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siiky
2022/05/05
2022/07/28
en
After some recent events in my personal life 乱 (Ran) came to mind: what if our "mental strength", or ability to withstand stress, is like a fagot of arrows?
I think the analogy works well enough.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't the faintest fucking clue what I'm talking about. All that I "know" about psychology is from Psych 101 by Paul Kleinman (maybe others meanwhile, check my book list), random Wikipedia pages, and a few random posts here and there (check my psychology links). I just had this thought after the already mentioned events and decided to meditate on it.
One arrow corresponds to one "unit" of "mental strength".
Greater number of arrows translates to increased ability to withstand stress, and vice versa: lesser number, decreased ability.
Repeated or continuous stress on the fagot eventually results in breakdown, assuming that the stress actually strains at least some of the arrows.
And rest, that is, lack of stress or strain, has some sort of "healing" effect. Immediately after you've gone through some stressful event you're more likely to breakdown with another stressful event. However, give it some time and the second event is more manageable. This is possibly the case that translates worse. If an arrow starts to crack it won't magically uncrack. But maybe that's the wrong scale to think about -- arrows can be very flexible, so they can withstand a lot of stress in a very short interval with no damage (their "stress capacity" depletes as fast as it regenerates). On the other hand, if they are cracked, they have to be replaced -- like sharks replace their teeth? Or maybe the analogy plays perfectly right, and there's no way to fix a broken fagot... shit, fingers crossed!
And lastly: two fagots are indistinguishable if not under stress. 20 arrows suspended in the air, or simply resting in your hands, don't break by themselves -- you have a literal emergency in your hands if they do. But the same is true for one single arrow, it will comfortably withstand the atmospheric pressure. However, try to bend them or hang something at their tips, and the difference will be noticeable. This means that unless you're under stress you couldn't possibly know how much stress you can really handle. And also that you can't compare two different people in terms of their "mental strength" without putting them under stress.
Now, how does this fit into the mind of some person?
The way I see it, there isn't one single fagot to take it all. It seems more natural to me that there are several fagots, each with a different "purpose", or for a different kind of aspect of life or relationship.
Why I think that's the case: if I have a shit day at work, I won't feel stressed with University because of it, or vice versa. Another example, probably more obviously: if I have a fight with someone, let's say a really ugly one, I won't feel stressed/angry when talking with someone else because of it; nor will I feel any ill will towards that someone else. SG(e)TM (Sounds Good enough To Me)!
So there's at least some fagot of fagots. Maybe it's really an hierarchy: there's the main fagot, composed of the society/work fagot, the learning/University fagot, the personal life fagot, the general life fagot, ...
The society/work fagot may be split into the "social status" fagot, money fagot, career fagot (maybe tied to "social status"), ...
The learning/University fagot may be split into the self-learning fagot (the shit you like/want to learn), the research fagot (the shit the scientific community thinks is dope), the grades fagot (the shit grades you get at classes), ...
The personal life fagot may be split into a fagot for each relationship with a person, including the self-fagot.
There's just this something I still can't explain, and that doesn't seem to translate well through the "Fagot Hierarchy Theory" I described above: what would bring one to the point of suicide?
From the theory it seems that suicide shouldn't even be considered unless the main fagot breaks -- all the fagots under it break? But I don't think that one would bring oneself to this point because of just one fagot either.
So what's it take?
Could it be that different fagots have different strengths/capacities? Such that, for example, the main fagot's main source of strength comes from, let's say, the work fagot. In this case, if the work fagot goes to shit, the littlest strain on the other fagots could be enough to break them, and thus break the main fagot as well.
Almost as if the strain "leaked" from one fagot to the other.
How fagots get weakened it's already been discussed. But how do we get to withstand higher levels of strain with time? Dunno...
Do we really become stronger and capable of taking more stress, or do we become "numb" and stop feeling that we're under stress?
If the latter, is it really that we can take more stress? Maybe it's like sleep and caffeine, in that we think we're fine until the lack of sleep starts to hit?