The countdown has begun. Scott Adams is giving himself just one more year to live after life punctured his Delusion Bubble:
So here’s what happened to me in the past years.
That matrix-like mask kind of fell off. And I lost my illusion for a while.
So being depressed is not about being in the wrong state of mind, which is the problem.
In my case, being depressed was being in the right state of mind. …
The part that made me depressed is when I saw things clearly.
And I worked since then to rebuild my illusions.
So when you ask me if I’m feeling better or depressed, I’m sort of in the process of rebuilding an illusion that I can live in without pain.
And I’m not quite there yet because I could still see too much ugly.
And I can’t live happily in a world with this much ugly around me.
I don’t mean physically ugly. I mean ugly ideas and thoughts.
And I’m trying as hard as I can to rebuild a protective, imaginary shield of “everything’s fine” when it isn’t. It definitely isn’t.
But you have to build up a little wall of imaginary protection.
So I’m building up a little wall of imaginary protection as efficiently as I can. But it’s hard work.
Then physically, I haven’t figured out how to fix my physical problem.
So, exercise — I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to exercise again.
Let me just give you an idea. It’s possible that I will never have another personal relationship for the rest of my life.
It’s possible that I’ll never exercise again for the rest of my life. Because that’s my current physical situation.
Now, it could be that I can work through those things and everything will be fine. I can do better by next week.
But the length of time it’s been, and the fact that I don’t even have a clue of what’s wrong — and I’m at that that certain age where things will fall apart — suggest that I could be at the end of my life.
And on top of that, [I’m] feeling physically that I’m literally at the end of my life.
But let me also tell you that I have a sort of at least a one-year minimum optimism buffer.
So my one year optimism about it works like this. If it looks impossible, I still give myself a year. That’s like a rule.
So the system —doesn’t matter what the problem is. Doesn’t matter how much it hurts. Doesn’t matter how much I want to stop.
I’ll give myself one year to just fix that thing.
What Scott actually needs is Jesus Christ, hope, and love, in that order. But unfortunately, he’s turning inward, toward himself, again, and relying upon the hope that he can reconstruct his Delusion Bubble in order to protect himself from the unpleasant realities of life.
And this is why it behooves us to help gammas grow out of their gammatude when they are willing to make the attempt, because their lives really are psychological hellscapes.