Bruce Schneier, the well-known security expert (warning: that’s an extremely tongue-in-cheek encryption-geekery fan-site), has a new essay on his (real) site today, and it touches on a subject that I’ve talked about before: how at some point in the near future, technology will make it possible for single individuals or small groups to cause destruction on a massive scale.
As I said in that article, the only way you’ll be able to protect yourself at that point is by demanding that your government enforce a minimum level of mental health on its citizens… something that will produce a society that we would recognize, but would hardly believe possible today.
For those who have followed my own journey toward mental health with interest (I know there are at least a handful of you 😉 ), here’s an update.
My discovery of false beliefs has slowed to a trickle. In the last couple months I’ve only found two. One was related to self-esteem, and may well have been the original root of all my self-esteem issues. It was something so utterly ridiculous that I’d be embarrassed to describe it, and odd enough that I doubt anyone else would have it.
The other had nothing to do with self-esteem, but was making it difficult to do things that I wanted and needed to if they were at all repetitions of something I’d already done — and when you think about it, once you reach your twenty-fifth or thirtieth birthday (occasions I’ve long since passed), just about everything is repetitious in some way. I’m not certain that I’ve dealt with that one fully yet; I can’t trace it to specific memories like most of the others, I only know what must have happened, based on what I know about my parents and how I reacted to such things. We’ll see over the next few weeks whether that worked, there may be more to do on it.
Other than that, everything seems stable. I’m still far happier than I was before I started… not euphoric, but a deep happiness that persists regardless of my surface emotions. Nothing seems to keep me down for more than a day now (far better than a six-month major depressive episode, a black hole that I was sucked into on a regular basis for most of my first thirty years of life). I’ve even stopped taking antidepressants, which were the only things that kept me going before learning about false beliefs and how to eliminate them.
I’m able to do things that I would never have considered before. I’m still socially awkward, but I’m no longer anxious about it, and I’m sure I’ll be able to improve it when I get around to devoting some time to the problem.
Life still isn’t a bowl of cherries, but it’s improving rapidly. 🙂