How Atlas Shrugged saved me from depression

I used to suffer from depression several times in my life: in my teenage and during my 20-s. I was never able to understand the reason until I read Atlas Shrugged. Understanding the reason is not enough, but it is a big step ahead. I believe Ayn Rand’s ability to understand human psychology is really underrated, and if we think about the fact that economy is just about human behavior and incentives, the insight you get about why socialist economists do not work are so spot on.

To understand my psychological issues I had to think about my ascendants too: my grandfather and my parents. My grandfather lived under a totalitarian communist dictatorship. He was more intelligent and knowledgeable than the average of the population, reason why he had an important post in the government. But by the time passing the regime became worse and harsher (the usual pattern of communist dictatorships) and the despots needed more trusted people and intelligent and competent and hard-working people were becoming more dangerous. For this reason, the quality of the people in the important roles was decreasing: people would be hired for their submissiveness to the regime and not for their abilities, especially because many able people started to get punished and/or executed because of some stupid critic to the status quo. Enver Hoxha acted preventively: if he judged that some people might become a danger to his status quo he would eliminate such people before they could act on anything. My grandfather, as many other competent people in charge, started to complain that it was impossible to work with incompetent co-workers who were hired because of their submissiveness and that the situation was becoming unbearable. Therefore, like many other like him in that period, he was condemned to exile in a remote isolated village. When I was reading Atlas Shrugged I was shocked by the similarities of the story with the situation of the Albanian regime: yet Atlas Shrugged was written before the regime had started: it predicted everything.

There is an important pattern in my grandfather’s story: he tried to do his best for the country but he was condemned because of it. He was condemned for being too honest, for being more competent than the average. Because the regime couldn’t give a place to people who were better than the average: they were becoming dangerous so to ensure the status quo they should all be eliminated. It is paradoxical, in my opinion such issue is the main focus of Atlas Shrugged: to be punished for trying to do your best is the opposite of a good incentive. But that’s what communism and any other totalitarianism is about: everyone should be in the average, those who overcome the limit line are punished.

Now, let’s go back to myself, my story. My story was a story about punishments from doing the right things, and maybe it still is. When I was a little child I couldn’t communicate but when I grew a little older I still was ‘the pretty girl from super protective parents’, so everybody would keep a distance from me like I was too different. We changed neighborhood when I became a teenager but still I was prettier than the average and I had something I never understood what that made the people around me envious. Maybe all teenagers are envious and it is normal and I just was too sensible. So I was always victim of bullism in every school I went to. I never had a real friend, like a deep friend or something, at a certain point they would reveal they didn’t really like me and betray me. It seemed that they were afraid I could take away their boyfriends’ or the attention of other people or something like that. I remember a guy telling me “It is normal a girl like you cannot have other girl friends, you are too attractive and nobody wants to lose attention, that’s how it works here”. He wasn’t wrong, I noticed it was a common pattern in my hometown. As a teenager I tried to do my best to be attractive but it just ended up in punishment. Doing what I really loved and trying to be myself or a better version of myself would just end up in punishments. It was the reverse-incentive pattern you see in Atlas Shrugged. Later in life I started to become scared of improving myself or looking too attractive.

Then I went in University because I wanted to show myself and other people that I wasn’t just pretty I had brains too. I thought that it would be a place where if you study hard and are intelligent you get good marks, otherwise you don’t. That at least in the case of qualities like intelligence there might be some justice and sense of order. Especially in my master’s degree, I was very motivated to do my best. But I was often disappointed, so much that I couldn’t study anymore and I fell into depression again. I didn’t understand that all you had to do was obeying the rules and answer only what you are asked to in the exact way the Professors want. You shouldn’t think by yourself and step out of the line: you would be punished. And I was punished again for doing what I believed was the right thing. For stepping out of the line. I understood that academia was not the place for me so I gave up my dream to become a researcher.

Then in the job market the pattern kept repeating again: I complained that we weren't working fast enough in a team where I was working (it didn’t even seem as real work) and I really wanted to work harder. But I was punished with doing a task that didn’t teach anything and that was ridiculously useless. All I had to do is follow the rules and not give any opinion or thought. In another place I tried to work hard and did far better than the expectations of my supervisors, but they didn’t seem to award me for that: instead, they hired a boss that had the task of cutting my legs: making me less relevant. So, still the pattern of reverse-incentive repeats again.

This pattern showed itself even in my relationship with other guys. Once a guy dumped me for a girl who was less pretty, less intelligent, less interesting. I know it sounds a bit arrogant, but he told me openly that I was too strange to him. I know in relationships concepts like better-worse don’t make sense and sound very selfish and arrogant: you either are liked or not. But I lived it very badly, because I tried to reveal myself as I really am and felt not understood and betrayed, seen and treated like an alien. I felt that if I had lied about me, to look more like the other normal girls he would have liked me. I again felt like I was punished for doing the right thing.

It is obvious if you read this: the lesson is just do what other people ask you and don’t step out the line: you shouldn’t be too attractive, too intelligent and you don’t have any reason to work hard (at least not for other people). If you step out the line you will get punished. Right, all you have to do is to keep yourself inside a measure. It sounds easy, but it is not.

Actually, the reasons of my depression are a bit deeper than that: I remember I sensed that there was something strange and controversial in me, something important I knew that I could never reveal, I perceived myself as a heretic or something like that because of my unusual opinions about freedom and individualism. So I felt that if I chose to do the right thing in my life, what I believe is beautiful and right, I would get punished like Christ in the cross. That’s the end of heretic people. I remember every time I saw the image of Christ bearing the cross I started crying and felt so much pain, yet at the beginning I couldn’t understand why it seemed so painful to me. After reading Atlas Shrugged I understood why: the Christ bearing the cross is like Atlas bearing the world. I identified with Christ bearing the cross: Christ representing my deep and true self that is so heretic and strange. And bearing the cross the punishment for being like this: the punishment for being yourself and keep doing what you believe is the right thing to do.

I have this strange idea that your mind is not just one mind: it is different minds merged inside, like different machine learning bots. Machine learning works with a very simple principle understood by Bayes: it has some priors that that are retrieved by real life observations. And through these priors it makes predictions. If your priors are that doing what is good and beautiful and improving yourself in the way that you believe is right will lead you to punishment you will stop doing it. You will stop improving yourself. If you were punished for working hard you will stop working hard. That’s basically all Atlas Shrugged is about. That’s the totalitarian communist government. But here is the most important point: can you live differently? Can you live a life where you stop doing what you think is the best thing to do, stop improving yourself, trying to remain in mediocrity, give up to your dreams because they might be too heretic, just be content with a life where you don’t do your best. Can you live like that? Is such life worthy to be lived? The alternative is to keep walking on and getting punished: punishment after punishments, continuously: like Christ that just walks ahead to the Cross. Every step one does towards what he believes is right and beautiful might be just a step ahead towards one’s own crucifixion.

Therefore, I understood that there were different minds inside my mind fighting against each other. Depression is a period of indecision: you have to make the decision whether to live or to kill yourself. But obviously such decision isn’t an easy decision to make.

You can interpret the characters in a fictional story as different aspects of the personality of the author. I have noticed this works very well. In the case of Atlas Shrugged the characters stuck into the communist reverse-incentive alike situation can be interpret as different personalities handling the situation in different ways. Dagny just keeps going on quetly, she won’t be punished harshly because she is quiet but she won’t get anywhere, Rearden is the one who fights openly and aggressively so he really risks his life and everything, he is punished different times and fights over again and again, Cheryl is the one who gives up and commit suicide, and last, John Galt is the one who tries to find an alternative; something creative and innovative.

Thanks to reading Atlas Shrugged I understood a lot about myself and my suffering, I understood that there were these different characters fighting against each other in my mind: Dagny, Rearden, Cheryl and John Galt. The machine learnings in my mind through my priors made a very dark and awful prediction: you can only choose 2 paths. The first path is to live according to your ideals of beauty and justice, try to always overcome every line in order to continuously improve yourself as you think it is right to do. If you choose this path you will get punished and suffer as it happened in the past, it will be just like Jesus going towards his own crucifixion. That's not true, but our unconscious mind is like machine learning: it learns from its priors. If a certain behavior has resulted in punishment, the unconscious mind has registered such information and such unconscious mind blocks the conscious mind from repeating such behavior. The second path is to become e mediocre person and to give up to everything that you think it is right and beautiful. Not improve in the way you wish just try to become like everyone else, and especially, not do anything dangerous and innovative. In this case you will not suffer any punishment, but you won’t live the life you wished you could. Which path to take? My mind interpreted that either those 2 paths are awful and painful, the second one is like being dead inside and the first one is about going to be killed. Therefore at a certain moment it invented a third path that maybe it is less painful: the path of killing myself before having to endure such painful outcomes. It is a mistake that death is the worse of everything like many people tend to think. There are a lot of things that are far worse than death: torture, for example, is often worse than death. Since we all are going to die anyway our mind doesn’t consider death to be the worst choice to take: it is typical even to some animals to slowly die by refusing to eat when they are sick or something is making them suffer. Even in nature, death is not the less rational choice to make. Therefore, when a person is faced with a reality that just brings pain and when all the hope dies, death may become the most rational choice to make to the unconscious mind. Consider that our mind doesn’t have infinite information and like machine learning, it only learns based on past experiences: if past experiences were negative, the future predictions will be negative too.

Thanks to Atlas Shrugged I understood why I was suffering from depression: the minds inside my mind had made their calculations based on my past experience and the prediction they made was very dark and scary. So dark that death could be the best choice to make: “if you kill yourself now you will save yourself a lot of useless effort and punishments and suffering, because you are going to die anytime” this was something the Cheryl in my mind was telling to me. But you never know if the predictions are correct, so there was Dagny in my mind who would never lose her hope and tell me that I should walk on as usual. And the Rearden in my mind was telling me that there is nothing wrong with myself, it is the world that is wrong, so you should not be scared of manifesting yourself and even the heretic and dangerous part of yourself. Even though, I have to admit, at a certain moment my Rearden started to vanish. I was always more and more scared of telling what I really thought and started to express my thoughts only anonymously. I believe the Rearden inside me died.

Where does Dagny find the strength to go on despite the fact that she understands that everything is falling apart and that she is not getting anything or going anywhere? The reason is in the fact that she enjoys the journey, the job she does, the life she does. She is self-confident and has a high self-esteem. For this reason she doesn’t care about other people’s approval and recognition. This is her strength and the reason why she hold on.

Now comes the most interesting part: John Galt. I remember that at that period I started to manifest an increasing interest into individualism and libertarianism. I never understood why I was becoming so obsessed about it and never thought there were some deep psychological reasons. John Galt represented a fourth path: the fourth alternative. As I said the first alternative is walking on risking being punished, the second giving up and becoming mediocre, the third killing yourself. But a machine learning inside me found an interesting alternative: the alternative of manifesting the meta-truth. Fighting against the obstacles by manifesting the truth about those obstacles to the world, the path of the revelation. John Galt finds an innovative solution to the problem: he tries to create another space for people who want to overcome the limits the communist – totalitarian alike society has imposed upon them. And he makes a revelation: in John Galt speaks he reveals the truth to the people. I realized that being a libertarian is similar to John Galt revealing the truth. By embracing the libertarian ideals and fighting to promote them I was subconsciously choosing the John Galt path: the path of the revelation. In fact, that was exactly the reason why I became passionate about freedom and libertarianism: it was the John Galt inside me that made this decision.

Understanding the reason why you are depressed is not enough to heal from it, so what helped me? At that moment once I made this important realization I had to think about the predictions that the machine learnings in my mind had done: were those predictions good or not? Is it true that if you choose to live a life according to your own values and try to manifest that heretic but important part of yourself will get you punished? Many would say just be careful, speak at the right moment and try to look stupid at the right moment. But it is not so easy doing it in practice. What if you have to hide and stay silent all of your life, hide all of your innovative potential because you are scared you will get punished by it? Is it not different from choosing the path of mediocrity? Isn’t it painful? Anyways, I wondered a lot about it and decided to think about the people who really chose to manifest themselves despite the obstacles. I thought that in the past it was harder, executions were far more common, as in totalitarian countries now when for sure you would end up executed. But in an actual Western society nobody will execute you for just being a little different and heretic, it happens but it’s uncommon. The issue is you will likely lead a really miserable life with a lot of refusals and unsuccess. Or live in the margins of the society. But there are many people who made it despite their obstacles especially in the Western societies. That’s what makes Western society different: the fact that you can make it. At first I thought about John Galt, despite the fact that he rebels at the end he decides to speak up, to reveal his own values and ideas. Ayn Rand decides that he has to speak up at a certain point. And there is a happy ending! Like in the Fountainhead, the main characters win! Doesn’t John Galt represent the message that Ayn Rand gives? So I thought about Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand faced a lot of obstacles in her life: her work was refused lots of times before it was published. But at the end Rand’s life was cool, she didn’t die before seeing the glory she deserved, she earned a lot of followers, lets say that her story is a happy ending story, like the John Galt’s one. And it’s not the only one. Therefore, my dark prediction was not that good, you don’t really know what might happen in life. You could win or lose, you can’t know. So I thought that since we are going to die anyways maybe it is better to give it a try. I understood that it was because of my awful past that my unconscious mind would always do awful predictions, and those awful prediction would affect negatively in my choices by creating a negative loop. Maybe the most important power in life is to not let your past define your future. So when I understood all of this I decided that to elaborate my unconscious block and dilemma and I was started to stop suffering from depression anymore.