the blind hero worship through some important character arcs.

It becomes very important to notice our end goals and whether our surroundings, our people are supportive of that. We as humans, are the beings of infinite capabilities, what we consider ourselves internally at core becomes very important in the end. Otherwise, the world is already prepared to overwhelm us with its preconceived notions of living a life.  

References and further reading:

  1. Confirmation bias sketch from Sketchplanations by Jono Hey
  2. Cover Image by Johannes Havn from pexels.com
  3. Dune: Philosophy in Science Fiction
  4. The Pygmalion Effect: Definition & Examples by Ayesha Perera on Simply Psychology.org
  5. The Batman- The superhero who ‘unlearned’ – Journey of a person through cognitive dissonance
  6. Existentialism – Zima Blue and Existentialism
  7. Biases and Delusions – Steering on the borders of rationalism and insanity
  8. Answering the questions on existence of “the existence”
  9. The Existence – Why? How? And What?
  10. Dune’s Ornithopters and Biomimicry

Motivation and Fulfillment – Sailing Through The OCEAN of Life for Self-Actualization

Abraham Maslow’s ideas of the hierarchy of needs lost its essence due to oversimplification into the famous pyramid of needs. Those who lacked happiness in their lives will prefer to be happy by trading all valuable objects they have, whereas those who never possessed basic things for survival will endure endless pain to get them. This creates a paradox of life. What was lost through Maslow’s pyramid came back into limelight due to modern theories in psychology like the Cybernetic Big Five Theory and Sail-Boat Model. They highlight a very important fact that stability and plasticity both are necessary for a person to become whole – a complete human being.

Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ for The Modern World

Psychology ~ Study of mental!?!

A big part of psychology is always associated with the mental disorders – a negative aspect of human psyche. It is a common (mis)conception that students of psychology largely associate themselves with the studies and treatments of such mental people. Maybe it is our human tendency (a defensive tendency) to get immediately attracted to negative aspects immediately which creates such conception about psychology. This is not limited to only psychology; it is applicable to everything we have initial opinions about. But this is not true, we are seeing only a half part of the psychology. The other half and the positive part – is more helpful to live a better life.

Talking about good and bad part of human psyche – where would you put a selfish person? For the sake of classification, a selfish person is the one who prioritizes himself/herself first when it comes to anything. He/ she would think of themselves first, for their own benefit first to make the best out of the circumstances. Isn’t that bad?

How could it be bad if survival is the only option in front of such people? Then the roles reverse immediately. When it comes down to survival of a person every virtue falls down. If a person did something for their own betterment and jeopardized others in the process, will they be called selfish? Now the answer to this question becomes subjective and quite tricky. Were the others evil? If yes, then being selfish for self-benefit by belittling the evil others makes you a hero. If the others were good then being selfish makes you the evil one. So, is selfishness subjective?

We will find the answers to this question soon in upcoming parts.

Have you ever felt that feeling of void after achieving something great you’ve been striving for? Have you felt that emotion of not being repaid for the many good you did for others? Have you felt jealous for that simpleton who while being less competent than you got more recognition? Have you felt bad for people who devoted all their life for the betterment of society got disrespected by the society? Do you think that the modern definition of love is closer to formal transaction of things, physical acts and emotions?

Do our answers to all the questions above in a “Yes” mean that we are bad humans?

This is exactly the part where the positive aspect of psychology plays a crucial role.

Humanistic Psychology – What Makes Someone “A Whole Human”?

The humanistic psychology popularized by the ideas of an American Psychologist Abraham Maslow is also coined as the third force in psychology. (After Freud’s Psychoanalysis and Skinner’s Behaviorism)

“It is as if Sigmund Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and now, we must fill is out with healthy half.”

-Abraham Maslow

So, simply put, Maslow asked opposite question about human psyche. What if things go right? What happens when a human mind is completely healthy? What changes can be seen in a healthy human psyche?  What are the characteristics of “a whole human”?

The ideas of humanistic psychology hence bring one spiritual aspect in the understanding of the human psyche. Maslow’s ideas from the Theory of Motivation show us that psychology is also about what good is in humans and how everyone can achieve it.

Self-Actualization – The Classical View on Being the Best Version of You

In 1938 Abraham Maslow spent six weeks with Siksika Blackfoot, the first nation (Indigenous people) in Alberta, Canada. Maslow was trying to understand the social hierarchy and dominance within these people and surprisingly he found something totally different. Siksika people ever fought for dominance or power, the definition of wealth for Siksika was sharing – the more you share the wealthier you are, children were treated same as the adults were – they had chance to put their own opinion in front of others, Siksika people were highly cooperative. Instead of a single dominant person forcing others for power, the Siksika Blackfoot society left no one behind. Even the people who committed wrong work had option to lose that attitude and join back. It was like the Siksika were highly aware of how one should behave for the betterment of everyone without compromising the personal well-being. Maslow realized that this is the highest form of being a human being.

Maslow understood that if certain basic criterion, basic needs are fulfilled for every human being, then they can immediately strive for self-betterment and also for the betterment of society. They will not exploit society for their personal betterment. Such person would be a person who has achieved self-realization where he/ she knows what is good for him/ her and how they can benefit others in the process.       

So, Maslow’s Theory of Motivation talks about achieving human potential to it’s fullest. How we can bring about the best of ourselves which will satisfy us and will also benefit others around us thereby uplifting the whole society. This theory of motivation struck hard against the individualistic ideas which were strong in capitalist America.    

The (Controversial) Pyramid

We all would have seen the famous pyramid of needs in certain forms somewhere. This pyramid is known to represent Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Although the concept of hierarchy of needs is originated from Abraham Maslow, the pyramid was never drawn by him. A consulting psychologist Charles McDermid came up with this pyramid to oversimplify Maslow’s ideas and this is where the core of Theory of Motivation was lost.

Oversimplification of Maslow’s theory caused the loss of its very fundamental ideas

Theory of Motivation and Self-Actualization

According to this theory, humans need an integrated hierarchy where basic survival needs must be satisfied to realize their full potential – to become a self-actualized being.

Theory of motivation deals with what motivates people to achieve certain goal or expected outcome. The most primary theory here is Maslow’s hierarchy of Needs.

Maslow attributed 5 hierarchies for the any person to achieve their full potential:

  1. Physiological needs – Things required for survival like air, water, food, clothing, and shelter
  2. Safety needs – personal protection from surrounding hostile conditions, a safe society, secure job/ income, health
  3. Belonging needs – people who appreciate your presence in their lives, love, friendship, companionship, sense of connection/ belonging
  4. Esteem needs – respect, loyalty, status, recognition
  5. Self-actualization – the ability to reach the highest potential

Before moving on with the discussion with these hierarchy it is very important that Maslow never intended these to be linear. The mistranslation of the concept of hierarchy into pyramid lost the whole basics of Maslow’s theory of motivation. Maslow always clarified that these are not sequential.

Maslow’s classified the first four needs namely physiological, safety, belonging, and esteem as the existential motivators. These are the necessities for a person to exist in this world and are completely dependent upon external factors.

The last need for self-actualization is completely intrinsic motivator. Unless and until you feel that drive to understand the purpose of you your being, you won’t reach the stage of self-realization. The person who has satisfied all first four but not the self-actualization will feel directionless even after achieving what he/ she desired. That is exactly why doing things to prove your worth to the world mostly ends in existential confusion, such people question the void which is created after achieving everything they wanted.

That is why inner motivation is important for bringing out the best of you. So, the last need namely Self-actualization is attributed as the intrinsic motivator. This intrinsic urge will drive the person to make the sense of his/ her conditions improve further.

In this further improvement the person achieves self-transcendence. This is the purest form of the happiness. Spirituality calls it the enlightenment.

The Characteristics of Self-Actualizers

It is very important to reiterate that Maslow never intended the hierarchy of needs to be linear and always clarified that you can work of these needs simultaneously. It is not like leveling up in a game one by one. The more you satisfy lower needs, the more you are concerned with the higher needs.

Maslow’s studied such people who have achieved self-realization and found some special common traits. Some of them are listed below:

  1. They have high level humor – Low level humor is when you belittle others to create laughter. The self-actualizers will make fun of themselves to create this laughter.
  2. Self-realizers have high sense of reality – Self realizers exhibit a healthy self-esteem. A person with toxic self-esteem will feel jealous for other people’s success. They feel entitled as they were the worthier than others. But the self-actualizers appreciate other people’s success and befriend them to learn the ways to succeed.
  3. Continuous appreciation – Self-realizers are able to find joy in even the routine tasks, mundane activities. Even though they are excited for something new and challenging they equally value the mundane-ness of the events in life. It is because they carry highest sense of gratitude for everything.
  4. Problem centered – Self-actualizers understand that whatever mission they have whatever purpose they have to fulfill must always lie beyond themselves and consider the big picture and long-term vision. They are aware that once the goal is achieved, they will get exposed to that existential confusion, once you have higher and wider sense of goal it is very rare that you will end up in existential angst. These types of people are not building an empire to become billionaire, they are on a mission to contribute to the world. Most importantly this urge to contribute to the society is not to make themselves feel worthy, it is because they understand that it is what the world desperately needs. Thus, self-actualizers select their goals in such ways so that they strengthen the personal skills and contribute to the betterment of the society simultaneously.
  5. Self-realizers enjoy privacy – Solitude resonates more with such people than loneliness.
  6. Self-realizers demonstrate these values: Wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, effortlessness, aliveness, richness, simplicity, beauty, self-sufficiency, goodness, uniqueness, order, playfulness, truth
  7. Self-realizers are accepting towards oneself and others – they know that a perfect human is not the one without flaws. They understand that imperfections, sadness, grief, jealousy are also important aspect of being a human and thus try to uplift others going through same conditions instead of belittling them.
  8. Self-actualizers are more spontaneous and strive to become more natural
  9. Self-actualizers intensely look out for autonomy. It’s like micromanaging will kill their motivation to do the task.
  10. Self-actualizers have more profound relationships. The relationships are not transactional.
  11. Self-actualizers have high sense of Gemeinschaftsgefühl – meaning heightened sense of being connected to humanity.
  12. Self-actualizers always strive to create win-win situations. That is exactly what helps them to find the goals which will benefit them personally and also the society on grand scale.
  13. Self-actualizers have peak experiences. Self-actualizers are not always happy (otherwise one would surely attribute such people mental!) Instead of remaining happy with everything irrespective of is valence – intensity, self-actualizers have these small moments which make them appreciate their purpose on even higher level. They are not always drenched in the rains of happiness instead a small shower of joy elevates their sense of purposeful existence.

After going through such detailed characteristics explained by Maslow, it is tempting to ask one question. Do Self-actualizers settle for what they are given?

Self-actualization is a journey

What majorly got lost in translation due to the creation of this controversial pyramid of hierarchy of needs was Maslow’s attribution to continuous improvement in Self-actualizers.

“It is not a state of being but a process, It’s a direction, not destination. This process won’t always bring the feelings of happiness, contentment, and bliss, and it may even sometimes cause pain and heartache. It’s not for the “faint-hearted”. It requires continually stretching outside your comfort zone. It takes a lot of courage to be the best version of yourself.”           

This is the part where the theory of motivation truly becomes humanistic. That is exactly what I love about self-actualization. It is not creating a paradise free from suffering, rather it accepts the presence of negative ideas of humanity at the same level as positive ideas. That is what makes us a complete human. It is sad that in general understanding we miss this part of the theory of motivation.

Maslow’s theory of motivation for the modern world

Scott Barry Kaufman – an American psychologist conducted an experiment to fit Maslow’s theory of motivation which is more relevant in this modern world and also doesn’t mistranslate the original theory during oversimplification. I would say it is not oversimplification of the theory of motivation rather it augments the same theory to remain more relevant in modern times.  

Scott Kaufman in his famous paper discusses that the as Abraham Maslow’s ideas go, the lack of satisfaction motivates people to fill that existential i.e., external, and emotional i.e., intrinsic deficiency. This deficiency is primarily about physical existence and then about mental/ emotional existence. It can also be deficient in both aspects (external and internal simultaneously). The people who lack motivation are also very defensive when they feel danger to their basic needs – survival needs.

Scott explains that motivated people are driven more by exploration, creativity and love not for themselves but also for the humankind.

The Cybernetic Big Five Theory

Scott Kaufman bridged the concepts of cybernetic big five theory with the characteristics of self-actualized human beings as explained by Abraham Maslow through an experiment consisting of a psychrometric test. (A psychrometric test is a questionnaire to assess intelligence, abilities, potential and personality.)

The big five theory of cybernetics identifies five factors which helps to define the person’s overall personality. Cybernetics here indicates the study of systems which work with a feedback loop. After all motivation is a type of feedback loop. Any mechanism which changes its response based on the outcome can be studied under cybernetics. So, the cybernetic system we are interested here are human beings. There are five factors which indicate the major habits – traits of the person. The varying contribution from each attribute can help us to understand what motivates, influences the given person and how his/ her life can be improved.

Following are the big five:

  1. Openness to experiences – as the words themselves explains – it’s the way – the trait in which one accepts or molds/ changes to the new experiences. The more open one is to experiences the less they are susceptible to mental disorder
  2. Conscientiousness – it is the ability to care, to take things/ consequences seriously, being diligent. More conscientious a person is more he/ she is reliable; extremes would be attribute to workaholics, perfectionists.   
  3. Extraversion/ Extroversion – is related to how a person draws energy to exist. Introverts feel energetic in solitude whereas extroverts seek company to feel energetic. This is inspired from Carl Jung’s ideas.
  4. Agreeableness – it measures how considerate you are. People with low agreeableness are selfish, people with high agreeableness are kinder, sympathetic.
  5. Neuroticism – is related to how one handles negative emotions and stress. More neurotic a person more negatively they behave.

This theory is also commonly known as the OCEAN theory. But, why did we try to understand the cybernetic big five theory? What motivates people is immediately related to how people behave and what are their “traits”; So, understanding the OCEAN aspects of the personality creates a model where you can understand what motivates them.

The Metatraits – Bridging the Classical and Modern Theory of Motivation

Scott Kaufman linked the big five facets of human personality to Maslow’s theory of motivation through the bridge of Metatraits.

The five facets of human psyche – the five traits namely Openness to experiences, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism can be grouped into two major categories. One is Stability and the another is Plasticity.

Stability is defined through the contributions from traits of Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness.

Plasticity is defined through the contributions from the traits of Openness to experiences and Extraversion.

The personality trait hierarchy
(Source: Cybernetic Big Five Theory, Colin G. DeYoung, 2014, Journal of Research in Personality)

Now, the magic starts happening.           

It’s Not A Pyramid, Rather It’s A Sail Boat

Remember that the theory of motivation had two aspects. One is the security, safety and the another one is sense of existence, meaning.

Scott Kaufman through his experiment clarified almost all aspects of Maslow’s theory of motivation. Unlike the popular mistranslated pyramidal structure of hierarchy of needs, Scott smartly utilized the fundamental idea of simultaneity of all needs into his new model. According to Scott Kaufmanns model the hierarchy of need is best represented by the Sail Boat.

Scott Barry Kaufman’s Sail Boat Model of Self Actualization

It is very wonderful to appreciate what this Sail Boat model communicates. Its beauty is that is brings the lost ideas from the classical theory of motivation into limelight and at the same time it removes that false linearity from the hierarchy. The word ‘hierarchy’ reflects that interdependence and complementary nature of the needs. The more you satisfy the lower needs, the more you will try to fulfill the higher need.

Scott presents that we are never leveling up from one need to higher one, rather we are trying to fulfill every type of need to certain extent simultaneously. Once we fill like certain need is fulfilled to a safer extent, we can fulfill other multiple need simultaneously.

We are continuously changing our needs based on the experiences we have while fulfilling other needs. Once you achieve certain goal in your life you may feel the need to upgrade you living standards, social status. If you get one life changing spiritual experience you may feel to downgrade your living standards because you feel that this is materialistic obsession.

Scotts Sail Boat model thus can be represented as follows:

The Boat is the security aspect necessary for the survival of a person. It is both physiological and psychological. Safety, Connection and Self-esteem create the boat; once you fulfill these aspects your life will be secured, your physical existence is guaranteed but this will not fill the spiritual existential void, the urge for purpose and meaning in you. You will have to attach a sail of being open to uncertainty, daring to love, daring to find the purpose which will drive that boat into the “OCEAN” of the life. (Look what I did their, actually this is how Scott explains it, you get it!)

Having a boat with holes – the lack of safety, connections, and self esteem will surely jeopardize your materialistic existence. After that having only a boat – fulfillment of safety, connections and self-esteem will give you proper survival. But only survival will instantly demotivate you to even live. Its like a boat which has taken halt, has no purpose and may collapse when a big wave collapses. Basic fulfillment of survival need does not guaranty long term sustenance, any big challenge in life, any negative event will tear down this boat of existence into pieces. You must appreciate that the boat here indicates the metatrait of stability which is supposed to the rigid trait of the personality, rigid int terms of the fundamental support to the whole being.

In order to handle the challenges, the big collapsing waves one need to explore the OCEAN, the challenges for that the motivation will be drawn from the openness to new experiences, learnability, curiosity. This learnability, urge for growth is attributed to the sails of the boat. The sails will ensure that you will move faster when you sense collapsing waves, sails will ensure that your boat will reach the destinations you want, sails will ensure that you have the goal, the purpose, the meaning to your existence. Thus, the sails represent the metatrait of Plasticity.

You must understand that Stability metatrait is how you fulfill your deficiencies in the fundamental needs for existence whereas Plasticity metatrait is about how you make sense of what existence you have established.

How strongly you will live is defined by stability, it is about how you protect your goals, its is about how you handle your impulses, how you strategize and understand the events to remain stable.

How purposeful, focused you will remain will be defined by plasticity. What new goals you create, how you learn new things to achieve these goals, hoe you strategize you r actions to demonstrate understanding, create meaning is what plasticity is.

Conclusion

Life, our existence is always proven to be filled with paradoxes and contradictions. You will see a smiling beggar lying on the roadside – begging for the food of one time and you will also see a billionaire crying in his Lamborghini because he/she lost their loved ones. Different people will weigh out these events based on what type of life they were exposed to. Those who lacked happiness in their lives will prefer to be happy by trading all valuable objects they have, whereas those who never possessed basic things for survival will endure endless pain to get them. These types of paradoxical lives are the origins to a completely different world view and most importantly what motivates human beings.

What was lost through Maslow’s pyramid of hierarchy of needs came back into limelight due to modern theories in psychology like the Cybernetic Big Five Theory and Sail-Boat Model. They highlight a very important fact that stability and plasticity both are necessary for a person to become whole – a complete human being. Scott Barry Kaufmann also found out in his study that self-actualization was more strongly related to plasticity than the mere absence of stability. It shows how intrinsic motivation weighs heavier than the materialistic stability. It is a big concept to grasp but all of us are always passing through this experience but seldom are aware of that. You will realize that this is the theory which could also join the western and eastern concepts of enlightenment and self-transcendence.

P.S. – Iron Man’s character from MCU in every sense is the best pop-cultural representation of both the classical and modern ideas of the theory of motivation.

The most selfish character in a story got motivated to sacrifice himself for the greater good

References and for further reading:

  1. A Theory of Human Motivation, A. H. Maslow (1943), Originally Published in Psychological Review, 50, 370-396
  2. Kaufman, Scott Barry. “Self-Actualizing People in the 21st Century: Integration With Contemporary Theory and Research on Personality and Well-Being.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 63 (2018): 51 – 83.
  3. https://scottbarrykaufman.com/
  4. DeYoung, Colin G. “Cybernetic big five theory.” Journal of research in personality 56 (2015): 33-58.
  5. What Does It Mean to Be Self-Actualized in the 21st Century? – Beautiful Minds – by Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American
  6. The Untold Science of Self-Actualization by Marco Sander
  7. Featured image – A man looks at the painting Not to be Reproduced by René Magritte by Daniel Reinhardt

Time in a Bottle – Making The Finite Life Last Forever

The moment we realize that we are in a possession of something truly valuable is the moment when we start fearing for its loss, even the idea of losing it haunts us. The urgency created by the finiteness of our lives is the reason why we could and should truly appreciate the people and things around us, it is the same urgency which pushes us to dare to live the life we want. Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle exposes this vulnerability as well as the strength of human beings in his song “Time in a Bottle”.

Remembering one the soulful artists – Jim Croce

Sometimes what poets, writers wish for is weird, quirky. Through this weirdness they are trying to overcome the realistic limitations we have as the human beings. Poets, songwriters are very well known to express their flights of imagination through their writings. They can make a man walk barefoot on the surface of the sun or make an elephant fly in the air making it light as feather or make a wild beast fall in love or make donkey sing like a tenor and list goes on. What makes these imaginations or these wishes special is that the imperfection these wishes’ originator wants to remove from the reality. When the poet makes a person walk barefoot on the sun, he/she wants that person to be able to tolerate and experience that hotness of the sun, when the poet makes the elephants fly, he/she wants them to have the bird’s perspective towards the world and there can be many interpretations depending on the core idea to be conveyed.

Wishes are one integral part of every person’s existence. Facts represent what the reality actually is and the wishes represent how we expect the reality to be. That is why every fact can be a wish but every wish cannot be a reality – a fact. That is where ideas like wishful thinking, false hope originate from. Even though wishes might not be the exact representation of reality – sometimes really far or exactly opposite it, they represent a hidden dimension of how we think and manage our expectations in day-to-day life. In simple words, we always wish everything to happen according to our ways but at the same time, we are also aware that “That’s not how things work in reality!”. And funny enough or given that our stubbornness to have control over the course of our lives, we still keep on wishing things to happen in certain way – our way.  Wishes represent the bridge between how we understand the world and how the world really is (and trust me very few or almost none of us have real understanding of how the world is!) You wish a thing to be like this and exactly that happens, now that reality originated from your wish is your understanding of how the world is. When this wish does not come to fruition, the exact opposite of that wish is how the world is for you.

In simple words, a wish is the most powerful tool of how we want our world to be; practical or impractical, it still exists for us through our wishes. Even when it does not come to fruition, it the only existent and personal thing that brings us calmness, peace in the world full of uncertainties. Having too many unrealistic wishes makes one delusional and having too much realism makes one emotionless, mechanical; so there exists a spectrum of how we manage our expectations.

Now that we have established what wishes mean and what should be their dosage in our daily life. Let us move on to a special wish a man had for his loved ones – especially for his baby and his wife. This guy was Jim Croce, an American folk and rock singer-songwriter. The date 20 September 2023 marks 50 years since we lost one of the most original and soulful artists and human beings. Jim’s “Time in a Bottle” song is the embodiment of the tragedy of his life which also point towards the tragedy of being a human; furthermore, it also shows an optimistic and truly important perspective towards living a limited, fragile but fulfilled life. Jim’s words – Jim’s wishes in this song are simple, just in exactly enough quantity but the ideas and thoughts expressed transcend the borders of the infinity.

If I could save time in a bottle 

The first thing that I'd like to do

Is to save every day 'til eternity passes away

Just to spend them with you

Jim wants to have total control over the time he can have. The moment he will have hold over time of his life he wishes all that time to be with his loved ones. Using as simple object as a bottle to contain such an intangible, uncapturable and extremely powerful object like the time shows how desperately he wishes to have control over the time just to have the company of his loved ones – his wife and his son.

It is only the daring of the songwriter’s imagination to make the concept of time as the ‘one with ends of start and finish’ thereby making it finite and “contain”-able in a bottle even after knowing that it is impossible.

The wish to save every day, to have hold over the time to spend shows how time is the most valuable currency we have as the mortal beings. Jim’s wish to transcend even the eternity furthermore intensifies his wish ‘to spend the life with loved ones’.

They say time is an illusion, but we know how treating time as an illusion or as an expendable item can make our mortal lives suffer even more. Even though we have a grasp on the theory of time travel, we have barely scratched on the surface of how to perceive time and control it. This inseparable and highly influential impact of time on our lives make them fragile and irreplaceable too. Jim knew this; that is exactly why when he says that he wants to contain time and eternity to spend them with his loved ones. He is realistically implying that he does not want to waste even a single moment of his life. It’s a good advice for every one of us too. 

If I could make days last forever

If words could make wishes come true

I'd save every day like a treasure, and then

Again, I would spend them with you

When Jim will get complete hold on eternity, he would still use that time fully with his family. The repetition of the idea expresses the urgency to not even waste the immediate next moment.

There is innate purpose in Jim’s wish to get hold on the things like eternity and time; things which do not have any boundaries or limits, things which cannot be contained into finiteness. The intent is to signify the incomparable value of the finite time we have in everyone’s life. Spending these moments in doing things we love, have passion for, and with our loved ones is the highest value one can extract from such an incomparable asset. This also a simple way to express how intensely and passionately Jim loves and cares for his family.

But there never seems to be enough time

To do the things you want to do once you find them

The wishes and imagination expressed by Jim show how immediately he wants to live his life lying ahead. The moment he introduces the word “but” here brings all of us from his imaginary world into the harsh reality of life that we live in. He expresses a common yet unexpressed feeling all of us carry inside every one of us.

We are always trying to find the perfect timing, perfect moment until we realize that the time we have here, is finite. There is no option but to make every moment count. If you look at the words of people who have realized that the time they have on this earth is really limited, you will understand how the value of time for them shoots up exponentially.

The moment we realize that we are in a possession of something truly valuable – the moment when we appreciate what an important thing we own, is the moment when we start fearing for its loss, even the idea of losing it haunts us. The moment we find the true happiness is the exact moment when we start doubting that this happiness will instantly perish and something bad will start happening. This is human nature, there is nothing wrong in it. It also highlights how loss of certain thing actually makes us appreciate the true value of that lost thing.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Steve jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

A true artist is an expert of bringing out such very common yet unexpressed emotions out to the masses through his /her creations. It creates this common ground where people from different walks of life – different levels of life share their common personal, intimate experiences. Jim beautifully puts down the tragedy of the finiteness of life and the urgency to live it, experience it thoroughly, inside -out. It is really heartbreaking to know that you won’t be there around your loved ones forever. And most importantly, the feeling of loss is more intense, dreadful than actual loss itself but that is what the reality is.

I've looked around enough to know

That you're the one I want to go through time with

Now what Jim says here is about how you can express your intense love, passion with practicality. He assures his loved ones that even though the time he has, the time all of us have is finite, we can still make it worth of our life by being with the people we love, by valuing them. This finiteness of our existence pushes us to appreciate everything, every person we have close to us.

You can see in the early part of the song, Jim expresses naïve, highly romanticized and somewhat foolish thoughts of being eternal forever to express the passionate love, affection towards his love. This early part of the song also indirectly reveals how carelessly we handle some important aspects and important people in our life, in our youth where we literally feel like immortals with infinite energy.

There comes a moment when we have to actually make decisions solely by ourselves which would alter the upcoming course of our very own life and there is no escape from these choices, at that same moment we understand what we hold dear to us, what actually matters, what is noise and what illusions we were following till that moment. Some would say that we become mature and more realistic. The perfect veil of illusions drops down showing the imperfect, crude reality. This is the moment we understand that even though the illusion was pleasing, the reality is where we actually exist and what could be more worthwhile than being with those who are special to us in this good and real time even though it is finite.

If I had a box just for wishes

And dreams that had never come true

The box would be empty

Except for the memory of how they were answered by you

The realization of the value of people, things, and moments in which we interacted with them makes us appreciate their real beauty. The time we must live may not be infinite but even in this limited time the memories we create with our loved ones make us truly immortal. These memories are the linkages which get carried on from one person to another sometimes from one generation to the next one.

When a person is granted with immortality but if he/she has no one to love, to care for or nobody cares for or loves him/her, then what realistic purpose does this eternal life serve? It is exactly equivalent to death.

Our existence is valid and real only when other people recognize it. It is a tough pill to swallow. Many would argue that the life comes from within, you are a whole universe existing inside you, you don’t need others to validate your life – your existence but please understand that these statements are valid only for the people whose value of life lies with the opinions of others. When I am expressing about the validity of our own life upon the recognition of others, it is the value creation and upliftment of the humanity inside of us due to the interactions we get involved into. You are a universe into yourselves but if you are not making other people’s lives better, affecting the objects, people in a constructive way you are an isolated universe which is exactly equivalent to living in your own imaginary world. It will still exist as a sole but that is one selfish way to live. Many undiscovered wonders are revealed when things interact with each other.

It might seem overly philosophical but when faced with the “existential crisis”, “existential angst”, “chaos of the reality and its imperfections” everyone needs an identity, a pivot to stick to make this life worthwhile. This feeling of making our life worthwhile is created only because of the urgency to live. And this urgency to live to its fullest is created due to the finiteness of the life.

Jim expressed this philosophy in his very simple yet powerful song. He appreciates that every purpose of his life found a direction towards completion, every wish he had was fulfilled at the exact moment when he decided to create memories with his loved ones. You must appreciate that most of the times our wishes create an illusive, deceptive reality in our head where everything is perfect, it is only upon exposure of these wishes to reality when the facts are revealed. These facts may not be perfect but they are the only real thing. That why memories are really very important.

Memories have similar nature to the imagination and wishes we have but they are the outcomes of we passing through the time. So, our memories are the next best things we have to the reality in which we live and not our imagination or wishes. Memories are the embodiment of the realistic imagination and wished realized. That is why we can make these memories eternal by creating them with our loved ones and engaging in the doing thing we love.     

But there never seems to be enough time

To do the things you want to do once you find them

I've looked around enough to know

That you're the one I want to go through time with

The needs and wants are less important than the moments we have with our loved ones. It is this irreplaceability of any other materialistic thing with the memories and moments in the company of the loved ones which Jim wants to highlight through his song.

There is one important story attached with the song “Time in a bottle”.  Jim wrote this song when he came to know that he was going to be a father. He was a struggling artist enjoying the artwork he created with the support of his wife. You can say that he was in the bliss of his artistic creations which he loved creating. When he understood the start of his fatherhood, he came to truly know and appreciate the reality of life and the finiteness it has. This made him serious about his art which inspired him to create his world-famous album “You don’t mess around with Jim”. Next time when you will listen to this song with the knowledge of what actually inspired him to write this song, then you will appreciate how deeply he loved his son and his wife. He wanted every moment from thereon to be filled with their memories and that was enough to justify his finite life, finite yet truly invaluable. One can call it poetic, sad, tragic or poignant- Jim died in a plane crash aged 30. It feels like Jim had some foresight about his upcoming life when he wrote “Time in a bottle”. Even with the lifespan of mere 30 years, you will appreciate his life through this song “Time in a Bottle”. His life, thus becomes an example of creating a long-lasting life – finite yet long lasting, eternal and irreplaceable life.   

The urgency created by the finiteness of our lives is the reason why we could and should truly appreciate the people and things around us.    

Who knows, in coming eon or maybe in coming millennium we might actually be able to contain time in a bottle, then Jim’s all wishes might become a reality. Until then let us appreciate what we have as this incomparable precious life.

Bedshaped by Keane – On Yearning, Melancholia and Intimacy

We are really great at understanding our happy, feel-good emotions and we are masters of enjoying such emotions but when it comes to the negative, grievous, melancholic emotions we fail to acknowledge them. Sad moments involving the loss of loved ones are incomparable to anything, anyone in the world. But awareness, acknowledgement, acceptance of such emotions can surely help one to justify meanings to their lives in newer ways.

The song – Bedshaped

Sometimes words fail to pinpoint the emotions one is going through where poetry and music are proven to be the strongest tools. Loss of the loved ones is one such feeling which is purely subjective thus is difficult to generalize. The melancholy from the loss of an intimate person, the feeling of a big void in existence and the irreplaceability of that person are such emotions that are very difficult to trade with other things. A song called “Bedshaped” written by Keane taps into such types of emotions.

“Bedshaped” is a song by English rock band Keane, released as the third single from Hopes and Fears. It became their third consecutive top-10 hit on the UK Singles Chart, after “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Everybody’s Changing”, peaking at number 10. The song also reached the top 20 in Denmark and the Netherlands.

For oversimplification, although not recommended for such a fine piece of art – this song highlights how we are always looking for that emotional pivot in our life and what happens when one loses that pivot. 

The Lyrics

The lyrics is written by James Keith Warnock Sanger / Richard David Hughes / Thomas Oliver Chaplin / Timothy James Rice-Oxley © CTM Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group

Many's the time I ran with you down
The rainy roads of our old town
Many the lives we lived in each day
And buried altogether

The poet is reminiscing the days he has spent with the person he is missing right now. He wants to remind this person that he misses that they lived those day together to the fullest and in such a way that every new day was a new life, everyday brought something new with it. These memories are not limited to the liveliness of the experiences from each days start only. They are also connected to how those moments disappeared at the end of those days. Whatever the days were, they both were together to witness those moments. This remembrance by the poet shows his longing for that special person – man or woman whoever they were. It is about a vacuum created by the loss of this important person.

Don't laugh at me
Don't look away

The poet is scared that there is no one left who can understand his state of mind. Now that there is no person left who were closer to him, intimate with him, who could care for him – he fears that the world will make fun of his confusion, directionless condition. The poet pleading to not be laughed at, not be ignored indicates that he is aware of the bad condition which he is going through but is helpless as nobody closer to him now exists.

The poet has become so self-judgmental that he has surety of people making fun of him instead of consoling him for the loss. One must understand why the poet has this innate fear and strong surety for the reaction of world for his loss; it is because he knows that the person he lost only and truly knew his personality – rest of the world will draw some conclusions instead of understanding the reasons behind his behavior.

One may call this emotion as the feeling of self-loathing because there is no one left for the person to reflect on the emotions of loss he is going through. The person has started to hate himself.

But there is some hope!

You'll follow me back with the sun in your eyes
And on your own
Bed shaped
In legs of stone
You'll knock on my door and up we'll go
In white light

The poet is so much consumed by the feelings of loss that he expects that this lost person or here we can say his spirit will come back to retrieve our poet to the after-world where they can coexist. “Bedshaped” indicates that this loss has made the poet so sick, immobile that the bed on which he is lying has become an extension of his body. The “legs of stone” indicate the disinterest poet has developed. He does not want to go anywhere. One must understand that this was the same person – the poet who had lived every day as new life with his beloved and now lost person. These are the feelings of depression due to the loss of the loved ones, but the poet hopes that their spirit may come back to rescue him.

I don't think so
But what do I know
What do I know

The poet expects that the strong bond of love may truly help him to recover from this loss but he is now so lonely that there is this uncertainty that this might not actually happen. The poet now moves on the boundaries of reality and illusions.

I know you think I'm holding you down
And I've fallen by the wayside now
And I don't understand the same things as you
But I do

This explains how the presence of a having loved one, and intimacy with such person can boost the self-esteem, confidence rather the whole personality of that person.

Now that the poet has lost such loved ones, he knows that he may not be the same confident person he was before. This makes him feel that he is not worthy of what that person made him. This feeling of becoming worthless again points to the emotions of self-loathing.

Now you should also understand that the poet is somewhat aware of what is actually going wrong an has this urge to recover from all this grief. He still bears the hope to come out of this alive but there is very fine line between the meaninglessness of his life and mere survival.

The Video

The video is stop motion animation directed by Corin Hardy. Which itself is fine piece of art.

The story conveyed in the video of the song actually deepens the meaning behind the song and amplifies the mixed emotions of grief, loss, self-humiliation, meaninglessness and most importantly the hope for liberation.

The video shows some short events in the day of a roadside naked drunkard who has lost the sense of his surroundings.

He misses the company of person he loved, the only person who truly understood him. He is miserable to pass this life on his own and alone.   

We can be sure of this meaning because the rest of the world is completely hostile environment for him now. He is running away from people. Hiding himself.

Running away from the people, he grieves in a restroom. The restroom here indicates the privacy he has, the shelter of some comfort with his intimate thoughts and the memories of his loved ones. We metaphorically, are inside his mind where he is trying to understand this loneliness. He wants to recover from this misery and feel liberated. Hope is the only thing that he relies on, hence we see him contemplating his ideas in this restroom.

The thoughts written on the wall indicate the chaos, the confusion that person has in his mind as he has no close person to show the direction, the ways. The isolation in the restroom with his thoughts with his degraded condition indicates the urge to find someone who truly cares for him and the meaninglessness in life created by the loss of the loved ones. 

You will notice that a cat brings him clothes from somewhere which somewhat lifts him up and that is also why he gathers the courage to revisit the world and blend in with the people in it. He tries to free his mind by letting go off the thoughts of misery.

Imagine what could have happened if a person would have given him the clothes instead of the cat. If a person would have offered him the clothes, then the chances for his recovery from grief would have been extremely high. Simple support from a non-human being gave him the hope to come out of his grief. Which is powerfully conveyed in the music video.

When this guy wears the clothes and tries to face the world, tries to vacate his mind the stares of unknown people again haunt him thereby pushing him again into his now chaotic and directionless mind.

This shows how sensitive a person is when he is facing the loss of his loved ones. The urge for the longing of the person who can truly understand you is strong in most of the people and there is nothing wrong in it.

Closing remarks

In the end of the music video, you will see the restroom the private room getting shattered and penetrated by ‘the white light’ this person was longing for. He is finally liberated. The song thus leaves at poignant and melancholic note where we are left to find out whether that liberation was his death or him losing all the control over his mind.

I would ask what’s the difference between them anyways? Does that difference really matter?

Longing for intimacy

Human beings are social animals not because they form some groups for mutual benefits so that everyone can survive, grow, prosper and leave something extra for the upcoming generations. A person cannot become aware about his existence without interacting with his surroundings. The crude awareness comes from the interaction with the materialistic things around the person but the core awareness of a person’s existence comes from their interactions with the people around them. That is why I think human beings are called social animals. We always assign our own value, our own worth (physical, financial, psychological, intellectual etc.,) relative to the things and people around us.  

It is also true that absolutely nothing is required to understand the existence of one’s being but that is only possible when one has understood what is means to exist relative to the things in their surroundings. You can say that the person who has achieved the topmost levels of spirituality won’t need anything to define themselves thereby becoming truly liberated, they are free from longing for anything but even these people have to go through the event of understanding their meaning for the existence through the relativity with the surrounding objects and most importantly people.

So, in every sense we as a human being always need some person with whom we can comfortably compare our worth – please understand that this comparison is not for competitiveness. Because when a person is actually seeking the meaning behind their existence – the words like competition, race and superiority have microscopic worth as if they don’t even exist. When the person understands where they actually stand with respect to this person then it justifies the purpose, the meaning of their being. This person becomes their pivot for the life lying ahead.

As the quote goes:

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Lao Tzu

Actually, it is not the power of love, it is the influence of having someone to justify our existence which brings out the best of the person. And who doesn’t want to be their best version? That is why love and its influence are powerful for human beings as social animals.

This is where intimacy comes in picture

Please note that intimacy is not limited to what lies between two people madly in love and neither is it limited to physical one. It can exist between two best friends, between a teacher and his pupil, between a manager and his subordinate, between an old grandpa and a young boy who are not actually related. Some people may call them soulmates and in most cases these relations are far from the blood relations although such intimate relations are possible in blood relations too. Also, understand that the intimacy can also be limited the self only but general examples are uncommon.

In very simple words, intimacy is that place of comfort where the person can be who they are without any judgements, benchmarks, and comparisons (although the basic logic emerges from relative comparison but it is not a competitive comparison. This is like the comparison where one realizes the similarity and differences in constructive ways)

So, when a person loses such intimate person in their lives the whole pivot of life, the center of the meaningfulness of their life gets destroyed which brings this existential crisis, the chaotic void, the unfilled vacuum. This loss of person and the feelings which come after that loss are difficult to express to everyone as intimacy can never be generalized.

In the first place, even before finding their intimate person people are always searching for their ‘go to’ person, they long for such person. Now you must understand how one feels when they lose such person they already have; being alive without their person is already a burden for them.

This might be my overthinking on a good song which just expresses how one feels when they lose their loved ones and how they consider their life completely meaningless in such cases. As the ability of words to express the exact emotions is practically limited and very subjective; whatever I have written may be meaningless to many and meaningful to a few or no one.

I think we are very great at understanding our happy, feel-good emotions and we are masters of enjoying such emotions but when it comes to the negative, grievous, melancholic emotions we fail to acknowledge them many times. I understand that such very intimate and highly personal losses are incomparable to anything, anyone in the world but awareness, acknowledgement of such emotions surely helps the person to justify meanings to their lives in newer ways because life itself represents boundless ocean of opportunities/ possibilities. Who knows someone might be needing exactly the same person you are. That surely will help the both sides. And that truly justifies we – the human beings as social animals (in a way). That is why songs expressing such emotions are very important.