Erasing Memory

At this appalling wee hour of the morning I came across the following on boingboing, which I haven't visited in quite some time and only stumbled across now after following the randomest of trails, true to the subtitle of this blog, but I will not enumerate the entire list of links explored now. Sometime I should track one of these trails of mine, though. What caught my attention was this:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/14/rewriting-fear-memor.html

Being able to rewrite the fear from a painful, emotional experience- selectively erasing bad memories. It might sound good to some- but to me, even if it works, without some terrible kind of side effect (and I imagine a side effect could be pretty bad) but still, I think it's a terrible idea, for all its shiny intriguiness. (new word there!) You're supposed to learn from bad experiences- to face your fears and overcome them! To grow as a person! The bad things were not meaningless, nothing in life is. Everything that happens to you is an oppurtunity to be used. Part of being human is facing experiences that scare you and push you out of your comfort zone.

If you can just erase all that by taking a pill or whatever then what was the point? What's the point of experiencing anything if you can just choose to erase it all afterwards? Will we start erasing all the bad decisions we make from our memories, so we literally have no regrets?

To me, this seems wrong. I wish they would think things through before trying ideas like this out on people. Progress for the sake of progress should not be the goal, and even when some advantages can be gained from it (helping people with severe PTSD from really horrible events no person should have to think about, I guess?) first you have to think about all the consequences, their implications, and the eventualities that stem from them. If not, humanity will suffer all the more.

Anxiety by Choice

I was talking to someone who'd just read the NYTimes article in the magazine last Sunday, and she said, they made an assumption throughout the entire article that she felt was unjustified. They assumed being anxious was a negative, unwanted trait.

"I like worrying!" she claimed.

But why would someone want to be anxious? Surely it only inhibits you from action, and makes you waste time worrying about phobias that are incredibly unlikely instead of dealing with what's real.

The article did make some mention that some people who are high-anxiety don't even realize it, interpreting the stomach ache from fidgety nerves and the tense flight-or-fight response as an adrenaline buzz, not as paralyzing.

Is there an advantage to being chilled out? If you don't have any worries, and nothing really matters- whatever way it turns out is fine with you- are you missing out on something the worried people have- caring?

I suspect the answer is, as often it is, "a happy medium". But figuring out where that line lies is the battle of most of a lifetime. And I think there are some people who are not aware that it is a battle.

Don't let that be you- don't live the unexamined life. (Yes, that's from Wicked.) So where is your line? When is worrying too much and when is it wrong to be too chilled out?