Sufficient?
I had the thought of whether or not my life is sufficient enough for happiness or for me to be content. The context for this is on my walk I saw the green grass by my work and it was aesthetically pleasing and I thought about if I should feel happy or at peace from that. On one hand, I know that a lot of things in my life right now are great, and there isn’t much more I could ask for in those avenues. And also I do know to some extent depression is what is currently weighing me down mood wise, and that isn’t always due to some problem that needs to be fixed. Or at least not fully due to that. But the argument against that is complacency and the zone of comfortable discomfort. If I am content with my present circumstances, even if certain things aren’t where I would want them to be, would I just stay as is and not worry about changing anything? And would that cost me a lot more in the future? I do think in some ways depression and the artificial drops in the optimization function going on in my brain led to a lot of the blessings I have now. It’s pushed me to do things like exercise, focus on sleep, learn how to socialize, and overall improve the quality of my life. If I was completely fine always I wouldn’t have ever had a reason to improve in all of these different ways. And so should I continue to accept this artificial perturbations that drag me down, and at what point is it more harm than good? If I had a week to live it wouldn’t benefit me to be depressed but improve the trajectory of my future life. And so at what point does that make it less worth it. And even then is my model flawed to start, do I need to be miserable and anhedonic to facilitate these improvements or is this an excess or unhealthy pain? Selfishly so I don’t want to be depressed now. I want to reject the possibility that these individual moments of emptiness and just negative emotions being allowed through my brains filter actually have value. The same way something like not by default filling downtime with scrolling leads to tangible benefits. Even if I could believe it’s true, in the moment it feels pointless and it goes against my brains circuitry wiring.
I sometimes feel like my brain fades away from me and I’m not fully sure why that happens. I have to trust fully in my automatic processes because consciously I lose function. I want to say I worry about it but for some reason I feel like it’s something I either shouldn’t or cannot worry about. I fear a lot of things in life are like that, but maybe it’s just a coping mechanism I’ve learned from anxiety.