Articles 15.
15.1
We Need Moral Direction - Freya India
“There’s a lot of advice out there about anxiety, especially for young people. Anxious people need to do breathwork. We need to meditate more. Repeat positive affirmations. Almost none of it works.
I think this is because we now use the word anxiety to describe two different things. There’s the anxiety that makes young people scared to answer the phone or order in restaurants. But there’s also a deeper, ambient anxiety I see so many of us wracked with—a sort of neurotic paralysis. Not knowing which path to take in life. Not knowing what decisions to make. Not knowing who we are. It’s this constant second-guessing, examining every decision to death, agonising over the right thing to do. When young people talk about how unbearable their anxiety is, the relentlessness of it, I think this is more what they mean.
For this anxiety, mainstream mental health advice doesn’t cut it. Maybe it helps in the moment, but the anxiety always comes back. I think that’s because it isn’t about how we feel, or what we want. It’s about how we act. The answer to this anxiety, I’ve come to believe, is living by strong moral values.
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Nowadays we’ve forgotten the word morals and replaced it with boundaries. Boundaries, a popular term in therapy, basically mean the lines we draw in relationships to define what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. In a new romantic relationship, for example, you first need to set boundaries. Boundaries can “be anything, include anything, and change depending on the person/situation/time.” “All that matters is that they feel good to you”! In other words there’s no common moral ground anymore so we are each left to make up our own arbitrary standards, present them to our partners, and hope they find some reason to respect them. We can’t base it on our morality, that’s judgemental, we can’t base it on God, we’ll get laughed at, so instead we base it on our mental health or happiness or some childhood trauma, which makes it feel like an us problem. And we’ve created this messed-up situation where the person in a relationship with a stronger moral instinct often ends up feeling guilty, or seeming the most insecure.
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Because of course in our individualistic culture we call it boundaries, another thing that closes us off from other people. We don’t teach young people a framework of moral values to live by, only how to cut themselves off from behaviour they don’t like. Now we enforce boundaries and move further apart. We use it as another reason to retreat from people. Just look at all the young women online saying they protected their peace so much they ended up alone, or cut out so many toxic people there’s nobody left. We got the first part—walk away from disrespect. But our culture fails to follow up with walk toward something. Hold yourself to high standards! Attract and invest in good people! Setting limits on everyone else is no way to live. Don’t just draw a boundary; live your values.
Besides, I don’t know about you but I don’t want a partner who doesn’t betray me because I declared it a boundary of mine, some weird personal hang-up. I’d rather we have the same moral code! A similar conscience! I think it’s a mistake to make morality something we dictate at the start of a relationship in delicate therapy-speak rather than something we search for in people. Surely there’s an argument for not explaining what loyalty is but quietly looking for it. For not teaching people how to treat you. For leaving it unsaid. I have a hard time believing we all feel empowered when someone respects our boundaries, rather than disheartened we had to ask. I don’t want my boundaries to be respected; I want to be bound together in the same moral universe.
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I write a lot about not falling for things in the modern world. But we also need to ask ourselves: what do I stand for? Not only what do I want to walk away from, but what am I walking toward? Not only what do I want to protect my future children from, but pass onto them? Boundaries are not enough by themselves. We need something to aim at. To attempt to be better, again and again. That, I think, is where we will find relief. We might find self-respect, too, even stumble across self-love. We might find our way to better people, better places, onto a better path. In any case, it’s the closest to peace of mind we can get. So don’t be indifferent about right and wrong, be indignant. Don’t let anyone convince you that your moral instincts are insecurity. Decide what kind of person you want to be, and hold yourself to it. Decide before the world does.”
15.2
You Don’t Have Anxiety, You Have an Anxious Lifestyle - George Mack
“You don't have anxiety. You have an anxious lifestyle.
I was reading through old journals on a flight. It was a stream of anxiety. Picture a cranky monkey on cocaine. That's what my inner dialogue looked like.
After reading 10 pages of journals, I wrote down the following one sentence reply to my old self: You don't have anxiety. You have an anxious lifestyle.
My anxiety was a side effect — not a cause. If you put anxious inputs into the system, you'll get anxious outputs. I spent no time with my own thoughts undistracted. My diet was terrible. My sleep was awful. I would get drunk 1-2x per week. I was smashing energy drinks.
I was putting a fork into a plug socket — and was wondering why I had this electric feeling inside of my body.
2 takeaways I had:
Anxiety is more like diabetes - There's type 1 (genetic) and type 2 (lifestyle). We need clearer naming conventions to prevent people who have type 2 thinking they have type 1. The modern world is a breeding ground for type 2 diabetes -- and type 2 anxiety.
Journalling is a time machine - Journalling gets to freeze your brains thoughts. You realise the value of this when you get to see them 5-10 years later. Your brain creates a false narrative of the past. It's only when you thaw old thoughts out from the freezer do you see what your brain used to look like.…”
15.3
Debugging Behaviours From School - George Mack
“Reminder to self: You have to debug the code the education system has written in your head. A lot of the behaviours you were punished for in school will reward you in adulthood. A lot of behaviours you were rewarded for in school will get you punished in adulthood.
Behaviours punished in school -- but rewarded in adulthood:
Questioning the herd - If a child questions the teacher and comes up with a new way of doing the class, they are punished. If an adult questions the herd and comes up with a new way of doing things, we label them a "successful entrepreneur"
Copying successful people - When I was 12, I handed in my Dad's university dissertation as my computer science homework. I was put in detention for copying. In adulthood, you're massively rewarded for copying people more successful than you.
Being a nerd - If you had a hardcore obsession with something unique, you're a bully's dream. In adulthood, if you have a hardcore obsession with something unique -- you can become the best in your industry or develop an audience of millions of likeminded people.
Practical knowledge - All the rewards at school are linked to your theoretical knowledge. You're rewarded for sounding or looking smart -- rather than actually being smart. In adulthood, the shift moves from theory to practice. The Wright Brothers had 0 academic qualifications to build an airplane. Street smarts > School smarts.
Avoiding popularity contests - School reinforces the mimetic desire to be popular. To be liked by everyone. In adulthood, you slowly realise that nobody was thinking about you in the first place -- they was too busy worried what you was thinking about them.”
15.4 **
Everyone Is Numbing Out - Catherine Shannon
“It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something. If your boyfriend brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice. Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers. Maybe you take it a step further: “Actually, flowers are really basic and lame. Only basic girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.”
If this goes on for long enough—even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—you will see them as a kind of joke. Flowers are now a bit. It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your “receptors for flowers” for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.
Entering the void
I’m deeply troubled by the fact that I see this happening at a massive scale, all around us. Except the problem is not a lack of bouquets, of course. It’s a lack of meaning.
Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even nihilists have a sincere belief system; they just sincerely believe that life is meaningless.) What we’re dealing with is worse than nihilism. People are checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.
“People are so worn down,” my friend told me on a recent phone call. She’s right: there’s a real lack of palpable ambition and vitality these days, a stunning lack of life force in the world. Another friend told me that “this has been going on for so long that people wouldn’t know meaning if it walked up and bit them in the ass.” It’s true—so many of the things that once gave the average person’s life real meaning are now treated with sarcasm and contempt: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of your life, getting married is just a piece of paper, having kids is a nightmare, family is a burden, hobbies are merely quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots, the list goes on. If you allow yourself to internalize this perspective, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.
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We think ironic detachment will protect us
The picture is bleak. It’s so sad it’s difficult to comprehend. How do you protect yourself in such a world?
You simply don’t allow yourself to experience it.
Think back to the flower metaphor. This is where we don’t receive flowers, but we cope. Same thing here. We look around the world, struggle to see the meaning in its chaos, and unconsciously tell ourselves that finding meaning isn’t that important. If I can’t pursue my own fulfillment, at least I can pursue my own pleasure. This is a somewhat reasonable reaction to the present circumstances. It feels straightforward enough—it’s binary, measurable, and everyone else is doing it. This is how the numbness starts.
And perhaps this route is even better—maybe even cool. Being ironically detached from life is endlessly glamorized in our culture. There’s a certain status in pretending nothing affects you and you don’t care. Cue photo montage of a strung-out Kate Moss staring listlessly into the middle distance.
Taking the ironic detachment route is also easy. It’s easy to laugh at other people, mock them, throw your head back, be a critic. Standing for nothing has the obvious appeal of making you impossible to pin down. There’s something very chic about smoking a cigarette outside a bar and being all like whatever. You’re playing a game of hide-and-seek with life, and you’re hiding. It’s thrilling to find a good place to hide, to have people seeking you. But in our drug-fueled debauchery, our coy, sarcastic conversations, and perhaps most of all in our fleeting, romantic encounters, we should heed the words of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott:
“It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”
It is a disaster not to be found, a total disaster to not be able to connect with others because we were too preoccupied with ourselves. The whole reason for ironic detachment is to build a protective wall between oneself and the world. We think we’re building a wall, but we’re really hollowing ourselves out from the inside. Eventually, without really noticing it, there will be nothing left for the wall to defend. There will be no one to find.
It’s not hard to see where the pervasive numbness comes in from here, as a sort of sinister phase two. The opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. I hope it’s obvious why this is a problem, but maybe you’re still thinking so what. To put it succinctly: when you take an ironic, negative, or numb attitude to everything, you are by definition not on the line for solutions, and when you stop looking for solutions, you lose all agency and will in your life.
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Possible antidotes
Rather than jump to sincerity, I’d like to start with basic honesty. It would be great if we started just telling the truth—to ourselves and each other. The truth is good. (I mean the truth, by the way. Not “our truth.” The truth, the real truth, does not have to market itself as “authentic,” like an influencer does, it simply is.) In other words: stop hiding and start seeking. Stop hiding from the sad truths and start seeking the transcendent truths that will address the sadness. When we flip the game of hide-and-seek, we can stop worrying about someone finding us, and start seeking the truth in the world, in others, and in ourselves.
With honesty as the foundation, I would advocate next for embracing reality—our real lives, right now—and not clinging to an abstract idea of how our lives should be. In other words: everything that we see exclusively online does not really matter. The broader culture’s idea of “a perfect life” changes every couple years. Measuring the distance between our real lives and some ever-changing, impossible ideal will do nothing but break our spirit. Besides, I have never met a person who has a dream life in reality. And reality—the truth—is what counts.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive. Things are never so fundamentally broken that we cannot move just a bit closer towards our goals and try again and again to live up to our values. Goals and values are good to have. The bigger and more transcendent the better, I say.”
15.5
Overexcitabilities 101: an introduction - Emma
“Overexcitability (or ‘OE’ for short) is a heightened ability to receive, and respond to, stimuli. Everything coming in from the outside world, and everything going on inside your head has the ‘volume turned up’. It is often found in creative and gifted individuals (although not all gifted or creative people have OE, and not all people with OE are gifted – it’s not a one to one match).
The term was coined by Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski, who developed the Theory of Positive Disintegration. He called out OE as a key factor in the potential of a person to develop their personality. A factor which could influence the probability of, and rate at which, a person goes through the various stages of disintegration, and growth into their authentic self.
Dabrowski called overexcitability a ‘tragic gift‘. This intense experience of the world is more likely to lead to extremes of emotion – good and bad – leading a person with OE to view the world in a very different way.
And that’s what OE is all about – it’s intense. Whether for good or bad, everything internal and external is amplified.
“One could say that one who manifests a given form of overexcitability, and especially one who manifests several forms of overexcitability, sees reality in a different, stronger and more multisided manner. Reality for such an individual ceases to be indifferent but affects him deeply and leaves long-lasting impressions.”
(Dabrowski, 1972, p. 7).
15.6 *
What is Giftedness? - Jennifer Harvey Sallin
“Typically, the word "gifted" is shorthand for "intellectual giftedness", but there are various ways any person - gifted or not - expresses their mental faculties. In truth, “giftedness” is a kind of mind construction pattern (neurologically, cognitively and phenomenologically speaking) which results in a complexity of thought (and often emotion) that is uncommon. In our work at InterGifted, we use my holistic model of intelligence, which I have developed in particular with advanced gifted adult development in mind. My model works with six areas of intelligence: intellectual, emotional, creative, sensual, physical, and existential.
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An intellectually gifted person has a baseline of intellectual intelligence that is higher than average; how any of the other areas of intelligence combine and interact with with their intellectual intelligence shows in their own unique giftedness "flavor" or "personality". There's also the question of levels of giftedness, which range from mild to profound, and very much influence the expression of giftedness in an individual.
Additionally, there can sometimes be twice- and multi-exceptionalities, such as autism, learning disabilities, or other neurodivergences (in many cases extended to include mental health issues and physical disability), which add certain challenges or additional "flavors" to the expression of one's high intellectual ability. Overexcitabilities, which are areas of uncommonly high intensity (but which are not synonymous with giftedness, as is often believed) add additional flavors of expression.
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The issue is that gifted people like exploration, not routine; and they need a lot more intellectual stimulation than is common. For a lot of people, traditional roles, rules and expectations feel good, and create a sense of safety, but many (if not all) gifted people feel imprisoned by routine, tradition, and rules-based contexts. Without the room to try out different roles, stretch and question the rules, be creative and go beyond traditional expectations and limits, gifted people often feel uncomfortable, misunderstood, imprisoned, suffocated, and at the extreme, even existentially panicked. And without adequate intellectual stimulation and depth in their relationships, they may feel themselves going into a kind of hibernation/shut-down; or conversely go into a kind of overdrive trying to get their needs met in contexts and with people who are unable to meet them adequately. Some of what I've described here can actually lead to something we call "gifted trauma". This is such an important topic in a gifted person's development and thriving, that we've dedicated an entire podcast to it, which you can listen to here: Conversations on Gifted Trauma.
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What's difficult about all of this is that many people don't want to see themselves as gifted because it sounds like a question of superiority, and they don't want to believe or feel they are better than others. But while it’s healthy not to see oneself as “special” and therefore “superior”, it is also necessary to recognize and honor the way one’s mind works and when one’s level of complexity is different as compared to the norm. As mentioned above, those who are more complex than the norm but refuse to believe it, risk looking for high complexity in friendships, relationships, discussions, collaborations, roles and systems when it is simply not there; and they risk being disillusioned and blaming themselves or others for the “failure”. They also risk overwhelming non-gifted people with their complexity, and once again blaming themselves or others for the mismatch.
Additionally, if a gifted person is unaware of their authentic academic and professional needs and tries to follow traditional academic or professional goals and routines, they may exhaust teachers, classmates, co-workers, bosses, and even family and friends with their chronic dissatisfaction and need for challenge and stimulation. If they are unusually sensitive, they may be bullied regarding their extreme empathy, extreme sense of justice/injustice, and inability to “go with the flow” or just accept things the way they are, problems and all. Or may even be aware of all of the potential ways they could help others and become a sort of “savior”, losing themselves in cleaning up other people’s messes (sometimes which the other people didn’t even want cleaned, and sometimes to their own detriment).
Another common fear of gifted people is that if they admit their difference from others, it will ruin their relationships with their non-gifted family and friends or somehow jeopardize their place in the non-gifted dominant world. It won't. It will simply help you to communicate more effectively, understand others in your life with more ease, and realize where and with whom you can get your various gifted-specific and non gifted-specific needs met. The essential point is: the better you understand your own mind and functioning, the better you can negotiate the necessary conditions for your thriving. That process takes radical self-honesty. Denial about one's giftedness can be a challenging aspect to overcome, but it is worth the work, as it allows you to come into a real relationship with yourself and with the world and others around you; allowing you to heal old wounds of unmet needs and thus redirect the use of your intelligence toward authentic, holistic and interdependent relating which allows you to meet your needs while honoring the limits of others. If you are somewhere on this fear/denial/acceptance journey, you may find my article on the topic helpful: The Stages of Adult Giftedness Discovery.
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Giftedness does not result in automatic success: as with everyone and everything, the conditions (inner and outer) must be right for flourishing. When a gifted person's complexity is supported and managed well, they have the proper social mirroring, and the social and cultural context is ripe, they can do amazing things. When it is not managed well and not supported (which given the numbers, is understandable), that same complexity can result in underperformance and failure throughout life. Finding the right support can be a challenge, due to the “complexity mismatch” gifted people sometimes experience when reaching out socially, professionally, and for help and support. This was the main reason I created InterGifted.”