black magic

I've been assiduously avoiding coffee for a few weeks now because, with graduation coming up and everything, my emotions were getting hard to handle, and I thought that stimulating my brain would just make me overthink things and come up with newer and more complicated reasons to feel depressed.  But I realized yesterday that in fact it has the opposite effect.  When coffee makes me more awake, I do think more about my problems, but I think about them in a more level-headed way, and I feel less desperate, not more.  By contrast, the other night, when I was exhausted and couldn't sleep, I found myself feeling worse and worse as the night went on (and less able to sleep, and more tired, &c).

It's a small discovery, really, but I still found it uplifting to observe that thinking more clearly makes me happier, not the reverse.  The last time I had drinks with Professor Lilla, he described going through dozens of old diaries and realizing that the question of whether ignorance and bliss are necessarily related had been plaguing him for decades.  For his next book, he's planning to figure out, once and for all, what that tension is about.

For my part, I'm not sure what I think.  Although there's a certain logic to the conclusion that knowing more makes you feel worse, and IQ correlates to propensity for depression to an alarming degree (something like a p value of .51, if I remember correctly), I suspect that at least in terms of relative states within a single lifespan, the opposite is actually true.  Even when I'm thinking about depressing things, I think I'm happier just because I'm thinking, because my own capabilities at those caffeine-fueled moments allow me to believe just a bit more that the world can be known and understood, that I can still make further discoveries and reach new conclusions.  People like to focus on how much crap is on TV and make apocalyptic predictions, but I think that even as the dumb shows get dumber (and more self-aware, interestingly — but that's another post), the smart shows get smarter, and gain wider followings.  I don't think shows like House, The Sopranos, or The Wire would be as big as they are if feeling smart didn't feel good to a lot of people.

Part of the reason I reached this conclusion today, rather than last week, is that I really thought that going to a bar party last night would make me feel better, and it definitely didn't.  Partly because the guy friends I'd hoped would make me feel better just tried to hit on me once they found out I was single, but partly because feeling drunk and stupid just made me feel... stupid.  But having a wide-awake conversation over dinner with Emi and Matt Mankins made everything better, and they were just being themselves.

I think I need to go to grad school.