Sorry to interrupt JYB's bizarro haiku marathon.
David McRaney's book You Are Not So Smart promotes this view, that our minds build a version of ourselves that is much more positive than we really are. I hadn't thought about the idea that if we strip that away, we might become depressed. But it seems to be understood that people who are highly successful also tend to have an unreasonably high self-esteem and very high levels of self-confidence. The subconscious mind takes that and tries its damnedest to make it work, and in some ways it can become a self-fulfilling outlook. Perhaps the reverse is also true, although I don't know if this is accounting for clinical depression.
Quote:In 1988, psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown published an article making the somewhat disturbing claim that positive self-deception is a normal and beneficial part of most people’s everyday outlook. They suggested that average people hold cognitive biases in three key areas: a) viewing themselves in unrealistically positive terms; b) believing they have more control over their environment than they actually do; and c) holding views about the future that are more positive than the evidence can justify. The typical person, it seems, depends on these happy delusions for the self-esteem needed to function through a normal day...
David McRaney's book You Are Not So Smart promotes this view, that our minds build a version of ourselves that is much more positive than we really are. I hadn't thought about the idea that if we strip that away, we might become depressed. But it seems to be understood that people who are highly successful also tend to have an unreasonably high self-esteem and very high levels of self-confidence. The subconscious mind takes that and tries its damnedest to make it work, and in some ways it can become a self-fulfilling outlook. Perhaps the reverse is also true, although I don't know if this is accounting for clinical depression.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
