Selfish decisionmaking

Haemin and I met up last night, and she started talking about how she felt that people should be able to answer questions about their motivations. One of the simpler examples she used was deciding whether or not you want a family (a question she’d put to a roommate).

It really bothered her that the reasons she heard all sounded selfish, even if you had to deconstruct the motive a bit before the selfishness revealed itself. So I’ve been thinking about it.

But all I can come up with is that these kinds of decisions are inherently selfish, it’s just that some are win-win, and others are win-lose. It’s especially stark when you consider the decision to have kids, because the hypothetical kid is not there to represent their own interests. Even if you adopt a child, there’s still an element of your own desire to raise a child, and making a choice to satisfy a desire, no matter how beneficial it may be to another person or even to a cause, is selfish because that desire belongs to you. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. If someone tries to be unselfish and choose something she doesn’t want, for example choosing to raise a kid when she has no desire to do so, it’s not just going to be a sacrifice on her part but it’s also going to hurt the unwanted kid. Kids still need to be wanted. They need to be part of the parent’s selfishness at some level.

Parents can tell their kids that they sacrificed so much for their kids, and it may be true, but it’s also true that the kids didn’t ask to be born into the family. I mean, this doesn’t mean that the parent should serve the child and can’t ask anything of the child. The kid should still appreciate whatever their parents sacrificed for them because appreciation at a certain level is probably good for the kid’s character. I’m just saying that if we’re being honest, the ultimate choice was the parent’s.

Just to cover my bases, I want to note that even if the decision is selfish at a deeper level, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter how many levels the selfishness is at. If the parent thinks they can just demand that their child fit into whatever box they ask them to, that’s obviously a terrible thing. From when the child reaches the age where he or she has a mind of his or her own to when the child becomes an adult, the child’s life is a dialogue between two egos. There needs to be negotiation, and the intention of negotiation has to be nurturing a mutual trust between parent and child.

Anyway. I guess you can’t totally escape selfishness but you can try for win-win outcomes as much as possible.

I know theoretically a Christian should be able to love selflessly with Christ’s love but I don’t think that my conclusion necessarily contradicts this. People inevitably hurt each other and commit sins. Because of Christ’s love, the new reality is that it is arrogance against God to say that anyone is unlovable or any sin unforgivable. If we tried to be completely selfless, though, we might say that because we don’t deserve grace and redemption, we should refuse it and suffer the consequences. That’s not the point. So at the right level, selfishness is inevitable and we should just accept it.

Mental Health Today

You all know someone who’s struggled with thoughts of suicide. If you think you don’t, they just didn’t tell you. Or maybe you are the someone. Just something to consider.

A few tips if you want them:

• Don’t assume you understand the problem.
  • There’s no point in comparing the validity of people’s struggles. When you talk to somebody who is struggling, before you say the wrong thing, remember that a dead body is a dead body, no matter how trivial their reasons were.
    • Know that people are not rational beings, no matter how good they are at logic. You cannot reason someone out of depression. Or anxiety, etc.
• Do not give advice, do not say anything that remotely resembles telling someone what to do.
  • If they do ask for advice, don’t go outside the scope of your knowledge.
    “I don’t think you should kill yourself”: within scope.
    “Just stop thinking so much about _”: not within scope.
• Isolation is a huge factor in mental health. Everybody needs somebody who accepts their darkness. Acceptance is different from pretending that the darkness isn’t dark, which is as bad as rejection. It means protecting the trust they expressed when they chose to reveal it.
  • For example, if someone tells you that they feel like their existence is a curse to everyone around them, hear them out. Optional: ask probing questions to keep them talking.
  • Expect them to be thinking, “I shouldn’t even be telling you this.” They may be afraid of what your reaction will be, or of their own feelings of guilt over ‘burdening’ you with their feelings. There is no surefire way to them feel safe and comfortable talking to you but a reasonable goal would be convincing them that you want them to keep the lines of communication open.
• People who support others also need support themselves, even mental health professionals. You don’t have to go spilling secrets but if you break yourself trying to carry other people’s burdens, you can’t be a pillar of support any more.
• Finally and importantly, always suggest talking to a professional. You can’t make an adult seek therapy but there is liability involved if you don’t act responsibly.
  • There’s a good chance that their answer is gonna be no, so it’s important to start working on the trust part before you make this suggestion. You don’t want them to feel like you’re dropping hints to stop talking to you. You’re bringing it up because you’re afraid you can’t help as much as a professional can, not because you don’t want to participate.
  • A lot of people will just tack on hotline numbers to these kinds of posts. They’re not hard to find, your phone can Google them in half a second, so I won’t. I also have a little bit of a reservation about telling people to call. I haven’t heard anything about psych wards worse than being understaffed or unprofessional in demeanor from anyone I know in real life that has visited or been placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold, but there have also been horror stories in hospitals elsewhere (link, please note that I don’t think that the Tumblr user who wrote that post necessarily came to a completely accurate conclusion but they did include a lot of links that I would suggest reviewing for consideration).

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On a somewhat unrelated note, you’ve probably also known at some point a person who has shared at least at some point the mindset of one of those mass shooters. I’m speaking as someone who knows what it’s like to be inside the head of someone who is observably violently angry and who got called into the counseling office at school right after the Virginia Tech shooting. Everyone has anger but some of us have rage on a different level.

Personally, my gut says that it’s more of a sociological problem than a psychological one, and that even though each individual shooter has some mental health problem, one-on-one intervention is not going to be effective against the epidemic. We need to figure out what’s really fueling the collective rage. Most of these guys think, for example, that it’s women that they’re mad at, and that killing people will teach women to put out for “involuntary celibates” and that will appease them. That can’t be true because I know that’s that what I was angry about. I know the rage was there first. I believe that the rationale took form after the fact and they just latched onto it because it sounded plausible, like a retcon, the body’s way of satisfying a cognitive need to excuse or rationalize an irrational impulse for destruction. I don’t know what the true ultimate cause is, but it’s obviously not that simple. And treating it is not going to be as simple as just trying to teach schoolteachers and kids to look out for the overlooked, although that will help save a number of lives.

We can keep guns out of violent hands (like the Swiss do, ironically), but without a long, hard look at what’s wrong, the hate will continue to breed, and they’re gonna find other ways to be violent. Unfortunately, the risk factor may turn out to be something that we are powerless to undo, whether it’s poverty, or widespread inadvertent exposure to synthetic hormones, or something else.