The Source of Desperation — and the Well in the Desert

The Basis and Circle of Life

What I am offering in this essay is not really a scientific view or an empirically verifiable set of facts and arguments. I still want to invite you to consider the following hypotheses with as open of a mind as you can. I will focus on some core principles of life, going back to the moment in time when what I typically think of as inanimate matter began to harness energy for the purpose of building more and more complex forms. In my understanding, these principles are not particularly amenable to change. If this is correct, it suggests that it is detrimental to believe that one can fully overcome the consequences that can be derived from applying these principles.

I cannot prove this, but I have personally found it incredibly useful and, in fact, liberating to think of the process we call life as being both dependent on and utterly opposed to one and the same condition: chaos. With this term I mean an ever increasing disorder of things, at least insofar as we can observe and categorize the universe into some ordered and disordered state of affairs. In physics and information science, this concept is also called entropy. The upshot is that — as what we think of as time passes — any coherence and order that matter exhibits will dissipate or disappear.

It is important for me to add that in the physical world, there seem to be at least some processes that generate order on some level of observation while — in my naive reading of things — they consume order on another level. One such process would be how gravity in the sun of our solar system leads to the consumption of hydrogen into heavier elements, in exchange for radiation that molecules on our planet have learned to capture and store for later use by yet other molecules and more complex assemblages of matter.

And I appreciate that this may sound esoteric or like some sort of magic trick… My intuitive understanding is that the origin of life is not an accident, but the quite logically occurring implementation of a fundamental principle underlying all of physical reality. Whenever energy is converted from one form into another, some amount of it is lost due to inefficiencies. The principle I am describing says something like this: each time such an inefficiency exists, a pattern of the universe will eventually emerge that harnesses as much of that lost energy for some further purpose. Or, in other words, nature seems to abhor the wasting of energy.

After some precursor molecules were able to capture energy coming from the sun, at some point life emerged as the logical consequence of nature applying this principle. As a peculiar property, every life form has a boundary, a membrane or skin, as part of its physical implementation. Whatever mechanistic processes are happening on the inside, this is going on in relative order compared to the messiness and unpredictability on the outside. And the only way to keep these processes going is by seeking and finding sources of energy. For almost all life forms this means consuming yet other life forms. This has accumulated over a billion years into a complex system of creatures, each of which is engaged in the process of transforming energy from an external source — other organisms — into some internally held form.

To the extent that life is able to find and consume nutrition in the form of these other organisms, it can thrive. And to the extent that the more complex forms no longer find other life to consume, those complex forms wither away. Such life is then consumed and recycled by less complex forms. That is, even then the work that went into harnessing energy is not lost, but simply transformed back to the beginning of the circle of life.

When life went from bacteria, fungi, and plants to animals, one critical component was added: the modeling of the chaotic, disordered outside through representations coded in neural firing patterns. And the way in which these patterns emerge needed to find a way to enhance the harnessing of energy. In other words, it was critically important for life to learn to differentiate between actions that lead to improving its energy supply and those actions that increase the risk of losing energy, and to predict those outcomes moment to moment.

While this is maybe incredibly woo-woo and speculative, I at least intuitively suspect that there is some sort of fundamental quality of experience associated with this implementation. Similar to someone trying to solve a mental puzzle, I imagine some initial frustration involved. When the problem of energy acquisition is solved, however, the experience shifts from frustration to joy. For humans, this might come with a sense of mastery and fulfillment of purpose. Conversely, whenever life fails to bring sufficient energy resources under its internal control, this is accompanied by experiences of insufficiency and desolation, which for humans comes with a sense of shame and self-criticism.

Since life has solved more and more complex problems of harnessing and conserving energy, I genuinely believe that all complex forms of life are capable of the experience of joy. For most mammals, this seems apparent in their behavioral manifestations during play, and whenever an animal takes a moment of rest to enjoy the reflection of some successful past decision. Similarly, I believe that all complex forms of life have the capacity for pain as well as for feelings reflecting a state of insufficient resources or lacking the capacity to successfully engage reality. I will pick this theme up in an essay on how feedback is a critical component in wellbeing.

The Experience of Pressure

For humans, there seems to exist some variability when it comes to both the sort of pressures experienced as unpleasant by different people, as well as some kind of overall threshold at which such pressure is considered too much to ignore or accept. My understanding of the psychological literature is that this is captured in variables such as “Trait Neuroticism” in the Big-Five personality inventory. The idea is that for some people even relatively minor deviations from expected conditions — say some unexpected and potentially startling noise — can be felt as quite unpleasant and irritating.

Despite being a fundamental aspect of life, I suspect that it is not so much the existence of the feeling of pressure per se that creates the possibly intractable appearing problems we observe in our lives. Instead, I believe it is a lack of understanding and integration of this pressure experience into our conscious perception of the world that produces a sensation of injustice and unfairness. And the reason for this lack is primarily the human tendency of wanting to look away from pain, to eliminate it, or to control it in some other way. The increase in humans’ ability to control many aspects of our lives has led to a paradoxical condition of control addiction: the more we possess the power to regulate our lives, the more we fear whatever little potential for disorder remains as highly stressful.

To illustrate this with a brief example, imagine going to a store, and a few moments after entering, you are confronted by a manager, accusing you of stealing some valuable item. You are led into a back room, and the manager demands to search a bag you are carrying. That in itself is probably already a situation in which you might experience some pressure. Refusing to have your bag searched would require some amount of pushing back to assert what you might consider your right to privacy — where is the evidence that you stole something anyway? You decide to allow the search to happen, and the manager then finds in your bag the valuable item. You of course know that it certainly was not you who placed it into the bag. And yet you are now caught in a situation where whatever happens next seems to be a potentially quite threatening prospect.

For humans that lived a few thousand years ago, none of this would remotely make sense. And being faced with another human being wildly gesticulating and making incomprehensible accusations would have been frustrating, but likely not very fear inducing. Back then, the real dangers lurked in encounters with a harsh nature, in which wild animals regularly threatened to kill unsuspecting humans. Or maybe someone might kill a fellow human for personal gail. None of this is remotely likely in a grocery store, and yet a person in that situation in the 21st century will likely feel fear.

Naturally, this example is contrived, and very few people will encounter it — although it is probably not too far from what quite some people suspect could happen if they do not pay incredible attention to what other people in their surroundings are doing. That is, over a lifetime of having had the experience of unfair accusations leveled at us, we can grow suspicious of the people we interact with, creating immense barriers between people. And for each human being, whatever turns out as the most significant source of experienced chaos and sudden disruption of predictability will be learned as a pattern of undesirable circumstances. Each time a stimulus matches that pattern, we experience stress over the thought of an uncontrollable outcome. In an unstable home, the conflicts parents engage in prior to a divorce can lead to children being even more afraid of healthy conflict.

The way I understand this process today is that what is missing is a genuine connection with the experience of pressure. If we can spend sufficient time appreciating how and why this experience comes about, and what the likely reasons are that we are being presented with that experience, we will get into the position of responding with vastly different alternatives, opening up choice and a freedom we do not feel we have in the absence of connecting with the pressure.

Pressure as the Foundation of Life

Before describing how I intuitively understand the transformation of the experience of pressure into something that feels more life affirming and positive in a later essay, I want to focus on the attributes related to the pressure itself. This may at first seem too abstract, irrelevant, or simply incorrect. My reason is primarily to offer this as a kind of orientation or thread for future posts. My hope is that by reading through this list, you will have at your disposal some landmarks or anchor points to which the narrative will later connect.

If you experience disagreement with any given statement, I would suggest that you simply skip over the aspect described for the moment. I appreciate that — given that I do not recall ever learning about any of this in school or in any particular lecture I can recall — this is not accepted knowledge of any kind. Instead, this list is based on my deductions, and imagining reading it for the first time, I would probably be fairly skeptical as well…

Some experience of pressure or gradient is necessary for life to evolve and thrive — conversely, in the absence of any signal that gives life a direction (or purpose) of “better than”, a state in which energy is preserved with greater efficiency than in the absence of that state, it would not be possible for the elements that combine into a living organism to successfully move towards this direction and make progress. For me, this is well articulated in Bobby Azarian’s “The Romance of Reality,” as well as Mark Solms’ “The Hidden Spring.” And the idea is based on and an extension of the “Free-Energy Principle” postulated by Karl Friston: given the fundamental reality of finite energy, any complexity that emerges must, on some level, deal with the conversion of this limitation (scarcity) into a complex system that conserves precious energy for further exploration.
Different conditions can be summarized under the term pressure: gravity (physical force experienced, against which life wants to rise up), molecular bombardment (water molecules being in constant motion, requiring a membrane container to prevent immediate disruption of control processes, or evaporation), nutrient scarcity (generating the need to figure out chemical sensors to detect sources of energy), as well as biological selection pressures all the way up to social pressure (generating a preference for meritocratic action in order to come out on top among a number of competitors). The fact that energy is ultimately not infinite also creates the need for our cognition to be highly selective — humans can only pay attention to the smallest sliver of the reality we are facing. This manifests, for example, in our limited bandwidth, creating the need to trade off between experiences. Whenever something urgent enters our awareness, whatever our brains are processing gets inter- and disrupted for the benefit of not missing life-saving signals.
Life develops a tendency to work against this pressure or gradient, such as building membranes around critical components. This extends from the cellular level over how an animal body contains separate systems, and shields these from one another, such as with the blood-brain-barrier in animals with a vascular system. To the extent that life masters this process, life “feels good”; I do not want to make the claim that this feeling state is a conscious experience for forms of life such as bacteria, plants, or those that lack a sufficiently developed nervous system to represent a self-reflective component of experience. What I do, however, believe is that, on some level of encoding, life must have the ability to represent whether or not the strategies being implemented by a given form of life lead to success (its patterning is passed on to subsequent generations). For animals this might simply translate into a (only partially conscious) motivational drive towards engaging in behaviors that favor conditions positive for life. For humans, this representation includes experiences which I describe as joy, fulfillment, and purpose.
With increased complexity of organisms, life’s ability to represent success shifts from a purely chemical based encoding (in the DNA and its products, which in turn interact with the environment) to methods that allow learning within the life-span of an organism. Rather than an organism being limited to act out its genetic program (and succeed or fail purely based on elements selected for across generations), organisms can make simple choices, and successful choice behavior can become represented in neural firing patterns, which ultimately leads to the simulation of decisions and experiences.
Once this stage is reached, life has the ability to experience, on the level of the configuration of the entire organism, states that represent success (the pressure being experienced is mastered) or failure — there is a representation of an estimate that the pressure is too great, or the skills and capabilities are insufficient for this particular form of life to succeed. In animals (and humans) this is for instance apparent in the centrally coordinated “fight/flight/freeze” response pattern, encompassing the entire organism.
Given that for life to continue it is irrelevant how the individual life forms “feel” (so long as their genome seems to encode greater success, compared with other, similar codes), and preventing catastrophic outcomes can genuinely “save lives” (and allow life to continue with increased odds), experiencing great distress at the “thought” (simulated experience) of outcomes that would suggest lack of fitness is adaptive — it serves as the internalized representation of the pressure that makes life possible, but in a negatively experienced valence. In other words, there are “Good Reasons for Bad Feelings.”
Put together, as paradoxical at it may seem (for now), the source of joy and desperation is one and the same, but experienced from two separate perspectives or vantage points: life wants to succeed in overcoming the pressure that is the source of its success, but the thought of not being able to overcome it leads to despair. All life is conditional on some pressure existing that brings it about. If life manages to utilize the pressure constructively, it feels great. A challenge is mastered, and a new capability is learned and acquired. If the pressure is too great, and threatens the existing skills from becoming extinct, life responds with a closure, a response of self-protection, and this comes with a feeling of potential desperation — in light of the thought that life could vanish.

Internalized Pressure

Humans have been shaped by evolutionary pressures to represent some form of primal morality that includes social norms as the source of feelings. If someone speaks to you with a firm voice, informing you that some of your past behavior led to harm — imagine for instance that you are told that something you did half an hour ago created an accident that cost someone else’s life — there are brain mechanisms built into human beings which are, on some level, inescapable. A chain reaction is set into motion which, if we do not understand what is happening to us, will leave us with few options.

I want to give a few more examples to demonstrate that this process can be triggered by quite a large variety of situations, each of which typically elicits a somewhat different flavor of experience. All the same, I believe that ultimately each of these situations — to the extent that reading the vignette elicits some emotional wincing on your part — shares the same underlying mechanism: an external stimulus is present that your nervous system interprets as a source of sudden change in pressure. If not responded to appropriately, this sudden pressure could lead to your demise, and it is thus of supreme importance to have a response at the ready.

Two aspects I want to mention before offering the vignettes: first, the experience of urgency is mostly a remnant of the time in which humans did not yet have our present day conscious capacity for complex introspection and reasoning about social situations. If for instance a superior individual, say your boss, tells you that your work is flawed, the possibility that your boss might simply be mistaken about some critical aspect is not easily available. Instead, your nervous system is more likely to jump onto the possibility of being fired as the outcome that needs to be avoided.

Put differently, the experience of pressure is usually accompanied by an often unconscious perception or approximation of a worst outcome that needs to be avoided. This leads me to the second aspect: out of the combination of the pressure and worst outcome scenario, humans seem to have a tendency to react reflexively and impulsively in situations in which such a pressure is felt. While these automatic impulses were probably adaptive in our evolutionary past — otherwise they would likely not be present in our repertoire today — they now either lead us into irresolvable conflicts, where two parties get stuck in a pattern of mutual accusations, or they create a vulnerability that can be exploited by people (or algorithms) that correctly deduce these mechanisms, who can use them for the purpose of behavioral manipulation.

With that being said, here are some vignette descriptions of situations that, I believe, many people might consider leading to the experience of pressure:

Anyone, but particular either a parent or teacher — or more generally a superior or authority figure — pointing out behavior that has led to harm or damage
Having some of your past behavior disclosed that you yourself believe violates an important community or relationship norm, like stealing, infidelity, etc.
Being followed or stared at by someone who is experienced as a potential threat
Realizing you forgot something important, such as letting your key in the lock, or not turning off a burner on your oven, or pretty much any crucial task
Being accused of not having acted according to someone’s expectations, like having forgotten an appointment

And to be very clear about this: since in a more physicalist oriented and/or objective interpretation of reality no physical pressure is exerted on human beings in such situations, I want to iterate the idea of internalization: whatever leads to the feeling of being put under pressure is a mechanism that exists as part of most humans’ nervous system — whenever we are faced with such a situation, there is an almost inescapable sensation of “I need to defend myself from this pressure.” And it is our evolutionary programming that makes it so challenging to consider an alternative to whatever the combination of our individual personality traits suggests as the appropriate response in such situations: either fight or flight.

Common Responses

Some of the most common and, in my reading, relatively unreflected responses are:

Using anger and aggression as means of defense, ranging from counter accusations to physically attacking the person or people on the other side of a conflict
Deflecting blame by identifying a scapegoat and projecting the responsibility onto them
Getting caught in anxiety or ruminative loops, which provide a persistent self-label of being a failure
Pretending that nothing bad is happening — and I would count the “fake it ’til you make it” approach suggested in many high-pressure fields under this heading
Running and hiding from the situation (stimulus), which particularly includes situations in which the person on the other side of a conflict is someone you care about, like your intimate partner or a loved one
Engaging in risky behavior as an outlet, for instance seeking romantic attachment/approval with another person instead of improving an existing relationship
And as a relatively more recent response, I would also count attempting to gain social status and currency by claiming victimhood into this category of unreflected responses

I assume most of these are fairly obvious patterns. Not everyone will necessarily show all patterns (in all situations), but I presume you are probably familiar with some people who show at least some of these some of the time. The reason to include the last item on the list is that, at least in my interpretation of social interactions in the 21st century, it is really a relatively more recent phenomenon, and yet one that is based on a pattern that has existed in the human moral psychological repertoire since the time when this morality started to form.

People who didn’t possess great physical strength as individuals always required backup from the community in situations in which their just moral claims — the “I saw these berries first” experience as a veridical and justifiable claim — needed to be affirmed by some collective authority, such as tribal elders. In such cases, it was then necessary for people to translate the emotional experience of pressure into feelings of unfair treatment, followed by a behavioral response that would get the external authority involved as an arbiter.

Unfortunately, this program does not care whether or not the claim being made is genuinely just. So long as the environment incentivizes people making this claim, more and more people will be tempted to exhibit this behavior, given that it provides them with additional resources — particularly if no-one is ever reprimanded for making such a claim without proper justification.

If, for instance, someone with a preference for the COVID-era mask mandates wants to enforce this as a norm — say, they feel threatened by the risk of infection from people in their building — one potential tactic is to claim oneself as being a victim of the behavior of others: “people who are not wearing masks are one step closer to being killers.” This pattern naturally also works in reverse… People who feel that mask mandates put them under pressure which they do not like might be tempted to paint themselves as victims of an over-regulated environment.

I suspect that the overall greater abundance in physical resources led to an increase in empathy for others. This is probably something generally worth pursuing. And cultures that have generally accepted the idea of treating others with increased care and respect seem to enjoy many benefits. On the flip side, this can also lead to an increase in rent-seeking behaviors via victimhood claims. It is simply often too beneficial to make such claims, since it alleviates one’s own responsibility, while at the same time firmly placing the need for change on other people’s shoulders.

My hope is that it will become a habit in your own thinking to check the extent to which any accusations you level at others may have been tainted by some amount of accepting a victimhood claim for yourself. Sometimes such claims have merit, but many times the claim of being specifically targeted is something that falls apart under sufficient scrutiny.

The Experience of “No Other Option”

One of the genuinely human experiences is wanting to have free will and choice. That is, if we get into a situation where we no longer feel quite as free to choose as we would want to, there is then some other internal pressure that builds as a counter weight, which ultimately can lead people into acting out some form of rebellious act against whoever they see as being responsible for the pressure they experience as coming from the outside.

In the absence of allocating some conscious awareness to that experience of internalized pressure, it often produces behaviors that, to the person acting without that awareness, seem to be without alternative. Under certain circumstances, this may lead to an overall experience of living life as a perpetual emergency. Most decisions seem to be made without much freedom to choose what one wishes to do.

Some items on a potentially much longer list of such behaviors might include:

Household chores — pretty much everything you do for your own good, but where you have a feeling that these must be done, i.e., a sense of being forced to do them
Going to school — even in countries that do not have a compulsory school system (like Germany), I presume that most people feel that school is not “optional,” which leads to a feeling of having no choice
Going to work — instead of appreciating that contributing to the economy is a genuine act of supporting the community with whatever one has to offer, it seems for many people to feel like something one would rather escape from
Having to do what the boss says — and one reason that the work environment probably, similar to going to school, has this unpleasant flavor is the idea that if your boss tells you what to do, it is very difficult to argue against that
Being stopped and questioned by police — much has been said about the experience by people who feel that police are unfairly targeting them as potential criminals, even though all that police seems to be going by are their skin color, their dress code, and maybe some other superficial characteristics; whenever this happens, people then feel an incredible pressure
Having children — birth rates in developed countries are falling to levels far below replacement, probably in part due to the experience of many women of not having the kinds of choices available they wish they had; in this case, birth control and abortion have offered some form of an alternative, but it seems to me that this has not led to genuine increases in satisfaction

To summarize, I believe that the ultimate source of pain and desperation, which are constantly lurking at the edge of human experience, is a feeling of pressure that is not being connected with, which then translates into despair. Importantly, whatever this feeling of pressure represents is not just a figment of our imagination. And the “not being connected with” part is the crucial bit.

In other words, if we can accept and integrate this pressure, taking it in as a necessary precondition of life, we can thrive. Then we can live through an exciting journey of challenges, full of danger and risks that, if navigated skillfully, make a thrilling tale. And this is true even if our life has many miserable moments, or if we are subjected to unfair treatment. So long as we can think of the pressure we experience as a fundamental aspect of the universe, we may not like it when it stings us in the least expected moments, but we will not despair.

If, on the other hand, we reject the pressure as undesirable, we live in constant pain and with a resentment toward reality itself. The strongest predictor I have been able to identify that leads people to experience life as miserable is a set of beliefs in a number of related propositions:

Pain is a bad experience
Consequently, a good life is supposed to be as painless, or as comfortable, as possible; conversely, it is desirable to try and eliminate any pain and discomfort one experiences
Life is supposed to be fair and just; to the extent that one observes or experiences a difference in outcomes — whether based on the same action or some kind of shared background — the corrective process is to eliminate any such differences
In either case, being confronted with discomfort or unfairness, this corrective process requires to control some aspect of the environment, rather than seeking collaborative solutions or changing one’s stance
The more control I gain over the environment — the more power I obtain — the better
And if one encounters resistance during the attempt to control one’s environment, such resistance is perceived as a source of pain, and must consequently be eliminated

It is this last bit, the experience of resistance as painful, and attempting to eliminate such resistance as a consequence of wanting to live a life without pressure, that does people in. From what I can tell, almost all of human activity on this planet is, in one form or another, geared towards trying to make life better. And by better I mean people generally striving towards a state that is less painful, more predictable and secure, and more comfortable. Based on differences that go far beyond — or below — the level of conscious perceptions and what we express with words, people apply quite different strategies in the pursuit of this betterment.

Whenever people, or groups of people, come together into a shared space, and they each bring often mutually different strategies to the situation in pursuit of their (ultimately same and shared) goal of making life better, the belief that resistance must be eliminated is one of the major causes of intractable conflict. If instead people with such different strategy preferences could simply accept that some amount of pressure, of residual disorder that cannot be brought under total control, is a natural and desirable aspect of reality, I believe that many conflicts would simply not exist in the form we experience them at all.

The “Tabula Rasa” Fallacy

As a last aspect of our current misunderstanding about human nature, I want to add that we seem to believe that humans learn everything they know from experience: the idea of clean slate or the “tabula rasa”. It is a nice and convenient idea, especially for people who understand that it is not true, and who are then able to use whatever exists in human psychology outside of individual learning as a way to control others’ behaviors.

Another way of looking at this is by describing it as the “Knowledge Fallacy” problem. In Western societies and cultures, there seems to be a heavy reliance on the idea that knowledge is primarily something that exists in propositional form: everything worth knowing can be easily put into words, and can thus be learned by verbal instruction. This overlooks, to our detriment, aspects of knowing that affect our perception, choices, and behavior.

Two important proponents of other forms of knowing and engaging with reality are John Vervaeke and Iain McGilchrist. Attempting to summarize their hypotheses into a shorthand, I would put it the following way: much of human perception and behavior is determined by aspects of cognition initially outside of our reach via language-bound access. It requires a deliberate process of connecting with these aspects of cognition and experience through a sort of internal mapping, by which sensations felt mostly in the body are brought into conscious awareness, labeled, and understood as related to important evolutionary adaptive drives.

To give an example, I suspect that human beings are born with varying degrees of curiosity with respect to trading this off against felt safety. That is, for some people, from an early age on, it seems more important to try out new experiences and behaviors over concerns of individual safety. This is not a learned behavior, but more a personality sort of trait — probably captured by “Trait Openness” in the Big-Five personality inventory.

That does not mean people high in this trait could not learn to become more careful when exploring novel situations, or that people lower in this trait could not learn to behave in a more curiosity driven manner. It does, however, suggest to me that without becoming fully aware of where one lands on this continuum, the naturally occurring setpoint at which a person finds itself simply presents a somewhat fixed input in some kind of choice equation.

I believe that we need to become aware of the fact that the pressure that is a requirement for life to exist and thrive is also at the core of the human experience. Once we do so, we are no longer forced to take this experience as a negative signal to be avoided. Our tendency to overlook our biological origins in favor of a purely mental-content-as-human-being model is currently making it very difficult to even express to one another where our blind spots lie.

We are living through a rapid expansion of humanity’s capacity on our planet to harness and transform energy. From the outside, I imagine that what is happening on Earth may look like a sudden explosion of activity. For a billion years, sunlight has been captured and was transformed into relatively primitive life. Quite some of this energy remains in the form of fossil fuels, which we are now burning through like some sort of fuse. What happens in the coming decades is unknown and unknowable. I certainly expect to be surprised.

Take Home Messages

As with the previous chapter, I am summarizing here what I believe to be the critical points. To the extent that you have been able to follow my thoughts, I hope that this list can help tighten things together a bit more:

Life is based on orienting a process of harnessing energy along a gradient of energy dissipation.
To the extent the process is successful, it feels joyous; and to the extent the process fails, it feels desolate.
Given the mental representations present in animal cognition, the hypothetical projection of a poor outcome in the future is experienced as anticipated pain.
As humans learn that pain avoidance is a valuable goal in and of itself, we are no longer recognizing that our anticipation of poor outcomes is ultimately a representation of what brings life about in the first place: the pressure stemming from the energy gradient.
If we can become aware of this fact, and not become addicted to the idea of controlling our environment as a means to reducing our fear of future pain, we will experience greater choice and freedom.

I will expound more on this last point in future essays.

The Well in the Desert