For the past few days or weeks, I haven’t been in a really good mental shape. Let me tell you how it started. I was scrolling YouTube maybe a month ago, and I saw a thumbnail of a website that had gore content in it. I really couldn’t think of anything; I just went to the site and watched one or two videos out of curiosity. But while watching those videos, I mentally fucked myself up, which is really bad. Then, I decided to stop watching it and went back to trying to do my own stuff that I had going on.
But I couldn’t escape the thoughts in my head, like, “Man, how could people be this cruel?” I really had watched some horrifying shit that I just wanted to forget, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have anyone to share what was going on with, or what I had just seen yesterday. I was really scared and really mentally vulnerable at that point, but I didn’t go back to watch anything again, even though going there was tempting.
So, I tried and tried to reason through it, but as deep as I got into that hole of thinking, I didn’t realize it, but I was sabotaging my mental health. There is no point in reasoning through an action or an act that isn’t rational.
Learn When to Reason
Here is the thing: we are taught to reason, but we are never taught when to reason and when not to reason. There is a difference, and I don’t know about all the cases, but “Evil is irrational”—don’t try to reason through it. If you have studied any game theory, then you must be familiar with what a payoff matrix is. Whenever we are choosing an option, we are choosing based off an assumption that the other party is acting rationally in their favor, and that isn’t the case with evil.
When you are up against evil, remember this: you aren’t supposed to play the game; you just have to end the game. End the game. Because the other party isn’t thinking rationally; it goes all the way, and it will do anything to see you suffer.
This irrational game hurts both ways: “Evil destroys even itself.” ~ Aristotle
The takeaway is don’t reason when it’s unnecessary. In some situations, it’s better to follow heuristics.
How to Protect Yourself
There exists a lot of evil in this world, but if you can somehow quantify it, it’s still much less than Good. There isn’t anything you can do to reduce evil; it’s a duality, and it will exist no matter what. Learn to spot the evil, and get away from it as soon as possible. Remember what I said earlier: your priority shouldn’t be to win the game, it’s to end the game, or simply avoid participating in it as a preemptive measure.
Evil comes on a spectrum, but here I am talking about the most heinous version of it. Talking shit about someone behind their back is bad, but not heinous.
Develop observation skills. You don’t have to ask people if they are evil; they will answer it themselves by their actions. And when you know the answer, just move away, because they might cause you harm—maybe not too much (because it’s a spectrum), but there will be damage.
Learn to Deal with Tragedy
Let’s say if something happens to you that was done with a pure intent of evil, how are you supposed to react? Just imagine: why would a person want to hurt you? Why would they do that? What is the reason?
Learn to accept tragedy. Bad things happen to people; it’s devastating, but it does happen. You should accept it and move on; it’s an accident. When a bird shits on your shirt, you don’t start asking, “Why did this happen to me?” By doing this, you are inflicting suffering upon yourself. You just accept that something bad happened to you and move on. It reminds me of that conversation between the peacock and Po from Kung Fu Panda, where the peacock(Shen) says, _“How did you find peace?, i took away your parents, Everything, I scarred you for life.” and then po replies “See thats the thing shen scars heal!” and the conversation goes on.
What went wrong with me was the fact that when I saw those videos and titles, I didn’t have the courage to just accept it. I was devastated (And thats the normal reaction after watching those videos), and I did what I have done my whole life: asking questions. Why does this happen? Why are people like this? Why would someone want to hurt someone this badly? It’s an endless pit. You are essentially applying rationality to something irrational. If you can’t get out of your head, maybe try to distract yourself by other means, but not by doing extreme things like drugs. It should be something that occupies your mind instead of that thing, so that you stop asking those questions or just do your work.
While asking questions like these, I fucked up my mental health. But the positive side of it is that I learned from that incident. You know what else I learned? That I am not courageous enough to accept it and move on. As I am growing older, I am realizing I am not courageous enough. I had stumbled upon gore content a few years back, but at that time, I was very distracted; my mind was occupied by things, a lot of things. I was binge-watching YouTube content, Netflix, and all those things, so I don’t remember it hurting me a bit. It was easy for me to move on. But now I am not like that. I don’t distract myself a lot because I need an empty mind to think and work on hard things that i do. And this time, when that thing got into this empty mind, it was pure chaos and a mental fuck up.
The biggest lesson for me from this incident was to take care of my mental peace and stay away from this kind of content as much as possible, because it can hurt your mental health. I will be writing more about dealing with a non-distracted/empty mind in another article, but that’s enough for today.
I didnt wanted this incident to happen to me, but well it happened and i learned something, so i decided why not share it. also i now know the reason why philosophers go mad, and i will avoid that path completely
it feels light after sharing this
~ Swarit Shukla