
Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals - hhm
http://www.giftedbooks.com/authorarticles.asp?id=7
======
bmaier
>>When their intensity is combined with multi-potentiality, these youngsters
become particularly frustrated with the existential limitations of space and
time. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to develop all of the
talents that many of these children have. Making choices among the
possibilities is indeed arbitrary; there is no "ultimately right" choice. Even
choosing a vocation can be difficult if one is trying to make a career
decision between essentially equal passion, talents and potential in violin,
neurology, theoretical mathematics and international relations.

I'm curious how others have dealt with this. When faced with seemingly equal
career and life decisions how to you go about choosing what vocation or path
to pursue.

Does anyone have any specific methods?

~~~
corentin
Up to now, I trusted my guts and went without much thought to the path with
the best profits/effort ratio (that is, I usually chose the easiest,
satisfying enough path). The good thing is that you avoid analysis paralysis
(by not thinking too much) and prevent a lot of effort (as a kid, I used to be
guilty of being lazy but today I understand that hard work is overrated
anyway). On the other hand, you can end up in a dead end. So, from now, I
continue to move through small steps (I don't believe in bold moves) but I
also "look deeper in the tree"; I think about the next step as well when I
look at a path, to avoid being trapped in a dead end (of course, I learned to
do this because I ended up in a dead end recently). I have a vague idea of a
few ultimate goals I'd like to achieve, but not a crystal clear vision so
they're rather irrelevant to my small steps. But it's OK as long as the
decisions I make lead to better opportunities.

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DanielBMarkham
Best book for a gifted existential crisis? "Man's search for meaning." I wish
I had read it as a teenager.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning>

~~~
hhm
I read it. I'm not sure it's very specific about gifted existential crisis, or
about existential crisis at all...

~~~
DanielBMarkham
You don't think Frankl tackles head-on the meaning of existence? I mean, he's
the father of logotherapy, which, as Wiki describes it, is "a type of
Existential Analysis that focuses on a 'will to meaning' as opposed to Adler's
Nietzschian doctrine of 'will to power' or Freud's of 'will to pleasure;'."

Can't get much more specific about dealing with existential crises than that,
right?

~~~
hhm
Hmmm... yes, you're right, my mistake.

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tel
I think the book he wrote is even more interesting. My ex-girlfriend was
exceedingly smart, but in her young life did poorly being judged as ADD and
Dyslexic. I got the opposite treatment with gifted programs and expanded
curricula. When we compared symptoms, though, we were generally the same.

I wonder how many children in "special" education should actually be in gifted
education...

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mynameishere
Existentialists should stay true to their natures.

[http://madelyn.utahunderground.net/links/jeanpaulsatrecookbo...](http://madelyn.utahunderground.net/links/jeanpaulsatrecookbook.html)

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maurycy
Reminds me <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3503877302082311448>

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MagicFingers
Scarey place to be. did anyone read this by a cibermole? Burnt-out
programmers:: Existential Depression - the biggest threat to your brand?
www.intrench.com

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kingnothing
I read this almost a year ago, although it was posted on a different site.
It's a pretty good read.

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steveplace
What's the point in reading this... everything gets Dugg in the end...

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curi
He advised parents to lie to their children about hugs :(

Someone should tell him (and the rest of the world) that immortality is
coming.

It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question
traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort
tradition.

He also says essentially: they don't fit in, but help them _feel_ like they
do. Why not tell them that fitting in isn't such a great thing anyway, and
they shouldn't feel bad about being better?

~~~
jey
" _It's sort of funny that he says these gifted children will question
traditions, and then wants to help them via the rather arbitrary touch=comfort
tradition._ "

I doubt it's arbitrary. It seems to be, as the article said, "a fundamental
and instinctual aspect of existence". A lot of stuff is just built into us,
and touch=comfort is a prime candidate for one of those things that's hard-
wired into us. I doubt it's a culturally acquired/transmitted trait.

~~~
curi
High level human personalities aren't hardwired. They are many layers of
interpretation above any hardwiring. It's like imagining that which assembly
language is under your Ruby makes a difference to which programs you can
write.

~~~
jey
This isn't a question of a high-level personality trait, but a question about
the low-level firmware in our heads. The standard myth that we all grow up
with is that everyone is born as a blank slate, and the child's environment
shapes the person from scratch. This is only partially true, there's a whole
lot about our nature that is simply fixed in stone (ok, neurons really) before
we even take our first breath. Two obvious examples are the innate human calls
of crying and laughter. The weird thing is that most of the rest of our minds
are pre-determined by biological evolution too.

<insert shock, awe, indignation, cries of "What, I'm not even at all like my
_identical twin brother_!", etc here>

There's far less variation between people than we normally think; a whole lot
of us is dictated by the low-level firmware we're born with. We're just
acutely sensitive to the relatively minor differences between us, just like
you can tell faces apart even though they're all basically the same.

If you're saying is that the relative weights vary between people, so while
one person might be very comforted by touch another wouldn't care for it much,
I agree with that. But this is just the small amount of variation between
different people, the small amount that isn't fixed and can vary person-to-
person. This is just a difference-in-degree, not a difference-in-kind. I doubt
you can find someone who reacts to touch by immediately beginning to juggle
knives or by sneezing. Now _that_ would provide some evidence for the whole
blank-slate hypothesis.

Evolutionary Psychology is fascinating stuff. As I said in another thread:
"EvPsych basically makes one important observation and asks the natural
question leading from it: Just like our eyes and hands, our minds have also
been developed in response to evolutionary pressures. What were these
pressures and how do they account for the features we see in ourselves, like
language, love, laughter, crying, etc?" A good pop-sci book on the subject is
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright: [http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-
Science-Evolutionary-Psyc...](http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-
Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996)

~~~
curi
How people interpret touch is definitely a high level personality trait that
we can control. People often do. Some people associate touch with something
bad and recoil from it. People also have cultural ideas about _appropriate_
and _inappropriate_ touching, and react accordingly. That reaction isn't
firmware.

A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to
name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually
explains _how_ they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control,
reinterpretation, etc)

~~~
jey
" _Some people associate touch with something bad and recoil from it. People
also have cultural ideas about appropriate and inappropriate touching, and
react accordingly. That reaction isn't firmware._ "

Yes, this is all stuff that can be layered on top of the basic firmware. But
wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of distress,
you're feeling something innate and at your core? I'm not saying we're simple
or whatnot, there's definitely many facets to our cognition that are all in
there rumbling around. But we sure aren't blank slates that are programmed by
the environment. I think a better analogy is that we have a bunch of knobs
with certain ranges, and the environment & genetic variation together dial in
these knobs to make us who we are. This provides plenty of room for the
complex interplay between the different emotions, like the example you cite
where someone is generally distrusting of people and dislikes touch. I bet
even that distrusting person could feel close to someone who put in a lot of
effort to build a friendship to overcome their initial hesitance, and feel
comforted by this closeness. Again, it's a difference-in-degree and not a
difference-in-kind.

" _A second problem with the "Genes Rule The World" hypothesis (if you get to
name my position, I get to name yours ;p) is that no one ever actually
explains how they do this (while allowing vast room for conscious control,
reinterpretation, etc)_ "

That's what the fields of Genetics, Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary
Biology are about. :-) Check out that book I referenced in the parent post,
it's pretty interesting.

If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even if
there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable
answer?

~~~
curi
_But wouldn't you say that when you hug someone you love in a time of
distress, you're feeling something innate and at your core?_

If I thought I was feeling something innate that would not be valid evidence I
actually was, just a self-reported anecdote.

 _If it's not genes that determine what we are, then what? Or at least, even
if there isn't an alternative better answer yet, why aren't genes a suitable
answer?_

The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much
faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-
related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also
explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)

~~~
jey
Yes, that's an anecdote. It was meant to be an illustrative point, not a
scientific factually valid point. You should read the EvPsych literature to
get the scientific argument. I don't know enough about it to cite the papers,
etc. Another book that looks at factors involved in the evolution of the human
brain is The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon,
[http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-
Language...](http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Language-
Brain/dp/0393317544)

" _The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much
faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-
related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also
explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :)_ "

Yes, memes exist, and they do quite a lot, but it's not like as soon as memes
showed up, everything else went out the door! Even if we assume that memes had
some ability to thwart further biological evolution, that wouldn't _reverse_
all of the built-in stuff that existed at the point memes came on the scene.
Everything that memes do is layered on top of the huge amount of pre-
programming that we're born with; memes exist solely on the highest thin layer
of a big multi-layered system. Don't forget that we're actually primates with
primate brains, and mammals with mammal brains. Millions of years of mammalian
brain evolution weren't discarded just because we invented a vehicle for meme
transmission (language). That high-level idea transmission mechanism resides
on top of a regular ol' primate brain, with all of its complex builtin
emotions for survival, reproduction, social interaction, etc.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I can't put together a really
convincing argument citing specific experimental facts and whatever. I'm
starting to repeat myself ... shows how little I know about this stuff. You
should read some of the stuff on EvPsych to draw your own conclusions about
the validity of the field.

Check out this blog post on Overcoming Bias:
<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/evolutionary-ps.html>

~~~
gills
This branch of the thread seems like a good example of the existential
questioning in the article. Some folks are comfortable with the idea of
certain traits being hard-wired by evolution and/or God (depending on the
person). Others seem threatened by the idea of an existence over which they do
not exercise full control -- as if to ask "what meaning can be derived from
such limited opportunity for self-actualization?"

I'm in the first camp. Sometimes I have some anxiety over my existence, but
(as a Christian) it usually revolves around questioning whether or not I am
living the right kind of life.

One thing I do know is that worrying does nothing to help the situation.
Getting out there and doing something with your life does.

~~~
curi
It shouldn't be a matter of which position we feel better about, or feel
threatened by. We should evaluate this as a matter for reason and evidence.

