What's more, it is so developed that I can name it. I don't know the name of what society wants me to be. Domesticated citizen? Good boy? Effectless stranger?
I have a project in my head of outlining my "core beliefs": "Better living through chemistry", "All knowledge is accessible through language", "Brains over brawn", etc. The shadow part of me slips things in: "If God exists, God is evil", "Life is meaningless", "Humans are untrustworthy", etc.
If I could go to a doctor and point at some part of my brain, or at some chemical imbalance, it would be amazing. As it stands, I feel like each of our personal psychological maintenance entails us little individual people picking up boulders and moving them to other parts of the neurochemical pit. Sometimes we get help with big machines like lithium or whatever. It just feels like we're still in the dark ages of human neurochemistry, and we can't help piling on more confounding variables.
Anyways, I just wanted to share. I don't have any answers. Or at least, the moment's struggle with my shadow occludes them.
Depressive hedonism is powerful.. The death drive is like playing a tit-for-tat strategy against one’s own lebenswelt. I hope people don’t take me as being dismissive or insensitive or ignoring the contributions of biophysics to drug dependency etiology, but from a free will frame of analysis it resembles a kind of very dark and very negative discipline itself.
Imagine if it were just a thing that people could get help with as unshamefully as eg going to the dentist.