A vision of a better psychological future

Recently, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about the state of our collective psychology. A mass of ideas and possibilities of what the future could look like has been swirling and crystallizing in my mind. I’d like to try and paint it here.

This is the gist of it:

1. It seems like everyone is quietly struggling with trauma.

2. Our experience could be a lot better.

3. Psychological healing is a systemic, antifragility intervention.

4. We can do something about it.

Before I jump in, a disclaimer: I am not an expert in any of these fields, yet. The writing below is ‘broad brush strokes sketching some things Amanda observes’. I suspect it has the tone of outrage that arises from seeing a glaring injustice under one’s nose for the first time. I would love for you to see the direction of the brush strokes here, and tell me where you have more pointillistic knowledge and can help me fill in the picture.

I also think it’s really important to understand the worldview out of which writing arises, so you get a sense for the writer’s biases, inclinations, and how to interpret their writing. If you feel similarly, here’s ¹ some context on the events and motivations that led to this post.

Ok, now we’re ready. Let’s go.

It seems like everyone is quietly struggling with trauma

I’ve always been fascinated by people’s inner worlds. What thoughts are happening in your mind as you look at me? What makes your heart beat fast? How old is the little you inside, curled up in the corner? The more I’ve looked and voyaged in people’s hearts and minds, the more a little voice has started to creep up: wait, it whispers, wait, why are we all … so … scared? Why is everyone in a sort of inner battle with themselves, clawed at by voices from their childhood and the ghosts of fear and self-hatred?

When I say ‘everyone is quietly struggling with trauma’, I don’t mean Capital T Trauma – the kind that stems from really terrible events like abuse or sexual assault. I mean little t trauma – events that “exceed our capacity to cope and cause a disruption in emotional functioning”. It’s being told off by a teacher when you were 6, and learning to live within the lines to avoid being yelled at. It’s thinking that your parents’ love is conditional on you achieving, and learning to contort yourself to get love. 

Everyone is walking around with a heavy quilt of beliefs they accumulated throughout their lives that is holding them back from living in a fulfilled, resonant way. I have yet to meet anyone who has fully shrugged off this quilt (and I’ve looked, pretty hard). It’s not anyone’s fault. We just grew up imbibing our environments, societal narratives, and our parents’ trauma, and we weren’t taught how to unwind them.

For many years, the little questioning voice got drowned out. Other, louder voices piped up. You’re so privileged, they said, how dare you complain? Everything is so much better now than it was 100 years ago. Maybe it’s just you and other people are fine. At least we’re not in a war. If the worst we have to deal with is some fear of taking creative risks or a bit of anxiety, that’s a pretty good outcome. 

Then I read a beautiful book, The Listening Society. It had a clear message: The amount of suffering people are going through is not okay, even if it’s been worse in the past, even if we haven’t solved poverty yet. Our psychological experience could be so much better.

This message rippled through me. It was like someone gave me a hall pass to stop sleepwalking and start protesting the status quo. Everywhere I looked, little t trauma jumped out. I popped onto Zoom Memes for Quaranteens and was astounded at how many memes were about anxiety, depression, hating school, hating yourself, being miserable, please help, get me out of here. And we laugh about it, because laughter is the sweetener when the drink is too bitter to swallow. But how is it okay that 34% of the US population is affected by anxiety disorders in their lifetime? How is it okay that so many people are lonely, have abusive relationships, are addicted to alcohol, or have major insecurities that keep them trapped in suboptimal situations? How is it okay that basically every single person is out of touch with their true selves, when it doesn’t have to be this way?

The world got more complex, and our narratives and institutions haven’t kept up. We’re assaulted by stimulation 24/7. We’re facing the kind of problems that require many big actors with competing incentives to cooperate. Every few weeks I have a small 2-min freak out about how nuclear weapons are just sitting there and one time we almost destroyed the world and the only thing that stopped us was one person's bravery and sense of self-agency (before I promptly repress that fear and try to get on with my life). We have an overwhelming number of choices daily: which country and city to live in, which friends to have, what to post on Instagram, what diet to follow, and hundreds more parameters. The guidebook that religion provided has dissipated.

And yet, no one teaches us how to cope with any of this. Schools don’t support us to become creatively fulfilled. They don’t teach us how to process climate change. We learn how to memorize the discounting formula for stocks over a period of 7 years (which, quite frankly, I forgot about 2 weeks after I sat the midterm), but not how to process overwhelming grief. So, we find everyone going through a similar journey, haunted by a malaise about the vast, daunting complexity of the world and the insufficiency of our psychological tools to keep up. But we go through the journey haphazardly – stumbling across solutions by chance – and, mostly, alone.

Our experience could be a lot better

When I ask you what the world will look like 100 years from now, it’s very easy to picture tall glass skyscrapers, plants on the walls of buildings, and sleek autonomous cars (à la solarpunk aesthetic) But when I ask how it will feel, it’s much harder. Why don’t we have clear narratives of the psychological future?

Let me lay out one sketch of what this could look like.

Every child learns the occupation of living². We learn how to process emotions ("What are you feeling? Ah, sadness? How wonderful that you were able to name that. Let's just sit here a while, I'll hold you, just feel it through. It's okay."). We have healthy relationships with anger, sadness, hurt, and fear. We learn that our reality is many narratives layered on top of each other ("You think you’ll never be good at math because you learn more slowly than others? Do you see how that's an interpretation you have? What if you were taught differently?") and how much agency we truly have ("What do you want to create? What's standing in your way? Let's turn it into a plan"). We feel loved, safe, and stable. Because we have so much security in ourselves, we have no need to push others down. We’re taught to try to understand where other people are coming from ("What do you imagine he's feeling right now?"). When we’re in difficult situations, rather than reacting quickly and lashing out, we process and try to empathize. We have stable, healthy relationships with each other that bring us joy. We don’t need to fill a hole of loneliness with social media. We don’t need to clutch identities to protect our ego. We’re resilient, loving, fulfilled.

Isn’t this, fundamentally, what we’re trying to achieve with all our material progress? Everyone needs a base level of material stability, but that alone doesn’t get us there – countries like New Zealand, paradises in many ways, still have some of the highest youth suicide rates in the world.

I think a lot of what therapy does is remind people of their own intrinsic resources. People get stuck thinking that this is just the way it is (I'll always be scared of failure, I'll always interact with my partner this way). And therapy reminds us that: actually, these are false constraints. There are so many ways out and we don’t have to stay trapped in any situation. And I want us to do the same for our psychological visions of the future: instead of thinking that this is all there is, we can realize that it doesn't have to be this way – it could be *so much better*.

Psychological healing is a systemic, antifragility intervention

This is perhaps the most exciting part. Imagine how the entire dynamics of human societies would change in a world filled with healed people. Psychological healing is upstream of so many good things, like having functional political systems, good company cultures, healthy relationships, people caring about climate change – the list goes on.

Why? Many of the issues in these systems (political polarization, putting others down in the workplace, clinging on to toxic relationships, harming the environment out of numbness) come from our own hurt, insecurities, and lack of self-love. When you unwind all of these layers, at the bottom of it all, we end up just loving other people. We have so much more emotional capacity to notice and internalize what others are experiencing.

This higher level of empathy pushes the world closer to an equilibrium of cooperation. It changes the game theoretical calculus: less concern for self and more concern for others means you get more of a payoff by cooperating with others. It even changes the framing of the games: when you understand others’ incentives and desires, it is much easier to convert zero sum situations (either you win or I win) into positive sum (here’s a scenario where we both win). I have a sneaking suspicion that many more situations could be positive sum than we currently think. Imagine what the world would look like if in every choice, everyone pressed the cooperate button.

Antifragility

The world is inevitably going to face disasters on many scales. I am excited about viewing psychological healing in the context of creating a resilient, antifragile system.

On an individual level, the more we heal, the more resilient we become. Healthy emotional processing lets you work through sadness, anger or frustration and have a measured, kind response. The more psychologically resilient our systems become (the less we jump to protests and violence and individualism whenever there’s a problem), the more we’ll be able to cope with the complex challenges we will inevitably have to face.

An amorphous thought that keeps going around my head: Someone has their thumb on the nuclear button (or the AGI-button, or renewable-energy-instead-of-coal button). Would you rather that person have a power complex because their father neglected them or insecurities about being good enough, or that they be psychologically healed and well-adjusted? Would you rather systems optimize for avoiding blame because people are scared of failure and judgment, or that they optimize for bravery and good decision making?

We can do something about it.

What next? This post is an incomplete, first pass at articulating this swirling cloud of ideas. There are many people already doing incredible work in this space – the meditation community, neurotech and psychedelic communities, therapists, coaches and psychiatrists, and a smattering of flourishing and happiness labs³. I don’t yet have a clear sense of which interventions are most promising. But, a couple that I feel excited about:

1. Momentum building and narrative shifting. Let’s shift from a narrative of “psychological healing is a nice-to-have that everyone is haphazardly figuring out themselves” to one of “systematically healing everyone’s trauma and helping people have healthy coping strategies is an urgently important way to achieve our individual goals, to create a resilient society, and help people be much happier and more fulfilled”. Let’s paint the picture of a positive 100-year vision of what it could feel like to be alive. Let’s get everyone talking about effective strategies for psychological healing as much as they talk about climate change. Let’s build the kind of momentum that gets more funding, entrepreneurs, and researchers into this space.

2. Teaching emotional processing. What would the school for the occupation of living look like? What do we systematically teach 5 year olds to help them become psychologically wise? How do we package up the wisdom of therapists & psychologists, and help everyone understand the mechanisms behind healthy psychologies?

I’m really excited to find and talk to people interested in this space. There is so much more for me to learn. I want to understand the mechanisms – what exactly is happening in the brain with trauma? What are the commonalities underlying the different therapies? I want to get a clear sense of what kind of interventions this space needs. Is it movement building, a psychological wisdom fund, an incubator, research, or just focusing on a concrete startup / organization and running with that?

If any of this resonated with you, let’s chat. I would absolutely love to hear: What made sense to you? What didn’t? What interventions do you know of? What do you think are the impactful levers we can pull? If you’re excited about working on this, then let’s definitely chat :) My email is amanda.mai.ngo at gmail.com, and my Twitter is @manda_ngo.

Thank you to Anna Wang, Carmen Lau, Chris Painter, Ethan Perez, Jason Benn, Mackenzie Dion, Richard Ngo, Sasha Chapin, and Vishal Maini for incredibly helpful feedback and cheerleading.

Thanks to Angus Blair, Chris Hagan, Mike McCormick, and Quintin Frerichs for great conversations that helped shape these ideas.

All errors in this post are my own!

1. This post arose from the primordial soup of:

1. Having experienced four years of general talk therapy, one year of CBT, and several months of couple’s therapy and coaching

2. Taking a neurolinguistic programming course that reduced my anxiety by 80% – from fairly debilitating to pretty infrequent

3. Being part of the Effective Altruism movement for 5 years

4. Trying to figure out what’s at the intersection of the most impactful thing to work on and my particular skillset and interests

5. Being pretty obsessed generally with trying to understand people’s mental states, motivations, blockages, and interpersonal dynamics

6. Having many conversations with friends and family where we all realize we’re bumbling our way through unwinding trauma by haphazardly reading things and introspecting

2. Coined by artist Maira Kalman

3. E.G. Happier Lives Institute, Psychosocial Flourishing and Health Lab, and The Human Flourishing Program