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> Interestingly, depression and anxiety might actually be a feature of developing this skillset, not a bug - these two mental disorders are endemic among these

> Interestingly, depression and anxiety might actually be a feature of developing this skillset, not a bug - these two mental disorders are endemic among these fields as well. Given how insightful your comment was, I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. Why, outside of comorbidity, do you think depression and anxiety might be related to developing this skillset?

drjesusphd 8y ago
If I may take a stab at it... I think it might have something to do with the disparate scales of thought vs emotion compared to what humans have evolved to deal with. Today, when you're tasked with creating something new, and your identity is invested in such a mission, it's a much more gargantuan task than being indispensable to your local tribe. Competing at a global level is just not something we're generally wired to do. I would be curious if world-class athletes, movie stars, business executives, politicians, etc. also have similar emotional problems. But our emotions do not work on such a scale. They're meant to deal with the anxieties of what a few hundred people in your community think and how to secure your next meal. In creative lines of work (however one chooses to define it), one is trying to be the superlative best or first to achieve something valuable on the scale of billions of people. And you probably hope that such a creation outlives you. We have not been designed for such tasks at an emotional level.
nostrademons 8y ago
This aside is more speculative and significantly based on personal experience doing 2 green-field products for one employer, founding 3 startups, and doing some internal research projects at Google... But what I've noticed is that aside from frequently co-occurring with creative work, depression and anxiety are frequently the trigger to finding a non-obvious solution and making forward progress. In other words, they're not just mental disorders; they're feelings that can give you useful signal about how to proceed next, if you listen very carefully to them. Anxiety is basically your emotional systems being hyper-engaged, such that you get an emotional response from nearly everything. Depression feels like the opposite, a deadening of your emotional senses, but oftentimes escaping the depression actually points the way to escaping your real-world problem. If you can imagine a future where you are not depressed (which if you've suffered clinical depression is actually quite difficult), very likely that's a strong signal that that's what you should actually be doing, no matter how weird or unreasonable it sounds. There's some evidence for this hypothesis here (2009): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/depressions-evolutionary/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/depressions-evolu... You could also think of the anxiety related to creative work in relation to System 1 of the brain in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. In highly ambiguous circumstances (which basically all creative work is), it makes sense for your brain to become hypersensitive to all available stimuli, and to quickly pattern-match on a course of action without too much rational consideration. We experience that sort of emotional overload as anxiety.

drjesusphd 8y ago

If I may take a stab at it... I think it might have something to do with the disparate scales of thought vs emotion compared to what humans have evolved to deal with. Today, when you're tasked with creating something new, and your identity is invested in such a mission, it's a much more gargantuan task than being indispensable to your local tribe. Competing at a global level is just not something we're generally wired to do. I would be curious if world-class athletes, movie stars, business executives, politicians, etc. also have similar emotional problems. But our emotions do not work on such a scale. They're meant to deal with the anxieties of what a few hundred people in your community think and how to secure your next meal. In creative lines of work (however one chooses to define it), one is trying to be the superlative best or first to achieve something valuable on the scale of billions of people. And you probably hope that such a creation outlives you. We have not been designed for such tasks at an emotional level.

nostrademons 8y ago

This aside is more speculative and significantly based on personal experience doing 2 green-field products for one employer, founding 3 startups, and doing some internal research projects at Google... But what I've noticed is that aside from frequently co-occurring with creative work, depression and anxiety are frequently the trigger to finding a non-obvious solution and making forward progress. In other words, they're not just mental disorders; they're feelings that can give you useful signal about how to proceed next, if you listen very carefully to them. Anxiety is basically your emotional systems being hyper-engaged, such that you get an emotional response from nearly everything. Depression feels like the opposite, a deadening of your emotional senses, but oftentimes escaping the depression actually points the way to escaping your real-world problem. If you can imagine a future where you are not depressed (which if you've suffered clinical depression is actually quite difficult), very likely that's a strong signal that that's what you should actually be doing, no matter how weird or unreasonable it sounds. There's some evidence for this hypothesis here (2009): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/depressions-evolutionary/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/depressions-evolu... You could also think of the anxiety related to creative work in relation to System 1 of the brain in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. In highly ambiguous circumstances (which basically all creative work is), it makes sense for your brain to become hypersensitive to all available stimuli, and to quickly pattern-match on a course of action without too much rational consideration. We experience that sort of emotional overload as anxiety.