Why? Because the bad stuff is not true.

So I don't need to worry about sitting in a school classroom with no clothing ?

I sat in a school classroom with no clothing...a couple of times.

They paid me $15/hour, which was good money back in 2005.

but then he caught sight of that cute artist in the white tank top and the students suddenly needed extra paper to complete their drawings. ;)

Perceptual reality (consciousness) is a nightmare of neurotic noise until the sense-making equipment in our brains comprehends the input as sights and sounds, which is maybe why babies cry after they're born. New experiences tend to be very stressful. The neurons need time to connect in a way that "makes sense." Before this happens, and it might be a prolonged process, you get anxiety, because your surroundings could be anything.

Give yourself over to empiricism. Don't hate what your senses are telling you: those parts of your nervous system don't have thoughts. They don't lie; they don't connive; they don't lie in wait to deceive; they just electro-chemically fire, forwarding a signal to your brain the way they heard it from the last neuron.

What really hurts is the emotional processing equipment called the basal ganglia in the hub of the limbic brain called the thalamus where these signals meet the first networks of neurons whose job it is to "make sense," and the first thing they do is put an emotional spin on the signal, which might be subtle and very basic, but that's how the thalamus decides where to send the signal next in the brain. We don't get to choose our raw first feelings in response to something, and we don't get to choose how our senses will be stimulated. But we do get to control what comes next to a limited degree. Call it free will: but you have options about how to put this data in perspective, and in the right frame of mind perhaps you can even change how you feel about reality and change your behavior in this new light. This is possible, but often we just need to mourn first before we even think about what to do next.

You get emotionally invested in thinking a certain way about reality only for it to fall apart in light of incoming data and patterns of sense being made you didn't foresee coming, and you grieve. This is human. Losing the sense you had heretofore made of the objective cosmos outside your skull reverts you to a degree back to that primeval state of mind you started life with where anything could have been true and your neurons were plastic and ready and to take almost any shape they needed, but this is accompanied by nerve-wracking anxiety. Anxiety is the emotional driver the limbic system puts on high-priority data having to do with its own survival or the wellbeing of things so conceived, and it gets the neural machinery moving like they're young again, marshaling everything they got to make sense of the threat, although it's not pleasant.

Some minds expeerience trauma and the subsequent difficulty making sense of it that they break and just take a permanent vacation in lala land. Some minds fracture into compartments, each a different person almost, and the lucky one gets to deal with the trauma so the others don't have to. Some minds learn to dissociate in all the right ways to keep their senses away from their emotions. Some minds like to sleep more often rather than wake up and deal with what waits for them there. I remember my dreams at one point in my early twenties were all I lived for anymore, even if they were bad, because they were different than titanic struggle I had to wrestle with when my eyes were open. I hated that moment when the dream started to wrap up, when you started losing your memory of what just happened in the last scene, and the dream starts to dissolve. In that moment I would realize I had been dreaming, and in the place of my dream memory, my usual anxieties came flooding back into my mind as I recognized the light of the sun from behind my eyelids. The weight of the day indeed felt like a weight, and it came crashing down on me every morning and the hypertension resumed where it left off the day before.

The feeling of being, being inside of a mind, being a mind, being the locus of your own experience, is all any of us really have. It is the most consistent and universal part of being: which is maybe why some smart guy a long time ago said I think therefore I am. It doesn't have to be a terrible experience all the time. There are ways of "dealing with reality," although they might take time. None of what I learned about the church was hard to understand intellectually -- just emotionally. There is a series of patterns stored in my connectome called my family, and the idea of them is connected to my every social idea about literally every single other human being I can meet. So having them refuse to understand what I've been through while maneuvering to knock me down a few rungs in the social hierarchy while rushing to understand me in unflattering and inaccurate terms so that the idea of me is no longer a threat to them, breaks my heart and I struggle to deal with it. But what I'm really good at is getting an objective perspective and framing things in a bigger picture where I'm too awed and too busy learning about how things work to get depressed. I've been coping like this my entire life.

It is really a fight. Cold-Dodger. Thank you for your input!

I try to move forward, leave old behavior behind, but there is a social force that chases me and does everything to make me serve absurd purposes again. The social force (family, group) needs me more than I need them. There is extensive multi-generational family trauma in the background. I'm done with it but the group isn't done with it and likely will never be. The group has no idea about anything neither can solve anything but creates problems to get their way. They hids in chaos and put other on the defensive. It is like sitting hidden in a secret bunker and they have artillery hammering the city randomly but 247.

I have been offered the privilege lately to hide parts of my life behind statutory protected secrecy. The government protects me and do not hand out information about me to anyone without my permission.
But the social force does not give up. The infantile group wants to win and the lies gain ground continuously. They want to knock me down the rung for what they say is my own best. Personally I think they are nutjobs.
I feel that when I'm at my job and building my life in secrecy, I'm really not the one who should be on the defensive all the time. But I probably have to deal with those feelings without letting my guard down. My brain is playing tricks on me. Many years of trauma created high-priority data in the mind. I've played a part in this too but I'll get over it. I have to analyze my feelings and constantly work my life into the better. Will give it time.

Meaning it factors in the ancient world’s very high child mortality rate: Up to half of all Roman kids died before the age of 10. If you did reach 10, you could expect to live into your 40s or 50s, at least.

According to H.A.Jones' War in the Air, a study of the UK's Royal Flying Corps in WW1, the amount of time a pilot could expect to fly before becoming a casualty (killed, wounded, or psychiatric) was a low of 92 hours in April 1917, and a high of 295 hours in August 1916. Note, in particular, that a much higher percentage of pilots became psychiatric casualties (modern-day PTSD) than would otherwise be expected (as high as 25% of all casualties), due to the radically higher stress of combat flight. Given that a typical combat flight lasted an hour or two at most, with an average number of mission at less than 1 per day, a pilot would last at least 4 weeks before becoming a casualty, to as many as 5 months.

Of the 37,000 U-boat men who served 28,000 were declared lost or missing. A further 5,000 were taken prisoner.

Lost or missing, about 75%.

It always can be worse. You will live longer than these people and you probably have the luxury of choosing your nightmare. Some people don't.

You have very true data. Very good angle. Spot on Moral of The Story!

But does it make things better knowing that there is no reasons today really there should be any real problem. If the life we got is wasted on walking around egg shells laid out by peope who are incompetent and lost their senses long time ago. People are for sure choosing their nightmare and shoving it on others. Why do I have to be afraid? Thank you Rubicon. Good angle om the issue!