When it feels hard to enjoy, life sucks.
Even to change how it feels, feels hard. Why should it feel hard? Perhaps because it’s a pattern that exists to perpetuate itself.
Apathy does not want to die. The pattern of hopelessness fights for itself.
It does not care for the individual it is existing through. It is amoral and pragmatic.
Yet why is it a mood? What is the neurological basis? Is it a larger pattern, made of smaller primitives?
This raises a question: What is a mood? It is context based on content.
If you get out of the wrong side of bed in the morning, it primes the content and sets the context.
I can instantly change my context, let us suppose, through automatic imagination. How do I change the content of my mind? Is it my choice?
If what is around me is not my choice, then the content of my mind is not my choice.
The context is what you’re changing with AI. The frame.
A beautiful frame on a terrible picture will not alleviate all the problems.
The solution is to use a frame that gets you to act and change the picture.
Yet when the picture is fighting to keep itself alive, it is difficult.
Perhaps this is when you need the help of others.
However while you’re in a good frame of mind you can prepare for later. For the bad.
You can change the context through AI and change the content by changing your environment to focus on the positive.
Yet even the context-content distinction is perhaps artificial.
If you think of a picture as many layered frames, or think of a picture of a wall with a painting on it, the context-content distinction disappears.
There is only one picture, at different levels of resolution. There is only the Now, the current experienced moment, through which you view the world.
This makes AI more powerful but also demonstrates its weakness. It is as strong a tool as you wish to make it, and no stronger.
If you use it on the little problems, you gain strength to use it more deeply on grander problems.
AI lets you change the context through which you are viewing the world. If you change enough levels of context, the content shifts too, because you’ll want it to. You’ll make it happen.
Yet if the pattern of hopelessness is fighting to keep itself dominate, like a mental virus, it is not amenable to the same mental defenses time after time.
Your mental defenses must themselves evolve in order to fight new mental diseases.
Though the strategy of AI may always work, the exact tactics to defeat a particular mental anomaly may need to vary.
Instead of seeing a negative mood as a given, we might instead see it as a pattern of activity that can be fought.
Yet in order to break out of the thinking that so grips the mind, you have to increase awareness and the desire for more awareness.
Doing so releases the hold of the content on your mind, and gives you more control over the context.
The awareness must come from somewhere. It takes energy to be aware, and a lack of energy will make shifting awareness difficult.
To defeat a negative mood, realize it is fighting for itself, not for you. Create a space of awareness about the mood. Then use automatic imagination to change to what you want to feel.
This is one of my favorites! We were really thinking about the same thing. Mental virus sucks the life out
Again, I like where your mind goes here. You hit a few points of my profession (clinical psychology): framing, helping others to help yourself, and some principles of CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). At one point, I think u hinted at what I think the best solution might be, which is to use the bad mood as a change agent. Not necessarily to artificially change the mood by some psychological trickery, rather to accept and own the mood as an indication that you are poised for true change, and the mood will persist until you choose to make the necessary changes (even if that choice is to reliably take bipolar medications ; ) or what have you).
Bad moods aren’t “bad” to have, as they create the scale and context to give your good moods meaning. The big question to me is: are u going to let your bad moods become a destructive or a productive agent along your path?