To preface, I try to always make sure I am writing about me and not you (even if I use the proverbial you or the proverbial we). Any opinions I am not prescribing onto others. I do not talk of any masses, or at least I try not to. I am talking about little old me.
I often feel that a lot of pop-science words and concepts make simple things cloudy. For example, tricks to get your serotonin up, or figure out what you need to do to have more dopamine. Or perhaps what is causing dopamine, so that I can be careful about, because dopamine after dinner isn’t good. For me, this is clouding things with pop-science. It is much easier for me to say that I feel good after I run. I am more motivated when my room is clean. Being nice to people makes me feel good about life. Simple simple things. No need for naming chemical reactions that go off in my brain the same time that I do them.
So there’s needlessly complicating, but with pop-science stuff, there is also (to me) concepts hiding other potential truths. I am not a man of metaphysics I don’t think, but with wording like controlling your midocondriates, (to me) it infers a causal relationship. If our phase neutrons are of X value, then we will feel Y. As opposed to Y being the cause and the raise in phase neutrons being the effect. Maybe artificially raising X makes us sense a bitter emptiness of life that is a phantom in itself because it is akin to Y, but ultimately not? What if there is Z? What if Z does both AND MORE? I think saying things make you feel warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t hide away these possibilities, and saying that you need a dopamine rush does. To me.
Z was conspicuously, but secretly the soul in the last paragraph, but it can also just be anything not individualized. Family, friends, society, etc. If I’m home all day, I feel better when I walk around an area with lots of people. It’s nice being close to people? Evolutionary predisposition to those of similar species to increase levels of picobitters in the duodenum? I prefer the former.
Lastly, all of it seems to be saying to me that we don’t know ourselves, and we need some grifter to tell us how to know ourselves. I don’t need a pop-psychologist Canadian grifter to tell me cleaning my room is good for me. I know that already. I know water is good (not too much). I know walking is good (I guess not too much?). I know leafy greens are good (except the ones that are bad, and probably not too much as well). I know dancing is fun (there is no too much for dancing).
What I’m trying to say is that for my run this morning, it was the first time in a long time I set an attainable goal for myself, made the attainable goal for myself, at a speed faster than I expected, and it made me feel like a million bucks, like a real super star just being on top of the world. And then I thought of grifters and science words, and then I said “pwah”.
I will run again tomorrow with the same goal, and with motivation to make that goal.
a quick edit: Just in case it is not clear, I am not in any way talking about people’s experience with mental illness, nor am I putting forth something that is anti-medicine.
Klingsor's First Winter 