[gjsman-1000]

A. Therapy, but only go to a therapist with objective and practical plans for results, even if that may take a few sessions. Any therapist that just offers vague solutions is leading you on. Do not trust therapists that solely affirm you and never challenge you to change your behavior. Everyone has room for improvement; so it’s not worth paying $100+ a session to learn that you are perfectly fine.

B. Remove strong dopamine stimulants from your life (if any) at least for a little while. Dopamine is powerful, but desensitizing. Your brain likes a balance of ups and downs - extreme ups cause everything else to be perceptually lower. This perceived lower outlook often then increases the very need for the thing creating the high, causing a vicious cycle. Alcohol and Porn are the big ones where, anecdotally, you can notice significant changes in your outlook after a month of fully abstaining. Other people may need to cut back or remove Video Games and excess Food for a while. What is important though is that dopamine is dopamine, your brain can get it from many places, so be careful to remove and not replace.

C. Consider your spiritual life. I’m personally Catholic, and will always strongly recommend and beg that you begin investigating that (as I’m showing my bias here); but if you are not at peace with God (or even whatever you honor), it will mentally eat at you. Dante’s Inferno may have demons consuming humans in Hell - but the mental anguish from a guilty conscience will eat at you in this life.

D. When you know there’s nothing seriously wrong with you (therapy); have your mind mentally balanced (removing strong stimulants); and believe yourself to be in a spiritually good place (no nagging conscience); efforts to exert your will or follow guides to becoming more ordered and focused will, in my opinion, have a much higher likelihood of success as the serious boulders in the road will have been removed.

[leetrout]

I like your list.

I think you can replace religion in C with mindfulness / meditation. There are community aspects to organized religion but, at least in the US right now, those carry some (a lot of?) negatives that might not be helpful. But an open mind and curiosity about the mystery of life can prove useful without the structure of organized religion.

[gjsman-1000]

I firmly believe in what you would call my organized religion; but I’ll give you some food for thought on why I’m not sold on your vision.

The biggest problem, or negative, with unorganized religion or meditation is what I would call the excessive focus on oneself. What is good is what feels right to me as good; what is bad is what feels right to me as bad. This is very subjective and can easily go down a rabbit hole where your religion, is ultimately, your own ability to rationalize your own actions and perspectives. Meditation can also easily backfire into an exercise in forcing your conscience to conform to what you mentally want to believe, regardless of whether it is true.

I am not saying that “organized religion” does not have serious downsides - I believe that any objectively false religion will have enormous consequences. However, I think that almost all of them do recognize one fundamental principle: Good, and Evil, are external properties of us, and our own feelings or preferences or desires or inclinations, have no bearing on whether an action is objectively Good or Evil. It takes an external force (e.g. God) to define what it is, so that we may understand and conform to it - otherwise, we are God.

In a sense, everyone believes in a God. Everyone believes that somebody defines good and evil. Either it’s an external force to which we must logically conform, or it’s ourselves. This is also why people of extraordinary evil (Hitler, Mao, Stalin) are also worth critically examining - after all, the God they worshiped in themselves did not condemn their actions. Why is your personal God better than theirs?

[relaxing]

Please, take a Philosophy 101 class. You may be surprised to find your pet ideas about everyone having a god (defined in a way that is effectively meaningless) has been considered and long since moved past.

[gjsman-1000]

This would have been taught as Philosophy 101 before Christ was even born, as even the Greek and Roman religions understood that good and evil are objective concepts defined by something. And they must be defined by something, or rape and cannibalism are not crimes. After all, animals do it all the time, it’s only natural. Thus, what is natural, is not necessarily how we ought to act.

Also, what a hilariously weak comeback that doesn’t address anything I said. On that note, I’ll take over 2400+ years of philosophy before I take a modern philosopher sharing the news about his brilliant new idol. Don’t let the novelty fallacy blind you to the fact that even you have an idol - the idol that ironically claims we’ve moved past idols.

[rexpop]

> only go to a therapist with objective and practical plans for results, even if that may take a few sessions. Any therapist that just offers vague solutions is leading you on.

No, therapy is also a place to practice relating, eg vocalizing emotions, setting boundaries, or mending ruptures. Therapy is, after all, also a relationship.

"Vague" solutions are, of course, "no true scotsman," but yes, therapists should be able to offer concrete, actionable coping tools--explain them to you, and help you process your attempt to put them into practice.

I don't see a reason, however, to see a therapist who finds fault with me that I don't, myself, consider a problem. Let my friends and relations stage the interventions if need be. ;)