you live in a multi-agent body

Imagine all your problems.

Imagine all your desires.

In your mind they are represented as thoughts, feelings and perceptions bundled into something what we call experience.

Some agents fight for your survival (even when you no longer fight lions), some agents seek pleasure, some agents are there to calm you down and some agents are their to avoid pain (not to confuse with avoiding suffering).

So you are technically composed of two type of agents:

1. stress agents
2. care agents

When somebody offends you, some sort of “wrong doing” agent is activated and you feel an emotion of guilt. This can activate a “fighting back” agent that gets you activated and you attack back. Both of these agents are stress agents. Care agents come when you for example switch context, and calm yourself down talking to your friend about it, or pursue some sort of pleasure that makes you forget for some time that those stress agents are there. It does not solve much, but for a moment gives you a temporary relief.

Now what is the long lasting truth about this? Your suffering will be as long as your time you will get stuck in a loop of these agents. They are features of the system, not bugs. The key is to maintain homeostasis (balance between care and stress agents being active), although I would argue that we spend majority of time within the stress agent boundary.

If you generalise that YOU have a problem, you are misunderstanding a nature of the system. What is “YOU”? “You” is a simplification and misunderstanding how our mind works. Accepting this simple truth is all there is. There is no fixing of the problem, only access to the truth. Stop connecting your generalised “YOU” with your suffering and be very specific about what agent is currently active.

We are the sum of our agents that belong either in a category of stress, or category of care. They activate each other, form gangs together, tease each other, they can be mean to each other and so on.

There is nothing to be fixed, only understood. Stress agents are giving you the opportunity to understand the nature of your generalised “YOU”!

PS: thats why therapy feels good, but usually is not very effective just two days after you left

PS2: only solution is depth