The Posts of 2008


Filed Under Round-ups, Uncategorized | Jan 7, MST 12:29 pm

 
In the four months since this blog started, thirty four posts have published on this site.  That breaks down to about two posts a week. In the first months of 2009, I’d like to increase that number to about five posts a week.

I hope to improve the quality of the posts as well. Right now, I’m still experimenting with this site (expect a new redesign in the near future), trying to find a good work flow.  I guess Steve Pavlina said it best in his essay on creating value: beginners always suck.

And this blog is just beginning, so it’s got far too many rough edges that will have to be smoothed out. However, looking back over some of the entries I’ve made, and a few of them show promise. The following are my favorite posts of 2008 — in no particular order.

1. Mimicry, social beloging, and automatic behavior


In this article, I examined how people constantly and unconsciously mimic the people they’re around. This automatic behavior poses certain interesting questions that have yet to be answered. The one I’m most intrigued by is that, if people are constantly responding to their environment in ways they’re not consciously aware of, what does that say about the control they have over their lives? I believe misery is built on a solid foundation of ignorance, and cultivating self-awareness is the key to living a happy, meaningful life.

2. A Holistic Guide to Dealing With Emotional Vampires

When you considerhow we unconsciously ape the people we’re surrounded by, you begin to appreciate how important it is to avoid emotional vampires. The quality of the people in our lives determines the quality of our lives. We’re not immortals, so we shouldn’t waste what precious time we do have on people who are disrespectful and destructive.

3. Searching Your Way To Better Health: How I cured myself of panic attacks

Five years ago, I started having panic attacks. At the time, I didn’t know what they were, and I sought out medical advice. Unfortunately, the doctors I saw were complete idiots, and I returned home determined to do what they couldn’t — cure myself of whatever it was that I had. I turned to google, typed in my symptoms, and within minutes I had a name for what I was experiencing. Once I had a name, it was as if I had established some degree of control over my experiences, and within a short amount of time, my panic attacks went away. I can’t recommend that other people will share my luck, but in my case, Google was a better health care provider than any of the medical professionals I spoke with.

4. The Five Factors of Depression

In this essay, I break depression down into five different areas of concern: genetics, environments, relationships, physical health, and internal states. Deficiencies and problems in any one of these areas can contribute to depression, and usually several problems across all five areas exist. The interesting thing is that each area is like the leg of a table, and if you knock down a couple legs, the whole thing comes crashing down. Improving conditions in a couple of these areas will usually end up improving conditions in all of them. Change your environment and internal states, and you’ll often find your physical health and relationships improve, and so on.

5. Beating Seasonal Affective Disorder

SAD is a condition that hits people in the winter months. Human beings need sunlight, and when the sun is in hiding, people often come down with the blues. This post lists a variety of ways of dealing with the energy zapping condition: light boxes, dawn simulation, vitamin supplements, and pharmaceutical interventions among the therapeutic possibilities. It’s a good overview of the condition and the possible treatments available to those who have it.

6. Why do depressed people wake up exhausted?

A short but sweet video post about a question that has always baffled me: why do the depressed wake up exhausted? According to the video in this post, depressed people have different sleeping patterns then healthy people. They spend more time in the more active REM phase of sleep, where dreaming frequently occurs. The depressed dream more than healthy people because they have more emotional issues that need to be resolved, and since this emotional debris isn’t being cleared out during their waking hour, the brain takes it upon itself do this while people sleep. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that great a job. I’m not sure how much weight this theory holds, but it’s an intriguing line of thought and it’s definitely worth investigating. Having seen the video, I now try not to carry any emotional baggage to bed.

7. Ten Illusion Clips

This has to be my favorite round-up of the year. It’s a collection of ten optical illusion videos, and each illusion shows just how wonky the human mind can be. The importance of this list is that it emphasizes how unreal our interpretation of the world often is. Visual trickery isn’t the only kind of illusions we end up experiencing — there are emotional, psychological illusions galore in the gallery of our personal experiences. We all have to be wary of automatically assuming something to be real simply because it seems real. Appearances can deceive, so we need to approach life with the possibility that our knowledge about the world and ourselves is faulty. Certainty is a dangerous thing.

In my opinion, these are the seven most interesting posts I’ve made this year. That works out to roughly one good post every two or so weeks. That’s a number I plan on improving this year!

In 2009, I resolve to be…


Filed Under Various | Jan 5, MST 12:46 pm

Welcome to 2009, everybody!

2008 was a hell of a year.  Wallstreet tanked, taxpayers gave billions of dollars out to the rich,  and people all over the world are now worried about the future.

Over at Mister Misery, things in 2008 were decidedly quiet. This is a tiny, itty bitty blog. I don’t spend nearly as much time on it as I should. The reason I run this site is to learn more about pain and suffering. I’m an abolitionist, a transhumanist. I believe that a world of pleasure is possible, and to make that world a reality, I spend my time studying how to turn misery into happiness.

Alas, dear readers, I haven’t done a very good job so far. I’ve taken this site too seriously, so In 2009, I resolve to be less serious on this blog. I want to share all the craziest, juiciest, most interesting studies with you. I want to show you that a better way of living is possible, that happiness is within your reach, and that misery is nobody’s destiny.  What I don’t want, is to be grim and serious. I don’t want to pander to academics, I don’t want this blog to be dull, and I don’t want to post anything that requires a thesaurus to read.

In the past, I had trouble writing for this site because I always felt the need to qualify whatever it was I was saying.  This made my posts dull, grating affairs. Yes, if I don’t qualify things in my posts, they’ll be considerably less accurate — but also infinitely more readable and entertaining. When you qualify an argument, you’re asking people to connect the dots themselves when they’d rather have other people do it for them. In 2009, I resolve to take more stands, even if that means ignoring some opposing points of view.

Finally, this site has been rather lazy when it comes to post frequency. Once a week simply isn’t enough.  Expect much more material in 2009. I’ll be traveling extensively throughout the year, and during my travels, I’ll be interviewing interesting people and posting about it on this site. I’ll also be producing a videos for this site about psychology, misery, depression, and the future of pleasure.  It should make for a much richer blogging experience, and hopefully this site will go from being pretty damn weak to being incredible awesome.