Actions have an equal and opposite reaction. It’s worked into our brains at an early age, even before we have the language to be able to speak it. At less than a year of age, infants are already capable of understanding the cause-and-effect framework that rules the world. By about six months, infants have also begun to construct their own emotions, and react to the feelings of others. At first, it’s a process of mimicry - they react to the emotional state of their parents - but soon after they are producing de novo emotional reactions to the world around them.

The conceptualization of how the world works - wether it’s comforting or alienating, full of fear vs full of joy, if there is safety or danger - are the foundation on which the rest of experience is built. Children that fail to form a stable emotional bond with their caretakers generally suffer from something called Reactive Attachment Disorder, a condition where they are unable to accurately parse their emotional landscape. In the worst cases, children that are raised in neglectful, violent environments cannot parse the facial expressions that have to do with joy, sadness, and fear - but are perfectly capable of interpreting anger. 

As adults, there individuals continue to have a hard time regulating their emotions, forming strong connections with others, holding down jobs, and they are much more likely to pass these sorts of problems down to the next generation if they do manage to have children. It’s a curse that cannot be lifted, passing from generation to generation through a poorly managed infant experience.

The rest of the population, those that have experienced a relatively peaceful childhood, with parents that were able to meet their socio-emotional needs, the world is a relatively stable place. They have the ability to navigate complex social interactions. They can mange difficult emotions by self-regulating. This means that they’re able to avoid entering a tailspin when something goes wrong - and are also able to escape a tail-spin once it’s initiated. 

This isn’t to say that these individuals never disregulate, or that neglected children can never be stable as adults. It’s more a broadly-binned collection of traits, reflective of an average response. All of us have specific triggers than can allow a small disturbance to snowball into something much larger. The most effective talk therapy programs are basically intense emotional skills training programs, which teach individuals how to recognize the cycle when it begins, and strategies that can help stop the cycle as it approaches.

Things Get Complicated

The interesting thing is that being faced with a difficult task can induce an emotional response all by itself - and the more complex the task, the more emotional the response. The ability to regulate emotions in the face of a difficult task is the greatest predictor of being able to complete the task in the first place. And though there is less war and violence than ever before, which suggests there is also better parenting than during times of famine and global strife, modern humans are stuck with a world that is far more complex than it’s ever been before. Ours is an era of global networks, rather than small-scale interactions.

In a complex system, cause and effect start to blur, and to recede into a complex sea of interactions. Instead of small-scale social networks, where your actions can only affect a handful of people, each decision now seems to have global implications. The fates of billions seeming to hang in the balance of one’s decision to drive a car with low MPG, to freely consume single use plastics, to purchase goods made from sweatshop labor. With enough foresight these concerns can extend into the future, to the yet-unborn that will suffer the fallout of a decision without ever having asked to be born.

A well-trained capacity for relational thinking, the kind that considers the interplay between objects rather than objects in isolation, can help with understanding these sorts of complex effects. But it is hard to imagine that any individual is capable of holding onto all of the moving parts that go into any decision - let alone enormous ones like the production of palm oil, clearing of rainforests, or outsourcing manufacturing, or fixing the healthcare system.  

All actions within a complex system are going to cause unpredictable reactions elsewhere. Stop importing palm oil and forest clearing, and crater the economy of the countries in question. Regulate outsourcing, and prevent market systems from coming into balance - leading to higher prices for goods and a lack of economic development in countries that are being outsourced to. Increase access to health care, and while ensuring acute intervention for many - you may decrease the likelihood for lifestyle interventions.  

Consider heartburn. When I was a kid, I had a bad stomach. I still do, but we’ve managed to learn to get along. My parents took me to specialists who didn’t have a clear understanding of what was happening, doctors what poked and prodded and looked at stool samples, but there was no clear suggestion of what could be causing the effects. When I was a teenager, one of the doctors my mom took me to - a lady whose name has been lost to the fog of time but I remember as looking like a mixture between Jodi Foster and my high school English teacher - suggested a remedy. Perhaps, she said, Nexium would help.

Always excited to show off I knew things, and weirdly anti-pill given my proclivities towards rebelry, I asked what the side effects were. She assured me that there wouldn’t be any - as long as I didn’t take the pills continuously for more than two weeks. Pressed for more details, she confessed that continuous use of the pills would increase the risk of death across the board. I was a pretty nihilistic teenager, but even for me, that was a bargain I wasn’t interested in. I continued to live in daily pain with a stomach that wouldn’t cooperate until I turned 30 - when I finally figured out that daily exercise, a strict diet, and meditation were the only things that could fix my central issue. 

Alternative Solutions

The solution couldn’t be enacted by taking a simple pill - nor would it solve the fact that the doctor didn’t know what was wrong with me, and didn’t have the time to figure it out. Really, I still don’t know what’s wrong with me - microbiome or what, but the solution came from a set of technological changes, rather than a single shift. The alternative that was presented,  a potent chemical treatment, had an equal and opposite reaction - my heartburn would stop, but there would be hell to pay as the change in hydrochloric acid levels caused the calcium to leach from my bones and muscles until, one fine day, the whole thing would just stop working.

We live in a time where things are just irreducibly complex. What that means is that it’s almost impossible to evaluate what it means to take the best action possible. We don’t even know what the “best” action means. We have to place our trust in algorithms - artificial intelligence - that are capable of integrating far more information than the human brain. These algorithms govern decision making in everything from healthcare to sentencing. In many ways, this can be a blessing. When I was in college, one of my general studies courses focused on disparity of treatment for prostate cancer - over-diagnosis in one place, under-diagnosis in another, a huge disparity in the associated healthcare costs. It’s still an issue today.

Today, there are attempts to standardize cancer treatment through the application of algorithms, which many hope will lead to more standardized approaches. Computerized decisions about court cases, advertisements, stock market decisions, even the route you take to work in the mornings (or did, in the before times) are everywhere. And they do great things for us, by taking some of the burden off of our shoulders.

But even so, it’s important that we realize that while the complexity we operate under might require more processing power than any individual is capable of, it’s important not to take the hand off the wheel. And not just in a self-driving car, but more metaphorically. The systems that we use to relieve decision fatigue, to help us self-regulate emotionally when faced with insurmountable challenges of food shortages, a changing planet, a lack of centralized value structures in the vacuum left by the decline of organized religion - are only as good as the factors we train them to consider.