Wednesday, 13 March 2024 ------------------------ Hello. It’s me again. Chapter 10 was an interesting one. The book noted it as speculative with informed data, but it matched with my personal experiences nonetheless. What the heck is 'proinflammatory cytokines'? Cytokines is category of small proteins, mainly for regulating immune system cells and blood cells. Proinflammatory means it up-regulates inflammation. So proinflammatory cytokines are proteins that promote inflammation in your body. What’s inflammation good for? It’s a defense mechanism against harm, like damaged cells and pathogens (e.g. viruses, bacteria). What about 'cortisol'? That’s a hormone with a few functions, like triggering glucose release from your liver, and suppressing inflammation. Huh? It suppresses inflammation? Yes, but if your brain consistently (chronically) triggers release of cortisol, you’ll consistently have high levels of cortisol, that’ll unsustainably deplete your body’s resources, ultimately kick in your immune system to promote inflammation. Something like that I think. Cortisol is released to get your body ready for action when your brain predicts there’s an imminent threat. I’m getting bored, basically stress good but always (chronic) stress bad. For my story, that sounds like a good explanation for why my chronic pain (inflammation) went away, when I changed environment. Before I was in school where my brain predicted danger at all times (scary people). After I left school, I was alone (no scary people). In Denmark, we go to something called gymnasium (3 years) before university. That was less people scary, and more work scary, as you had to actually study now. I thought I could fool them but I ended up fooling myself. I could have completed gymnasium if I had wanted to. Computer science is not very popular in Denmark so you don’t need perfect grades for that. But I knew I wouldn’t be good in the job market. I knew I’d eventually have to face the horror. The horror that is looking for a job without good connections. Even if I got a job, it wouldn’t matter. I was bad with people, and my dislike for what I felt was incompetent authority was too strong to keep playing along. I was tired of trusting people. Fortunately, I had been working on my escape plan long before this, and after finishing second year of gymnasium, I felt comfortable to commit to my plan, to leave school behind for good. When you’re in school, your parents financing your existence, is a good time to take risk. Once you’re busy financing next month’s existence on your own, good luck. About taking risks. l knew if it went completely south, I could always return to school and rely on the public safety net. To be afforded the opportunity to take risk is a privilege. I would never have the audacity to call myself self made. The word is nonsensical and should never be used. Bad mindset. We want to give our children the best future we can. That doesn’t mean you don’t teach them to fly on their own, as parents or as a society. From my experience and from what I read, it looks as if you get punished for having trust. I don’t think that’s ideal if you prefer to live in a society where you don’t have to fear your safety every waking moment. Don’t mess with trust. I think I don’t trust people. It’s tricky because it’s somewhat a good thing but also not a good thing. Perhaps it’s a reason for why I don’t form an emotional bond with people. Why do we connect with people. I think the overall reason is for survival. In practice, I think you can group it into two reasons. The first is for practical reasons (money, family), and the second is social communication to regulate each others body resources (platonic or romantic). Today, the practical reason is mostly gone, it’s the one that has more force to bring us together though. The second, you can more easily forget but is valuable as well, hence why people feel bad even if they have everything to survive in terms of shelter and food. I think it’s a good idea for all people to improve their self regulation. However, the improvement in regulation by a social bond relative to the cost associated with creating and maintaining the social bond should be considered. There may be an upfront cost to creating the social bond, where returns are negative, but as the social bond becomes stronger, return on investment increases, maintenance cost falls, and investment in romantic bond can compound further by having children (only if society keeps costs down associated with having a child). For everyone, it has become more expensive to create a social bond, because the traditional, practical reasons that forced people together are no longer much relevant. I think it’s important that we learn why social bonding is beneficial for our health, how an investment in a social bond can compound. That we try to reduce the costs associated with creating and maintaining social bonds. The only practical thing left that requires direct social interaction, person to person, is having children (hopefully it stays like that). Today, an emotional bond between the parents is a prerequisite to this. That’s a good thing, it tells us society is prosperous. Furthermore, I think a child should grow up in environment that promotes social functioning, and that starts by learning from their parents. Life is not perfect, it can become necessary to raise a child without an emotional bond between the parents, but I think it should be avoided. What is required to form a social bond? It requires that your social realities are synchronised. That parties involved can efficiently predict. If you generally have trouble predicting other people, I think it’s something one must consider before attempting to form social bonds. What is masking? I’d say it’s an attempt to improve prediction by taxing yourself. If the goal of an interaction with a person is to improve regulation it should be obvious why masking will not work for this. If you mask the other party may benefit but you wont. Likewise, if the other person is taxed by you, when you’re not masking, and their goal is to improve their regulation it won’t work either. As you can see, it can be a tricky situation if one struggles with social prediction. I therefore think it’s worth to investigate if one is able to regulate their body alone, if it is difficult to do so by social connections. It seems that it is actually doable, in fact, a much more reliable way. It also puts one in a better position to find people that you can connect with as you already have a healthy baseline covered by yourself. It shouldn’t have to be your first option. From an early age I’ve been forced to become better at self regulation. I think you’ll always be more vulnerable when you only have yourself so it’ll require more limits in the environments you can sustain. While I’m still working on improving, the improvements I’ve had the last month are incredible after giving myself time to work on it so I think it’s worthy option to consider. This lacks a lot of nuance and things to consider, but I’ll leave it at this for now.