Gaslighting Yourself to the Good Life

An acquaintance once told me she’d attended talk therapy for several years, and I asked if it helped.

“It makes me feel better to talk about things,” she said. “But talking doesn’t change reality. Shitty things are still shitty after you’ve talked about them.”

I asked if she’d tried other therapy types — like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) — that work on our perceptions of reality and help us question our assumptions.

She shrugged. “That’s just another way of gaslighting, but you’re doing it to yourself. I think I know what my reality is like.”

I didn’t press the point, but I completely disagreed. Reality isn’t going to change because I want it to, but I’ve found my feelings and perspectives about reality are surprisingly pliable because I’m often mistaken about what reality is. Fixing the perception often removes or radically reduces the pain.

I remembered this conversation after Margaux read one of my recent Cicero essays, and asked for help with “seeing the world as it truly is,” which is a major philosophic aim and a calmer way of being.

It occurred to me that my suggestions to her would be interpreted as “start self-gaslighting yourself” by significant chunks of humanity. Most people agree that objective reality exists. They just think it has intrinsic properties like “good” and “bad,” or at least that their value judgements are “perceptual facts”. What’s the difference between seeing a rainy day and dubbing it “bad” and seeing a color and recognizing that it’s blue?

They think, isn’t it obvious how we should judge losing a job or winning the lottery? The value or lack thereof seems self-evident. And the strength of our emotions — joy at some occurrences and anxiety and sorrow at others — reinforces our visceral judgements. And besides, many humans echo our interpretations. We must be right.

To question these perceptual facts is to meddle with our sense of self, question our sanity, and raise the possibility that the world is not what we think it is. It seems a fool’s errand, a self-destructive attempt to trick ourselves into feeling crazy (gaslighting). When you tell yourself reality doesn’t line up with your beliefs, you must be mad, foolish, or ignorant, and who wants to be any of that?

And it hurts! Critically question the ideologies and labels we’ve let into our identity — which often dictate our judgements about reality — and we feel the sting of cognitive dissonance.

But there are a few reasons why we might try to see clearly anyway:

• We’re in long-term emotional pain and are willing to endure some identity demolition to get out of it.

• We realize we’ve “believed” our way into a corner, and a constricting web of judgments has left us with no maneuvering room. We want to be free!

• We’re unusually attached to seeing reality as it is, without the filter.

If you want out of the madhouse for any reason, you’re in good company.

Around 500 B.C., the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus championed the idea that human perception is fundamentally flawed and we’re prone to fooling ourselves. “Nature loves to hide,” he wrote in Fragment 123. He thought there was an objective truth, but most of us are asleep and can’t see it. “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own [idios kosmos—private world].

It’s in this private, deluded world in our skulls that our problems crop up. Buddha had related ideas, and in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a prisoner escapes from a cave of delusions, only to return to tell the inmates what lies beyond. They think he’s gone mad and try to kill him because he’s threatening their comfortable certainties. There’s a price to waking up.

In ancient Greek, the word for truth is Aletheia, which translates to “un-concealment” or “un-forgetting.” Reality is veiled in part by human self-deception, and philosophy is the best tool for pulling back the curtain.

We’ll probably never see reality exactly as it is — we’ve too many biases coloring the lenses through which we view it. But there’s no question that we can see much more clearly and relieve much of the pain that goes with our self-deception.

Suffering and other strong emotions are the blaring siren alerting us that something may be amiss in our perception of reality. When we feel anxiety, anger, excessive desire, FOMO, or whatever, we need to pay attention.

So if you jump at a loud bang, your heart races while contemplating public speaking, the flush of anger colors your cheeks at an insult, or dread knots your stomach at a hurricane forecast — stop.

This initial gut reaction is not the truth, according to the philosopher Epictetus. It is a Phantasia — an “impression” or “presentation.” Note that it shares a root with fantasy. The philosopher Seneca believes these initial impressions lead to Protopathiai — “first movements” or “pre-emotions”. They weren’t any more “real” than jumping when something goes bang.

As these crop up, Epictetus wants us to “…say to every disagreeable impression [phantasia], ‘You’re an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’ Then examine it and test it by these rules that you possess.”

When keeping initial reactions at arm’s length like this, we gain space to see what they’re really about. We haven’t yet agreed that they have any relation to reality. We can examine them on the fly, which may take some practice to do well, but finding a quiet moment to journal like a philosopher about the impression may allow us to go deeper.

So how do we test these impressions? I’ll give you Epictetus’s way, but also some “easier” and approachable ways that can strip away a few layers of delusion. If you agree that these things are true beforehand and internalize them, then you will have a series of “tests” to use against your phantasia as they crop up. The more you use them, the easier it becomes to throw impressions out for failing to pass muster. Each time you do, you see reality a bit more clearly.

Not just us, but whole societies and teams of experts are wrong all the time.

When I was a kid, much of the sci-fi featured bleak futures in which Earth was overcrowded with humans and nature had been stripmined by overconsumption. Humans were shipped off planet to distant colonies to relieve the crush. These stories were inspired by real demographic projections and dire media coverage, and they penetrated society’s consciousness.

The whole thing is laughable now, with Earth’s population set to peak early. People switched from worrying about overpopulation to worrying about population collapse. But before we realized the error, many people made stupid mistakes. Many were wracked by anxiety for no good reason, but it had a real-world impact too. China’s one-child policy was pretty dystopian, caused a great deal of suffering, and damaged to the nation’s future — all to escape a delusion of an overcrowded earth.

Similarly, as recently as 2009 experts claimed we’d reached “peak oil” and our advanced civilization — run on oil-derived fertilizers, plastics, and EV batteries — was doomed to collapse back into the 16th century. Now we’ve found so much oil that the new fear is that we’ll destroy the Earth via global warming by burning so much of it.

Panama disease hasn’t killed off the banana. The Y2K bug fizzled to nothing. Acid rain didn’t destroy our forests. And the list goes on.

Yes, you might say, we were wrong about all that, and the anxiety was misplaced, but now we know the truth, and our anxiety about population collapse and global warming are completely valid! And Panama disease will kill off the banana any day now.

Maybe, maybe not. We do not know how things will turn out. But either way, wasting our precious lives labeling a kaleidoscope of possible futures “bad”won’t help the situation. It just makes us miserable.

So when you feel anxious about something, remind yourself — No one knows for certain what it will bring. We could be wrong. If we are, we’ll have spent hours in misery for no good reason. And if we’re right, the worry and dread did us no good anyway.

So we say “scientists say the world is warming.” But not “this is a disaster.”

Or we say, “the pundit says the world will be an uninhabitable hot box in my children’s lifetime,” but add, “but no one can foresee the outcome of so many variables.”

What seems a disaster often turns out to be a blessing.

We get laid off, only to find our dream job. We’re forced to leave a beloved city, but discover paradise somewhere else.

And even when phantasiai that seem unpleasant remain unpleasant, they often change us for the better. We become more skilled, capable, or resilient in enduring them. Some hardships that have bettered me so much that I’d be reluctant to trade them away.

So we say, “This seems unpleasant, but it could be neutral or pleasant in the end.”

Or, “this feels painful right now, but if I play my cards right I will emerge stronger.” In this way, we can appreciate the unpleasant for what it might lead to, and how we can become more competent, resilient, and agentic humans because of it.

“…examine it and test it by these rules…first and foremost by this one, whether the impression relates to those things that are within our power, or those that aren’t within our power.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion, 1.5

If a disliked thing happens, it falls into one of two categories. We can do something about it, or we can’t.

If we can’t do anything about it, there’s no use worrying over it. Just go on living your life, adapting as seems best. And if there’s something we can do about it, even if our control is incomplete, we should just do that and the other useful things in our power. But there’s still no need for worry, because worry just makes everything worse.

Judging reality rarely makes sense, but it particularly makes no sense when there’s nothing you can do about.

The next level, which many find harder to adopt, requires shifting to an alien mindset. It means declaring most of what we’ve thought good or bad to be delusional.

Instead, while you still have preferences, you decide nothing is truly good or bad except virtue. Luckily, we always control virtue, so we can’t be denied it, and there’s no need to worry about losing the one truly good thing.

If you find yourself with negative emotions, you just ask — does this involve virtue? If it does, take the virtuous action. If it doesn’t, you can relax and let it go.

I’ve written many pieces about the thorny subject of virtue, but to briefly recap:

If you want something that’s not virtuous, you can use decomposition or Horace’s Wedge to help see that what you're after isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And every day, as challenges pop up, you start playing the great game to reframe it all. Each day, find what’s hard in work and life and subvert it with virtue.

It’s not easy, and Epictetus knew it, but it works.

I know, I know. The few readers I haven’t lost are probably thinking…right…so just gaslight yourself about virtuous nonsense. And fair enough. I get it. That’s why I shut up when talking to that acquaintance about therapy. She wouldn’t have the patience for any of this.

But consider that maybe the self-gaslighters are those insisting on strong opinions about our value-neutral reality. The universe just is. So what sort of nonsense have they wrapped it in to find it so upsetting?

Let’s invert this, and ask: what’s the most surefire way to make life miserable? Surely it must be holding your own contentment hostage by demanding things you don’t control conform to your subjective standards, and then being unhappy when they don’t.

Directly facing reality may be hard, but willfully misperceiving it is incredibly expensive. Think of it as an opportunity cost. When we spend limited mental energy dwelling on "bad" stuff that might be delusional, the cost is not building a "good" present in this moment.

By questioning our phantasiai, we aren't retreating into a dream world of our own. We’re waking to one where we’re no longer victims of our perspective. We start to see clearly. The most comfortable way to live isn’t enduring a bad life with a stiff upper lip, but recognizing that “bad” was a fantasy story we’ve been telling ourselves all along.

A clearer perception of reality, however imperfect, is a much more beautiful view.

Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.

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