New Year Celebrations, The Pointlessness of Pessimism: How Negative Emotions Just Don't Add Up

This is my first blog post. Nothing too important because even though this way of thinking is an important and highly useful one, I explicitly explain it in posts such as 'Absurdism' and 'Nonverbal Communication'. It's one of the less important posts, but still an interesting read.

So here's a question that my brain came up with during New Year.

What does "Happy New Year" even mean? What's happy about the Earth completing another revolution around the sun? Is it because the human civilization survived for another year? Is it just an excuse to take a few days off and celebrate with your social group and not feel bad about it? Or does it mean something like I wish you have a happy new year, which is kind of like good morning, which I also don't exactly understand, because what difference does it make to your morning or year if a person says that they wish it turns out to be good for you? If I say bad morning, are you going to have a bad morning? Or is it because the person's morning is actually better due to the fact that someone made the effort to wish them a good morning, or wish them a happy new year, and make them feel noticed and valued in some way that fulfils some kind of visceral social need deeply embedded into human nature? Or is it just another outdated widespread social tradition with no definite cause or reason just passed down over generations without questioning? To be clear, I'm just curious. I see nothing wrong with being all pumped up about the Earth completing a revolution. And I've also been not only reciprocating whose who have wished me and adhering to social norms related to the New Year celebrations, but proactively sending out Happy New Year messages to every one of my contacts, because everyone does it, I really don't see any significant downside to it, and so I lose nothing by doing it just in case it has some significant symbolic cultural or psychological significance. The risks seem to be negligible; just the time spent sending a message. And the upsides are unclear and ambiguous, so it seems to be the rational thing to do. I hope that makes sense.

On the same note, while we're on this topic, I don't understand new year resolutions. Why do people wait for the Earth to complete a whole revolution around the sun to make decisions that they know would be beneficial for them? If it's a psychological barrier, how could the Earth's change in position cause any significant change in their mindset or attitude? Do you follow this widespread social custom? I also came across this theory that time is just a mental construct that appears to be flowing in real time but probably is just a continuous stream of memories we perceive a few milliseconds later. So one more possible explanation that occurred to me is that it could have the symbolic meaning of letting go of your past actions and move on by compartmentalizing that period of time into something in the distant past, even though as I mentioned it's a psychological construct (doesn't mean it's ineffective) and we can never be free of our past, that's the cycle of cause and effect we can never escape from and be independent of.

I'd like to point out an analogy between this and birthdays. Why do we wish someone happy birthday? After all, they are one year closer to death. Or actually forget death, because it is just nothingness and there is no reason to be afraid of it in my opinion, and lets focus on the fact that the person is one year closer to old age and all the suffering that old age brings with it. If anything, it's a reminder of your inevitable mortality and must make the person feel a sense of existential dread and act as a reminder that time is running out, unless they are fine with the idea of death which doesn't seem to be the present societal norm to me. Yes, reflecting on your mortality has it's benefits, because it can help you discover what you truly value, but I seriously doubt that is why people celebrate birthdays, if there is any reason at all behind it. I'm asking these questions because from my observations, I feel like people accept social customs and the traditional way of doing things too easily.

Now I'd also like to point out that in most cases that is the best decision to make when uncertain because it's the tried and tested method been handed down over generations, but if you try to dig deeper and understand why they do it the way they do, you often find that they are just following their social group or parents like overly acquiescent automatons with no understanding of what they are doing or logic behind their behaviour. Here I'd like to clarify that I see nothing wrong with it at all. Being someone who blindly follows the herd is a common thing, and that's the majority, and questioning tradition is not required in most cases unless you're exploring new territory or have a desire to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. It does help to question long established traditions so we can improve upon them and get new perspectives on how things should be done, but by no means am I suggesting that everyone should be like that. You do you, and if you are satisfied with who you are, there is nothing wrong with it, because you didn't get to choose your genes and neural makeup that determined your personality traits and interests, so you shall not be held accountable for it.

There's also the emotional aspect, just like religion. If you start scrutinizing each and every detail behind any belief, you would find that at least some of them are irrational and stem from your intuitions and emotions. But recent studies suggest that religion confers several benefits to the mental health of the followers of any religion; it enables them to genuinely believe that they are a part of something greater than themselves which helps them give meaning to their suffering, and provides them with a sense of community and belonging. This belief may crumble apart if they start analyzing each and every aspect of it, so in this case it's apt to say that ignorance is bliss. Maybe birthdays are something similar to that?

Here I'd like to digress a little from the main topic to discuss the subject of negative emotions. I recently came across an essay on Aeon titled 'The helpful delusion', which I found a very interesting perspective on the function our emotions serve investigated from an evolutionary perspective. The timing also happened to coincide with one of my introductory psychology classes where I learned about 'learned helplessness' and how it's a signal from your brain to stop doing something that you keep on doing despite repeated failures.

Both the essay and the concept of learned helplessness gave rise to some questions that I thought you'd be able to resolve for me or at least guide me towards the right path. The first question is- Could it be possible that negative emotions like anxiety and jealousy don't actually indicate that there exists some problem in our daily lives, but that they are the problems themselves; put another way, could it be that it's just because of these emotions that we are compelled to change our way of doing things, and we that we would've done just fine without them?

I understand that some of our instinctive visceral reactions and intuitions evolved to help us survive in an environment where the cost of not listening to your emotions was quite high, but in the modern world, I notice that the intensity of such negative emotions is too high and so they cause too much suffering which makes me doubt whether the benefits of these emotions really outweigh all the suffering that they cause. Would a person who doesn't go through such emotions over a long period of time really be at a risk proportionate to the suffering they need to deal with, when it's not even clear what the emotions are saying and whether they are really beneficial or just dysfunctional?

What's the line separating dysfunction and a healthy amount of emotions? When do we know that an emotion is pushing us towards changing our life situation, or just an unnecessary malfunctioning of our biology that needs to be cured? For instance, in learned helplessness, when do we know we should really stop trying to achieve our goals, or we should push ourselves despite repeated failures because circumstances change and oftentimes emotions lead to irrational decisions?

One last point I'd like to mention involves psychopaths and their ability to not feel any emotion. I usually wonder if overall their satisfaction with life is higher, because even though their lack of inhibitions leads to excessive risk-taking behaviour, they don't go through prolonged periods of suffering, and the only cost is an increased risk of death. Some would argue that death is better than suffering, and I also think we could learn something about the mechanisms of emotions from them.

Here's another question related to the set of questions I have described above. This question also involves the intersection of Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology and Education.

Suppose that by using the scientific method gain a very clear understanding of everything there is to know about the world; I am able to use my scientific lens to examine every event objectively in terms of the processes that led to it, and have complete knowledge of the complete chain of cause and effect. How would this change my perception of the world, and would it differ at all on how I view the events from those of others who are not trained in such a way? Take the example of the new year celebrations I discussed above- would I feel less emotional affect or enthusiasm and intuitive gratification or sense of joy from the fact that the Earth just completed a revolution and we have arrived at a new stage according to how we have compartmentalized time and everyone around me seems to be so happy? Or would I just have the scientific and philosophical knowledge and understand it at a conscious level but feel the same joy as someone completely ignorant of any such thing would?

Suppose there's a physicist who's been learning and teaching Physics and Mathematics for such a long time, subjects that have been repeatedly shown to shape your thought processes in a way to be able to scrutinize each and every detail of any event in detail and from multiple perspectives, and attempt to mathematically capture that which has eluded humans for such a long time and use your creativity to make new discoveries. Would his training in physics and mathematics change his brain's way of thinking and perceiving the world in any significant way? If so, how? And how would it be different from before he started training in physics? As far as I know, physics attempts to study the fundamental nature of reality itself, to the extent that our current mathematical and computational tools allow us to study the universe as objectively as possible, and if I'm not mistaken, it forces you to think in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes, because humans by default have a simplistic way of thinking about everything that doesn't require much cognitive effort, but by the nature of your discipline you must have been required to break out of all human bias to the best of your abilities and try to comprehend the world in as accurate a way as it's possible. Would that affect him in his everyday life and how you view the world?

Or are the intuitions and the irrational part of my brain so deeply ingrained into my human nature that I would never be able to get completely rid of it? Do you think with adequate training in the right way anyone can learn to not just shape their thinking skills and conscious thought processes, but their very intuitions at a deeper level similar to those who seem to be naturally gifted at it from the start? And what about younger children, can they do it more easily than adults because of their neuroplasticity?

I'd like to know any comments you are interested in sharing.