Hello Philosophy Society!

Discussion 1: Social Growth

Today’s discussion started with how to prune our social circle so that we only allow certain people in our lives that are good for us. It is important to develop the ability and capacity to be critical of our social relationships and not allow certain factors like how long we have known someone or their relationship status, being a family member, to allow negative behaviour or influence towards us. This can be challenging because there is an expectation that we are to have a long lasting relationship with all family members which can lead to stifling our growth if those individuals cannot be supportive. This does not mean that we are to completely cut people off arbitrarily but develop boundaries with them so that we are not harmed or cause harm.

Developing boundaries comes down to first knowing how others affect and influence us in our lives. Self-awareness in this regard is essential for us to be able to create a set of rules for others or ourselves so we feel good about how people relate to us. If someone does not have control, they have different values or a lack of regard for our wellbeing, then we may need to take space from them by limiting our contact. Most people will bring some percentage of positivity to us but it is important to be accurate in the frequency and degree of negativity they bring as well.

If there is a 5% chance a phone call with someone can negatively affect you to the point where your mental health is depreciated for several days, that means 1 in every 20 phone calls you will be out of commission. This is a very high frequency of your life that you are allowing another person’s presence to affect you in a negative way. Here is where articulating boundaries, ‘we cannot talk on the phone anymore’, is important.

It is important to give people the opportunity to learn from their behaviour but also you to determine if you are being triggered unrealistically. Sometimes we have a sensitivity to certain people or kinds of behaviors in general. It may not be that the intentions or the behaviour of another is necessarily bad, but that we have perceived it incorrectly. This is where discussion, realistic feedback and understanding the cognitive distortions is relevant to make sure that we are perceiving things accurately.

Cultivating our social group is about first being balanced in ourselves then attracting people in our lives that resonate with the balanced version of ourselves. It is an ongoing process of meeting new people who resonate with us so that we can have the optimal social life that promotes our growth and meets our needs.

Discussion 2: Workplace Relational Ethics

The relationship between employer and employee goes beyond the context of the workplace itself. It is important to not compromise the integrity of our relationship with people we work with irrelevant of the social hierarchy or structure. Lying to employees about the cause of their termination, for example, then calling them back to work shows professional misconduct. Learn to communicate the truth so that if you have to call an employee back they do not feel mistreated and misdirected by you.

You have a professional obligation in your position of power as the supervisor or employer to respect the autonomy of your employees. If you employees, even if you have to lay them off or fire them, know that you are being honest and doing your job in a decision that may be against their interest, they can still respect you. If there is a situation where you may need to call upon someone who is dismissed, their coming back is more probable if the dismissal was based on trust.

If employees feel that they are being used as a means to an end, this can cause a serious loss of motivation to fully commit to the company mandate and organizational goals. Using people in this way, Kant’s categorical imperative, will only hurt that individual, the company’s overall cohesion and productivity, and how people respect and see you as a leader. The autonomy and dignity of all persons involved in any group irrelevant of the position of the person within the hierarchy will create succinct functionality based on respecting our individual humanity.

Discussion 3: Parenting Trust

As parents, we cannot force our children to trust us. Trust with all people is built based on how we treat each other with values of respect, honesty, regard for wellbeing, safety, comfortability, etc. Our close relationships, like parents and children, are even more contingent on how we treat each other to produce an effect of our disposition or feelings about each other. We are necessarily more sensitive to our early childhood caregivers because we have associated nurturing experiences from them. If these relationships are tainted with negative relations as adults, it can reduce our trust for each other.

We will feel a certain way about each other depending on how we treat each other. It is important for our children to feel comfortable with us, that we will not unfairly judge them when they disclose information to us, for them to trust us in providing vulnerable information like we were fired from a job. The sense of comfort is a priority in the establishment of trust. The psychologist Carl Rogers discussed the notion of unconditional positive regard in the sense that we always respond to what a person says with positive regard. This is a skill that we can develop in our interactions with all other people, most importantly our children.

Discussion 4: Flaws of Narcissism

Narcissism is an issue for people because it prevents us from accepting all forms of feedback. The individual perceives any form of criticism as an attack on their character and will respond by redirecting that criticism illegitimately through aggression and a social punishment to prevent the person from being criticized in the future to avoid the aggression, reframing the conversation so that the criticism is seen from an incoherent perspective but removes the narcissist from the feedback, and dismissing the criticism.

The narcissist has a very fragile sense of self and self esteem and has learned illegitimate ways to respond to feedback and criticism from others. This ultimately harms the narcissist because they lose access to the perspective of others to help them in their own growth. It is important to practice new ways of responding to criticism and identifying the emotions that are brought up when this social context occurs. Hopefully, through practice and not escaping the situation, can a sound minded person help the narcissist navigate the poor tactics they have learned to deal with feedback.

Discussion 5: Self-Interest vs Selfishness

Being self-interested is a different thing than being selfish. Self-interest is making decisions and taking actions that used to promote survival and one’s growth. Selfishness, in contrast, is when we make decisions or actions that take away from the survival or growth of others. Selfishness is especially true when we do not have to do so. Some circumstances, zero sum contexts where there must be a winner or loser, may not be selfish. Hoarding resources or compromising another person in the workplace to advance would be a case of selfishness because alternatives exist where we can grow from but we choose to place other’s well being at risk for our own ends. This again would be an example of using others as a means to an end as described earlier.

Philosophy Academy: Feeling Good Chapter 5: Do-Nothingism: How to beat it

Today we began chapter 5 of Feeling Good which is about procrastination; pages 81 - 110. Burns begins the chapter by identifying that not only do we think we act. The problem when we feel depressed is that it can remove our feeling of wanting to do things as well. Changing how we think affects how we feel but also changing how we act will substantially affect how we feel. One of the worst parts of depression is how it reduces our motivation which can create self-hatred and insolation. The things we love the most can be ruined because of the state of being depressed. (81)

Being isolated for anyone, even animals who are confined in cages, would cause depression. Having the attitude of self-help seems to make the biggest difference and try to help themselves make the most improvement. When depressed, people can refuse to make any effort to try and help themselves. The cause of this paralysis is their attitude of procrastination and self-defeating behaviour that is contrary to one’s self-interest. (82-4)

Believing that being lazy is in your nature, a desire to hurt oneself or suffer through depression, frustrating others with one’s depression, or some kind of benefit from doing nothing are all flawed ways of thinking about the problem. First, seeing oneself as lazy is a trait model of one’s personality but is clearly an example of the distortion labeling. (84) The second belief has the assumption that the person likes to suffer but this is very much so in contrast to a health model of human nature. The third belief is a passive aggressive attitude or a sense of internalized anger but depressed people rarely have anger towards themselves or others but most often are in fear of displeasing others. Lastly, there is some attention that people get from others when they are suffering but people who are depressed usually disqualify these forms of attention and hence depression has no real reward. (85-6)

Ultimately, distorted thinking is the cause of a lack of motivation. On page 87, Burns offers a diagram of the lethargy cycle where self-defeating thoughts lead to either self-defeating emotions or actions that leads to the negative consequences of the cycle of being isolated, negative beliefs about oneself and feelings of inadequacy. (87) Burns states,

If we change our behaviour it will also have an effect on our thinking. When you behave even though you may not feel like it, the result of acting that way will give you evidence against the negative thoughts you have. Ultimately Burns wants us to transform a lethargy cycle into a productivity cycle. (88)

Burns then identifies 13 different types of mindsets with procrastination and do-nothingism. (88-93)

1. Hopelessness: Being stuck in the present with a negative state can make it seem like all states will be just as negative, making us forget when we were happy and believing that we will never be happy. (88)

2. Helplessness: Believing that how we feel is caused by things that are out of our control like other people, our biology, or bad luck. (88)

3. Overwhelming Yourself: Sometimes we can magnify tasks so that they are impossible to complete. Instead of breaking tasks down into smaller steps, we believe it must be done all at once. This overwhelmingness can lead us to distract ourselves from how we feel but end up not attempting the task at all. (89)

4. Jumping to Conclusions: People can make negative assumptions about the process or outcome of a task that demotivates them from doing it at all in the first place. (89)

5. Self-Labeling: The more one puts things off the more one can see themselves in a negative way. Our self-efficacy is reduced more and more as we stop doing things we lose our ability to believe that we can. (89-90)

6. Undervaluing the Rewards: Not only does the task seem difficult but the outcome or reward loses its desirability. We don’t feel like putting effort into a task from disqualifying the positive in the reward. This can create a state of anhedonia where we diminish our ability to be satisfied or pleased. Disqualifying the rewards can cause us to not even try. (90)

7. Perfectionism: Developing inappropriate goals or unrealistic standards can make things so impossible that we don’t even try. (90)

8. Fear of Failure: Paralysis can be created if we believe that we will fail no matter what we will do and do nothing at all. The distortion, overgeneralization, can prevent us from wanting to try a task if we believe we will fail at all tasks. Having a product vs a process oriented mindset can prevent someone from wanting to do things. Focusing on the outcome and not the effort we put into things can make it seem like any effort is meaningless unless certain outcomes are reached. We cannot control the outcome necessarily but we can control our contribution to the process. (90-1)

9. Fear of Success: A lack of confidence will reduce a person’s belief in their success and unfairly judge oneself based on the expectations of others perceptions. The fear of others' perceptions of us can reduce our motivation to do things. If we do not believe we can amount to the expectations of others we can lose our motivation to even try. This can also reduce our commitment or involvement in cooperating with others. (91-2)

10. Fear of Disapproval or Criticism: If we believe that others will disapprove of our decisions and not accept our accomplishments that can demotivated us. We can aim low and not challenge ourselves because of the value we place on the approval or fear of criticism from others. (92)

11. Coercion and Resentment: To be motivated, some will attempt to force themselves with ‘should’ or ‘I have to’ beliefs. This can create intense internal or external pressure in performance that can take away any motivation to even try. A sense of obligation, burden, resentment and guilt become associated with tasks, making them even more difficult. (92)

12. Low Frustration Tolerance: Obstacles can create panic when we attempt to solve our problems from a sense of entitlement that things are supposed to be the way we expect them to be or how we want. The comparison of reality to the ideal version in our minds makes us condemn reality. The ‘should’ attitude on reality, ‘it shouldn’t be this way,’ creates unnecessary frustration and increases the feeling of giving up. (92-3)

13. Guilt and Shame: If we feel like a bad person or that we disappoint others, it can lead us to being unmotivated in life. It is important not to engage in the personalization distortion, where we are unfairly taking responsibility for things outside of our control. (93)

All of these mindsets show how the irrational, distorted way of thinking is creating the sense of being demotivated. Any meaningful activity is worth doing to create a better mood. If we do nothing, we can become flooded with negative thoughts. (94) This is a lifestyle where we have to learn to switch towards taking action that is meaningful even if we don’t feel it. At the very least, doing something meaningful will distract us from the negative thinking pattern and internal dialogue. We will develop a sense of mastery that, through our experience, will disprove these thoughts. (94)

Burns now goes through 13 different Self-Activation Techniques to motivate us out of procrastination. (94-125)

1. The Daily Activity Schedule: On page 95, Burns gives a chart where we compare our prospective to retrospective activities. We plan out what we would like to do during the day and after completion, we determine if it was pleasurable and if we achieved a sense of mastery from it. Just making a plan for the day can give us the foresight into our near future to help guide us to accomplishment. The activities we feel accomplishment are designed with an M for mastery whereas P is for those that make us feel good via pleasure. We can then rate our projected mastery or pleasure for different tasks then rate them after completion to see how accurate our predictions of our activities really are.

Doing the activity schedule will reduce any tendency to obsess over what value an activity has and counterproductive ambivalence on whether we will do it or not. Doing part of our plan is better than nothing and will give us some sense of accomplishment. It is important to balance out enjoyable and work-related activities. The more we stick to our schedule, the more we will feel motivated to do things and disprove any negative beliefs that we can’t. We will develop a sense of awareness of how we spend our time and give us a greater sense of self-control. We will learn which activities give more mastery of pleasure after recording them and can plan days in the future that are more balanced.

Just being alone and doing nothing can cause depression in anyone. Even if we do not have plans with others, we can make plans for ourselves and feel good about life. If we are alone, that in itself is a great reason to schedule things. As we show self-love by caring about ourselves through doing constructive activities, other people will notice and be more attracted to us. Writing down how each activity makes us feel and scheduling a new one for the next day will increase our sense of self-respect and reliance. (94-8)

2. The Anti-Procrastination Sheet: On page 99, Burns shows a chart that can train us to test our negative predictions about certain activities. We may not do something because it is perceived as too difficult or having no reward. It is important to test these beliefs by breaking tasks down into 15 minute steps and predicting the difficulty of each step. Once completed, we record the actual difficulty or satisfaction of each step. Our productivity and self-confidence can increase simply by empirically testing our beliefs about how satisfying and difficult each step of our tasks are. (98-100)

3. Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts: On pages 101-103, Burns gives a chart where we identify the thoughts that are associated with some task we are putting off and write a rational response to those negative thoughts. Once we diffuse the negative thoughts, we immediately remove that from preventing us from engaging with the task. If we wait around to feel the desire, interest or energy to do something, we may never do things that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable. Learning to act without feeling is important in our ability to do what is best for us. Writing down our thoughts is very effective, in contrast to simply thinking about them when we are making an effort to create motivating and rational replacements to negative thinking. (100-104)

4. The Pleasure Predicting Sheet: On page 105, Burns has a chart where we test out negative beliefs about doing activities when we are alone. If we assume we are not productive, we can write down activities when we are alone and with others then record or predict actual satisfaction from those activities. We can quickly learn that we have equal greater enjoyment in doing things by ourselves than with others. It is important to be mindful of self-fulfilling prophecies in leading us to create negative moods by believing that we will be unhappy and behaving in ways that create unhappy situations.

It is important to remember that other’s thoughts have no effect on our moods. We cannot read the minds of others. Someone can smile, think harmful thoughts and we would not even know what those thoughts were. We may have some indication of what someone is thinking from nonverbal behaviour but it is important to always communicate and check with people to understand what they are thinking. Ultimately, it is only our thoughts that affect us. It is our thought about what another is thinking that is affecting us, not the actual thought of the other person. Burns states,

Always respond to automatic thoughts with critical thinking to develop a rational response. (104 - 107)

5. How to Get off Your “Butt” - The But Rebuttal: On page 108, Burns gives a chart where we respond to excuses we make that prevent us from doing things. As we make excuses to the task we can create more excuses to our response. All excuses can be responded to by objecting to them until we have none left. This way, no matter what automatically comes into our minds, we can object to those ways of thinking until we do the task. (107 -109)

6. Learn to Endorse Yourself: On page 110, Burns provides a chart where we compare our self-downing statements to self-endorsing ones. This chart is used when we tell ourselves that our efforts don’t count. We feel defeated to do anything before we even begin. We can identify the self-downing statement and replace it with an objective self-endorsing one. It is important to keep practicing this transfer of statements in our minds until it becomes automatically endorsing.

It is most important that we do not neglect ourselves. Only we can allot others downing to affect us. Irrelevant of other people’s frustrations, combating our own self-downing statements and not allowing their negative attitudes to become ours is up to us. We can create a daily mental list of what we did and give credit for each of those accomplishments.

https://www.achillesjustice.com/post/feeling-good

Burns, David. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. Harper Publishing. New York, 1999.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Mass Market Paperback – Dec 30 2008

Organizational Reflection: PS Progress

Today was the largest turnout for the Toronto based group so far! It takes time to begin any volunteer based group but certain factors will promote it’s success. Shared values, the value of wellbeing, a healthy mind, and working together to develop the skills correlated with being mentally healthy in a safe environment on the foundation of the principle of philosophy are all relevant to the Philosophy Societies growth.

The Philosophy Society will continue to grow as members learn and apply the new skills to their lives. They will be able to show through demonstration how the group is increasing their well being and the content that is retained is directly relevant to their daily lives.

Wisdom is not only making sense of academic conceptual problems of the human condition. Wisdom is about how we live and our ability to create a life for ourselves and in harmony with others that fits our identity best in a realistic and balanced way. Being human is not easy but if we can work together on the limitations of our condition, that we have certain instincts that may not be adaptive to our current social situations or environments, the complexity of the workplace and the economy, how to find our place within our families and friends, we can live better lives.

Working together in a cooperative way towards shared goals makes us stronger. These goals are ones that we can critically evaluate and determine the appropriateness of our pursuits of them. Everything in the Philosophy Society is something that is up to discuss and apply our critical thinking skills towards. Our group is something that teaches each individual how to respond to social biases like conformity to perceived authority or logical fallacies like ad populum, what the majority thinks is true is not necessarily true.

We want to create a place where the love of wisdom is a way of life. If we can learn to not only understand what conceptual content would be part of that way of life, but also the psychological needs any human would have to develop living that way of life, we will all benefit. The ultimate goal is to become so skilled in our understanding and practice, that people who are suffering from serious mental health issues can participate in our group and be helped with those conditions. I believe this is within reach and I am committed to teaching the skills necessary to bring this result.

First, all the people who are involved in the Philosophy Society are the priority. We all have goals and problems we are dealing with. Let us figure all of these issues out so that when someone who is in need comes along, we can speak from experience. We will be able to communicate how we understand the place of philosophical principles or thinkers in our journey of wellbeing. We can discuss how we applied certain habits, like mindfulness, meditation, exercise or a healthy diet, to our lives and the difference it made for us.

Together is all we ever have. Being alone and hopeless is not an outcome I am willing to accept. I never want anyone to feel alone and hopeless. So I push myself to create an organization where that will never be the case.

Some mental health conditions, actions or behaviours we would not accept. There is a reason society developed the criminal justice system. Whether it is effective and ethical is another discussion. If we can find balance within the self, we can proactively prevent issues because we attended to the seeds of those problems. Behaviours do not come from nowhere. They are developed like a plant growing. If there are some behaviours or states of being we do not like, there is a way to understand the nature and trajectory of the development of this behavioural phenomena. The criminal justice system is retroactive: it condemns things that have already occurred. The Philosophy Society, in this context, is proactive: for example, we can give people a place to grow and learn healthy habits before problems occur.

The Philosophy Society is also retroactive in the sense that if you already have a mental health issue, the content and skill development will help you recover from that. Whatever knowledge or skills that will help mental health issues is something that we can learn. The Philosophy Society accepts the social responsibility to learn the skills that will not only help ourselves but help others and by extension society.

Academic Reflection: Decriminalizing Drugs

Here is an essay and later chapter in the book on the decriminalization of drugs.

https://www.achillesjustice.com/post/drugs

Reflection: Cycles of Growth

Every time we make a decision and invest in a course of action, it changes the trajectory of our growth in life. It is only until we complete the goal where we can look back and gain benefit from all the time that was invested into the progress necessary to achieve it. It can be very difficult during tasks that take a long time to complete. We can become used to how it feels and forget what it was like before we decided to embark on this path.

Growth necessitates that we make decisions and there is usually greater reward with longer term commitments like education and certain jobs. Once we complete our education we are now in a different psychological position than before the task. The way we make our decision from this new position is inherently different for now we have a new factor, our degree, the knowledge gained, and the experiences we learned from, that all accumulate into a new perspective and factors in our present decision making process.

For us to grow is to not only make decisions that are in our interest but know how to navigate the path that that decision places us on. We will be faced with challenges that are not relevant to the decision path but we need to make sure that we do not compromise the results of the decision outcome due to these other factors. This will bring us success in life and help our development as individuals.

As we are in the path of the decision completion, when we think about the goal, due to it being incomplete, it can only give anxiety. Once it is complete, and we think about it, it has not shifted from an unknown factor to a known factor which can produce satisfaction. It will take time for our brain to adjust in the processing of the completion of the task so that it is integrated into our identity. I am now not ‘doing the assignment’ but ‘I did that assignment.’ In the process of doing so, many factors are unknown. Once something is complete, it becomes concrete, a history. This past information has a different function than an ongoing task in ‘que.’ This relationship to tasks in que and completed tasks is part of our psychological development and growth.

Knowing what decisions to make, how to navigate ourselves in the completion process and the contrast between in progress to complete is important. Our mental capacity is depreciated when we have tasks in process compared to when we have completed tasks. Part of the reason for this is the informational content, one is open ended, 'maybe i wont complete the task or fall short of my desired outcome,’ whereas the other is set, ‘This is what the final product is!.’ Our minds can focus on the set identification of the completed task whereas when it is still in process, what the thing is is still ambiguous to a large extent.

The mental efficiency of our minds can only have so many in process tasks at once. It is important to complete tasks and ‘stand upon the summit of your success’ to determine what tasks to take on next. If you make decisions while too many tasks are still in queue or in process, you will be spread too thin among many things that are not complete. Focus and complete as many tasks as you can to retain cognitive effectiveness and have more efficiency overall.

Reflection 2: Empower vs Power

Two issues: The Iranian regime and protests against the mistreatment of women and the problem of the oligarchs and Putin attacking Ukraine. How can these kinds of issues be prevented in the future?

There is a contrast between power and empowerment. Power that is isolated in the control of few people who make decisions for many people will almost invariably lead to issues. If the smaller group that has power is being controlled by members that have ultimate control over the larger group fascism and tyrannical contexts can exist.

The problems of power can be prevented through empowerment: by giving all people who have capacity the skills and knowledge to be decision makers themselves. By teaching skills of emotion, values, critical thinking, sociability, and more, a social group can be created that will be able to overthrow the problems of power being abused by few over the many. The more people who have capacity that learn how to master these properties the less need for governance that can be abused.

Appeal to authority is not necessary when everyone with capacity has the power to be an authority themselves. You are the authority in the space and time you exist. Dominion over others is not necessary. Taking care of others who cannot care for themselves is. There is a way to develop a different kind of society whose members all have the training about their minds so that they as a collective group can govern themselves relative to the issues they are presented with.

PSM 2(34) - 30.11.22 - Social Growth, Workplace Ethics, Parenting Trust, Narcissistic Flaws, Self-Interest vs Selfishness, FG Ch5 - Procrastination, Decriminalize Drugs, PS Progress, Cycles of Growth, Empowerment

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