More Evidence That Pleasure Causes Pain

Yin leads to Yang, and vice versa:

Around 2012, something started going wrong in the lives of teens.

In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.

In a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science, my colleagues and I found that the increases in depression, suicide attempts and suicide appeared among teens from every background – more privileged and less privileged, across all races and ethnicities and in every region of the country. All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens I call “iGen” – those born after 1995 – is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors.

What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone.

It is amazing how we are not designed for the life of ease and pleasure we crave. Our brain is programmed to strive for it, but the programming almost assumes that it is not actually possible to attain it, and the brain never evolved the ability to cope with it if it was attained.

These people are attaining the pleasure, ease, and safety they are designed to seek, and once they attain it, it overwhelms the brain, burns out the circuitry, and leaves them in a chronic depression which in some cases is so overwhelming they actually commit suicide in one last desperate bid to shut off their amygdala permanently.

The only way to understand this effect it to view it in the context of addiction. Addiction to illegal drugs, which also creates the same unnatural level of neurochemical pleasure, is the only phenomenon where you can see a brain attain this level of pleasure. The only difference now is technology’s advance is causing us to produce a similar cognitive level of pleasure as the drugs used to produce.

The question this raises in my mind is, could this be a common problem which all technologically advanced species will encounter in this universe? Nature programs organisms to strive to eliminate the pain that is endemic in nature, but the technological mastery of the world allows them to fulfill that objective entirely, removing the actual ability to strive toward any goal, and that messes up the brain’s ability to continue to operate. Have other species in other solar systems reached this level of technological sophistication where they can create this ultra-high level of pleasure constantly, causing a programming failure of the brain? Did evolution then act on them to alter the brain’s programming to cope with pleasure and ease more effectively, and surmount the Darwinian pressure this creates? If so, how does that change their psychology?

Could the gray soul-less bugman, cruising to other solar systems to rectally probe individuals for reasons known only to themselves, be some kind of final incarnation of sentient being, adapted to the presence of ever-present pleasure by not feeling it themselves?

If so, lets hope the Apocalypse brings the pain, and soon.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because we need a little craziness to keep us sane