Pessimism and Optimism 3

The longer a person lives, the higher the probability that they will encounter low-probability events with major destructive impacts. Firstly, a sufficiently long time span in itself means an inevitability that low-probability events will occur. It doesn’t matter if it happens, or if you get hit once, the problem is when you look back on the whole process, you’ll find that you have no way to exclude the possibility of it happening again in your next long-term plan.

No matter what kind of planning you do, it is fragile in the face of devastating low-probability events. And you have no means to ensure prediction, nor to prepare for all eventualities. If you want to prepare so many insurance measures, you cannot afford the cost of the insurance measures. Even if you can afford it, the profits of what you are doing will not be able to cover these insurance costs. Not only that, these first-hand experiences of low-probability events will also make you realize - in fact, you were just lucky before. It was just luck that nothing happened for so long. Previously, you simply did not realize that this was a problem. You thought that since nothing happened, it meant it was not a problem. When the problem occurs, you can no longer deny it, honestly look back, and you will find that it is lucky that this happened only now.

The more this is the case, the more terrifying it becomes - what will you do in the future?

How do I know that a similar problem will not happen again? How do I know when the next hidden lethal problem will erupt? Previously, I also could not see any possibility of a problem occurring, but a serious problem still occurred. So after I have solved the problem that occurred and returned to the state of “not being able to see any problems”, can I relax?

You cannot rest your mind, so you cannot sleep. If you cannot sleep, it won’t take long before you fall into a manic-depressive spiral. The more manic-depressive you become, the worse the situation becomes, the less you can sleep, and the more reasons you have to be manic-depressive, the less you can sleep.

The cycle repeats over and over again until hell.

Those who try to advise you are useless. Because your reasoning is right. Their attempts to prove where your logic is wrong are futile. It’s not that you don’t want to listen to their advice, you really do. The problem is that no matter how much you want to listen to advice, you just can’t take it in. The reason is simple - your concerns are indeed valid. No matter how you think it over and over, you will eventually find that your concerns do indeed make sense.

You are not depressed because you are crazy, but precisely because you are completely rational, and rationality in turn tells you to have pessimistic expectations, that’s why you cannot help but be depressed. Those words of comfort are ineffective because their reasoning does not make sense. And you cannot force yourself to abandon rationality just to solve your depression - forcing yourself will only make you completely lost. Being lost will lead to more disastrous failures. So depression will surge up again to block out all sunshine.

Where is the way out?