zushi's place

Today I was thinking about the various people who published their CVs of rejections out there, and it makes me wonder about something.

I know a lot of people who have anxiety around failure and rejection, and it's common advise to say that we shouldn't let them affect us because it isn't a reflection of who we are, but I don't think that advise is a strong enough treatment of rejection sensitivity.

The way I think about it, being sensitive to rejection is a natural condition of our ancestral environment. When we historically only lived around Dunbar's-Number amount of people, a single rejection would and should hit hard because there were likely only 3-4 opportunities out there for most people, and repeated rejections by many people are costly because it deals a reputation blow that paradoxically makes future opportunities harder.

One theory of depression and frustration advanced by Dr Randolph M. Nesse in the book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings is that it causes us to re-evaluate our situation and to give up on the current approach, not through explicit re-evaluation of situations, but through making it really, really emotionally tough to want to try again. This is more reliable than simply making us reframe the challenge because it is more guaranteed to produce a behavior shift.

However, the problem is that this tendency is often too drastic of a solution. The correct response to an academic rejection in modern society is usually not “don't apply to schools altogether” but “apply to other schools”. But many modern institutions are disincentivized by legal reasons to avoid giving reasons an applicant wasn't selected. This lack of feedback turns the emotional reaction that would have been “thinking about how to improve things next time” to “frustration and thinking about giving up”. We see this type of negative emotional process again and again when failures don't come with negative feedback (and this is part of why failing in videogames usually feel much better than failing IRL). Our intuition detects an environment where “you will fail for reasons unclear to you”, and defaulting to frustration and depression is the natural way to pivot us away from the problem domain altogether. In this academic case and many other modern cases, this instinct is subconscious, automatic, and completely maladaptive.

How does one deal with the legal/emotional structures of a modern world that is misaligned with our natural instincts?

I think unusual structures do requite some sort of unusual solutions. And I think often these types of solutions are what we now commonly witness as modern stress-coping responses: – Compulsive shopping – Video games – Pornography – Substance addiction – Aggression

Sites on Rejection Sensitivity Dysmorphia often suggest medication as a way to combat rejection sensitivity, but I think barring actually pathological cases, I'm hesitant about this. Ideally, we want to search for something sublimating if possible – one that takes mal-adaptive instincts and utilize them for adaptive purposes. I think that in order to counteract how unusual our modern world is, this practice would necessarily look a bit intense or extreme or unusual, and I honestly think that the best ones I've found so far are meditation, art, and exercise.

That is, I think to deal with the unusual amount of modern rejection we face, we should try to project our depression and frustration to as much meditation, art, and exercise as possible. This (other than having an unusually good time with friends, which is one thing I'm still trying to figure out how to do) is the one way I can find to sustainable escape the modern conundrum of unaligned incentives and stress.

One line from Attack on Titan I always found interesting was the idea that “everyone is slave to something”. Characters that appear larger than life in that show often had some internal obsession that's pushing them to have inhuman willpower, even when those obsessions are not necessarily perfectly altruistic. I think that beyond all, cultivating this sense of unnatural obsession may paradoxically be one way to live naturally in this unnatural world, full of bizarre, unusual, and crushing rejections.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #sociology