Born of Frustration

 

One of the songs I keep playing again and again is the track Born of Frustration by the band James which came out in 1992. It has a nice gradual climb in intensity with a great vocal by Tim Booth (and trumpet echoes). The lyrics are interesting as well, which are psychologically and spiritually evergreen. Perhaps they were cryptic wordplay at the time they were written (as lyrics often are) but can gather meaning in the future. Lyric writing can be The Shrink, and music itself, The Exorcist.

Music, or any art form, is a useful form of active imagination. As I've always said, music (as well as sports) gets us out of the amygdala, at least for the time in which we are immersed in them. Whether that has lasting effects remains to be seen. But I do still believe the arts do have a positive effect if done over a lifetime--not only for the individual but also at the collective level. We seem to not want to ascend to the next level, even while it appears to be happening by pursuing things like space tourism, an Overview Effect for the ego.

Both physicists and spiritualists talk about exalting civilization and they redound to the same desires or the same results. Nikolai Kardeshev has his levels of civilization, and spiritualists such as Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson advocate spiritual enlightenment by moving through the chakras or A Course in Miracles, but we’re still in the 70s and 80s, at least in terms of the higher consciousness movement.

The transhumanist theories of David Pearce are interesting as well in terms of raising consciousness, but his involve technologies that don't yet exist at any practical scale--or haven't been tested to be ethical. He asserts that most of us have a bias towards being depressed, and is that way by design, so as to keep us on the hedonic treadmill. He also suggests that the popular nostrums such as meditation, taking psychedelics, and so on, are not really that effective: We're still stuck with our set-points, in the same way we gravitate back to being overweight after dieting.

Another line from the lyric: "Show me the movie of who you are and where you're from"

Struggles in your own life might also arise from your family history. What you might want to do is break away from that, or at least experiment with different personas (sometimes known as "identity tourism"—David Bowie is famous for traveling well)  to see if one is actually more joyous as opposed to depressive, but per the Pearce theory that's only a temporary fix. It's important that we have a variety of ideas, from wherever and whomever they come from, in order to make our lives more enriching and to raise our hedonic zero.

Identity can only be discovered and rediscovered by going within and revisiting and reprocessing things that you were doing and experiencing when you were in the first 15 years of your life, which become punctuated by the time you reach the age of 25. At that point, you are burned in, and your only way of reintegrating everything that you are is by revisiting the first 15-25 years  for the remainder of your life. That's where all the good wiring (set point) is, or per Marianne Williamson, how the universe programmed you, if that is something that is based in fact. We can say that it's possibly a fact because the animal kingdom might have some aspect of this. But animals are not aware of it, and we can't prove that they are or they aren't.

In terms of how other people can change our lives by becoming actively involved (perhaps over-involved with self-help) won't solve the problem of the pre-existing hedonic baseline. Influences really don't matter, nor do a change of  places in an epigenetic sense. The dark cloud that follows you around is your hedonic set point. As in weight loss or weight gain, your set point will determine the point at which your body is metabolizing calories, so you have to address the problem from that standpoint.

Many people, perhaps almost everyone, is born of frustration. The way Tim Booth sang it was cathartic in the same way the arts are cathartic in general. Catharsis can go a long way.