Cranberry Sauce

I am sad. But I am not quite sure about the origin of my sadness, nor its magnitude. I wonder if I’m sad or depressed, or very sad or very depressed. It has a sense of finality about it – like the end of an era, or the end of all hope. The only thing that comes to my mind when I think of nostalgia now is nitesh jain. To say my life has spiraled downward into apathetic degeneration would be just too dramatic and quite unreal. I can feel the life slip out of my hands, but to make things better (or worse) it’s as if I’ve been administered an overdose of tranquilizers to ease the pain. What I have then, is the sight of my slow, methodical amputation by my own hands, before my own eyes, while the rest of my useful faculties lie gagged and anesthetized so that I can see my own pain, but yet not feel it. Anticlimactic culmination is again too strong a phrase to use, this feeling is soft, innocuous, numb… brutally agonizingly incapacitating, but comfortable in its execution. Like a painless de...

An excerpt from the book “Experiments with People” An interesting feature of the psychological immune system is that to operate effectively it must operate discreetly. This raises an interesting question: Is psychological well-being associated with the accurate perception of reality or with a distorted perception of it? The traditional view is that contact with reality is essential for mental health. As the old one-liner goes, neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them, and psychotherapists collect the rent. The alternative view is that, given how inhospitable reality is, human beings cannot bear too much of it. They must therefore endorse comforting illusions in order to function effectively. In an influential article, Taylor and Brown proposed that three classes of positive illusion promote mental health: holding overly flattering views of oneself, overestimating one's personal control, and being unreasonably optimistic about the future. The fact that most...