I’ve been unemployed for a while with an unstable housing situation that’s just made it all the harder to get a job. I’ve been reading a lot(it’s been a driving force behind me transitioning from demsoc, or radlib, to being an ML), but I’ve also noticed a change in my outlook. I have PTSD, and suffered a lot from depressive episodes. But the more I learn, the fewer episodes I’ve had. I no longer view the world as a hell that I had to get through just to feel the occasional spark of joy. Getting rid of a lot of the individualist thought that I had before has changed my viewpoint. I now know, that with other principled people, that the world doesn’t have to be this way, that it’s changeable, and that we’ve got much of the strategy for how to do so already laid out for us. It’s made me much more optimistic than I had been, ready to face the struggles of the world because I know that we can change it.
Learning theory changed my outlook on life a lot. It put a stop to my doomer lifestyle and gave me a light at the end of the tunnel. I got (and still get) a lot of comments from ex-coworkers who said that, in the last few months of this year when I quit my job, that I seemed happier and healthier.
I guess mostly it took away my fear of the world by giving me words and the tools to really understand the world around me.
This played a huge part. Learning to look at the world in a materialist way just made a bunch of puzzle pieces click into place, and the anxiety of constant uncertainty was largely erased. Life is still very much uncertain, but having that lens let’s you get much more accurate when looking at what may happen.