Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t
Every action has consequences, mostly unpredictable.
When people do the same thing over and over again, the perceptual filters of our nervous systems take in less data. This is because the perceptual filters of our nervous system respond to change.
We respond to edges and movement and change.
Have you ever looked at a rapidly moving stream or waterfall for a long time then moved your glance to the shore and seen the shore appear to shimmer and move?
Our perceptual system adjusts to the motion of the water so it becomes the static background from which change will be detected. When we look at the land, our system takes time to adjust. While it is adjusting, our brain shows us the movement filter against which the land is still.
Some forms of depression appear to respond well to any change of activity. Creating change creates aliveness.
Many people who grew up in chaotic households create chaos in order to feel comfortable. Their nervous system has attuned to the chaos and it feels like home.
Boredom is painful (and extra painful for many people with ADHD) and bodies respond to boredom with the same level of crisis response as to a cut.
Not changing feels dead.
Change, on the other hand, feels exciting or dangerous. Neurophysiologically, the difference between exciting and dangerous is the presence of cortisol. Psychologically, the difference is in whether the change is perceived as moving towards something pleasant or away from something unpleasant. Moving in love and attraction or in fear and avoidance.
The more intense the emotional reaction, the more adrenaline will be generated to fuel the movement. The more adrenaline, the more the resulting action is a repeat of what has been practiced, trained or conditioned beforehand. Too much adrenaline makes the body move faster than consciousness can interrupt.
When my daughter was a competitive athlete, we described this phenomenon saying, “Under pressure, teams devolve to their level of training.”
The most dangerous games were the ones where a technically weaker team had stronger competitive drive than a technically stronger team. The technically weaker team would play faster than they could control and would injury themselves or their teammates through that combination of adrenaline and lack of precision.
Fear tends to drive actions that optimize the local environment for individual comfort. Love tends to drive actions that optimize the wider environment for collective comfort. Selfish vs prosocial actions.
The drawback of selfish action is that it creates enemies. Not just because other people don’t like being left out of the optimization process. But because the process of focusing on protection reduces our body’s assessment of who is “one of us” enough to be part of the optimization process devolves to the level of our training. Who have we been trained to see as family?
The drawback of loving action is that we can overextend ourselves, sacrifice ourselves for the collective. What have we been trained to sacrifice ourselves for?
Oxytocin, the us/them hormone is interesting. Many of us have been trained to sacrifice ourselves for our family. In which case, when acting unconsciously, our default actions under pressure are to sacrifice for family and be willing to sacrifice others for our family.
When we are moving slowly enough to make conscious choices, we ask questions about costs and benefits of action? When we are moving slowly enough to make conscious choices, we ask which actions we might take are in alignment with our values.
When we act consciously, we become responsible for our actions and their results in a personally tender way.
When we act unconsciously, it is much easier to deny that we should be held responsible. Our ego tells us because it wasn’t intentional, it wasn’t really us, so we shouldn’t be held responsible.
The challenge, of course, is that although none of us choose all of our training, all of us choose some of our training.
It used to be that calling something an accident, apologizing, and cleaning up the mess you made was promulgated as a cultural norm in areas I lived.
Accidents happen.
To err is human. (Is this where the fantasy of AI running everything comes from: a desire to escape from responsibility for one’s actions and shame?)
We are not in control. Certainly not in conscious control. Our bodies move faster than our thoughts. Our bodies have been entrained into a culture we didn’t choose.
We will eventually die.
To live is to be vulnerable.
To feel alive is to live in conscious relationship to that vulnerability.
Leave a Reply