Predisposed, Not Determined

So many life lessons in such little time! We are our own best reasons not to feed the stresses of others. So many oscillations in such little time! Pffft! These two weeks alone! 

   After a few incredibly enlightening experiences in life, I one day realized life is only worth the experiences it contains; I needed to reach as far into it as I could conjure up ways to! Because of this, highs and lows abound. I’ve been thrown through nearly every headspace, openly exposed to the world, forced to face it regardless of how I’m feeling. 

   Books will not cause you to experience but what they bring to mind in relation to prior concepts and experiences you have formed or had. You can read braille about the perception of color your entire life, but you won’t know the experience of it until you see it for yourself. 

   I have now seen and learned so much, and I might suggest (albeit by personal anecdote) that psychology complicates this way too much; those that study it rarely also experience it from such angles internally. 

   I have been so privileged, with no real credit to attribute to myself; I was merely subjected to the right conditions to instill a drive for nearly all forms of experience. And what have I found?

   I do occasionally come back from charting this enormous sea; as the other captains think to trade their share of gold and riches, I bring you tales of sirens, krakens, and habitable land. I won’t show you maps, I’ll show you how to sail without them. 

   Way back when, some people believed we were born tabula rasa (with no preconditions; all was nurture). In fact, I named the “enlightened” character in my illustrated novel ***on our website*** after this. 

   Of course, we now know there’s a lot more to it! Unfortunately, by the layperson’s most common interpretation, “These people with these or those conditions largely can’t help x, y, or z.” Why am I bringing it up? Is it technically true? —Shhh… Let me paint you a different picture. 

   There have been a series of experiments done on mice where they’ll inject several groups with an aflatoxin akin to the carcinogens you’ll find in things like charred meat or cigarettes. Then they go on to feed the mice different sources of protein. The classic setup was ~5% vs ~20% protein, and the source mattered a lot. At 20% casein (milk protein), aflatoxin reliably turned into liver cancer; at 5% casein, it mostly didn’t. When they used plant protein instead (even up at ~20%), the cancer promotion largely vanished. Same toxin dose, same calories. Just swapping protein type and amount flipped tumor growth on or off. But as we know, genetic predisposition has everything to do with cancer growth! …right? RIGHT???

   Yes! Buuut… not so simply as people think. Cancers are very different. Really, “Cancer” works the same way our broad psychological labels do. It sounds singular, deterministic, and genetic until you zoom in and realize it’s an umbrella term for different processes that express themselves ONLY under certain conditions. Some of those conditions are more or less forgiving than others. 

   Genes don’t so much dictate outcomes as they define ranges of potential. Environment, inputs, timing, and capacities decide whether something stay latent or becomes pathological. Just like anxiety, depression, impulsivity, or addiction: predispositions exist, but they aren’t usually our destiny. They are switches, dials, and feedback loops. We mistake classification for causation, and in doing so, we quietly absolve ourselves of agency. 

   The mind is like the body. If most of us keep it entirely pure, away from too much conditioning, negativity, and stimulation. If we keep our minds active, with purpose and work. If we keep them supported by their surrounding environment as opposed to weighed on. If we stop consuming everything we’re hungry for and start consuming the things which we now know empirically to be good for us… cancers are very unlikely to form regardless of predisposition. 

   Yes, some people will straight up be born with bits of brain missing, flipped, or malformed, but even they do not know their capacity for change. The more we uncover, the more we learn how much more was within our control than we ever realized (I mean this with regard to healthy habits. Philosophically this is a different question for another time).

   An introspective model of mind, even more useful than all the hoopla one must cut through to get to the heart of psychology, is this: 

   At the bottom of every egoic layer rests awareness, containing nothing more than the sensation of being in the absence of conditions and knowledge. 

   As we grow we begin to differentiate this from that. Soon, likes from dislikes. Soon these preferences take hold of broader concepts that begin moving further and further away from the reality of here and now. 

   Layers stack and stack atop a mind that was made for experiencing over thinking. Fighting, hunting, and gathering over filling out spreadsheets and scrolling social media. But boy is it plastic and boy is it thirsty! Two incredible evolutionary survival traits. Two really sucky drivers in a world of information, stimulation, and consumables. 

   And so we walk through life, accumulating until the weight becomes as real as the one that nearly broke through our sternums before this last bit of time in the woods. 

   So it’s like this: When it comes to stress, I have a higher tolerance than Paige. I would venture to say I’m genetically predisposed to just be a little more capable in this one regard to her. I can tolerate more and endure more. I’m hungrier and I’m more motivated. Thank god she’s not like me. 

   BUT! Even having come out the box shy and unsure, she has made herself into a world class adventurer, spraying life-changing ammunition out of the deepest trenches on the battleground of ideas. She has made herself far more capable than those already predisposed to such things, because she has selected her influences intentionally, curating the things which inform her awareness, adding only the most useful layers to the user interface we call ego. 

   Too many pop ups on the UI and it gets hard to see. Experience is no longer assisted by it, but impeded by it. Thus, regardless of whether you “like” alone time or “feel” like meditating or “want” to detach from certain attachments, you would be wise to do so unless your goal is to someday find yourself with no idea how to dig your heart out from under the weight.

   Because nearly half of us (somewhere between one in three and one in two people) will meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental health disorder at some point in our lives. That’s before you count everyone living in the gray zone below diagnosis. Psychological dis-ease is not anomalous, it is the baseline, a baseline which quickly transforms to disease. 

   Meaning, the question isn’t whether the mind breaks down under certain conditions, but “how optimal are the conditions you’ve built around it?” If you stack stimulation on stimulation, stress on stress, attachment on attachment, the outcome isn’t some big mystery! It’s a predictable statistic. And if you instead curate inputs the way you would a body you actually cared about, most “conditions” can’t fully express themselves at all. 

   To bring it full circle as to the responsibility this implies on my part… I need to take control of my wellbeing, of course, as we just did. But second only to what makes me capable of it, I need to serve as a good influence before anything else. We are each a part of one another's environment, and there’s enough of the rest out there. 

   Love you, friends.