There’s no way that social anxiety, dating insecurity, or self-loathing could be optimal… right?
Once upon a time, Jake felt horrible every time he interacted with other people.
Because he knew no ways of making interactions feel safe, this gave him an incentive to avoid interacting with others. Guess what happened next!
He became depressed.
Depression certainly wasn’t globally optimal for Jake, but it was locally optimal.
What Jake thought was a “problem” was actually a solution. To stop feeling horrible when interacting with others, he just *stopped* interacting with people!
This changed later once he unlearned both his self-rejection and the insecurities that originally made interpersonal interactions feel unsafe.
With no more use for the “depression strategy”, his symptoms evaporated.
I know because Jake was me.
Locally optimal strategies are common
Soon I discovered it wasn’t just my depression and anxiety that were “locally optimal strategies”, but also my conflict avoidance, emotional numbness, eye contact, boundaries, neck pain…
In every case, the issues had hidden incentives. And they needed to be addressed.
Take my chronic neck pain. For 3½ years I had chronic tension that was sometimes so bad I couldn’t turn my head. The first approach I tried was physical therapy and stretching exercises. This approach treated the tension as simply suboptimal, as if it was only accidentally tense. Even after years of this, my neck pain barely improved. Finally, I developed the locally optimal approach and discovered the tension was, in a weird way, to avoid interpersonal conflicts. After addressing these incentives, my neck pain triggered ~90% less frequently.
When an insecurity has lasted for years, it’s likely locally optimal. Like the efficient market hypothesis but for emotional issues: “If there were zero downsides to resolving this issue, then why hasn’t it been resolved already?”
The hard part is you can’t think your way to the answer.