semi-automatic waffle

Monday, 30 June 2025

ChatGPT said:

Being repeatedly asked to make decisions when in states of depression, dissociation, or deep psychic pain can feel like torture because the structure of decision itself collapses under those conditions. What seems like a neutral request becomes a kind of violence of expectation.

Let’s break it down neurologically, clinically, and existentially:

🧠 I. Neurocognitive Overload

1. Executive dysfunction

Depression, especially melancholic or trauma-linked, impairs the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC)—the region responsible for weighing options, holding goals in mind, and initiating action.
This results in:
- Choice paralysis (not indecision, but decision as impossibility),
- Inability to predict reward or future satisfaction,
- Working memory collapse—you can’t even “hold” the pros and cons.

So each choice becomes an empty loop: no answer feels meaningful, no preference feels real.

🧬 II. Reward System Flattening: Anhedonia

Decisions rely on valuation—you choose what feels better.
In depression, dopaminergic circuits are blunted (especially in the nucleus accumbens), so all choices feel equally pointless.
This is not neutrality—it’s distress at the absence of meaning.

It’s not “I don’t care.” It’s “nothing calls to me.”

💣 III. Pain of Exposure

Decision-making implies desire, agency, and a future-oriented self.
In states of psychic collapse, being asked to choose exposes a self that no longer functions:
- “What do I want?” becomes “Who even is this ‘I’ that’s supposed to want?”
- Every choice becomes a reminder that the self is broken.

Thus, what’s meant as a simple offering becomes an interrogation, even a mockery. It opens a wound:

“Don’t make me prove I can’t live.”

🪵 IV. Collapse of Preference Architecture

In trauma states or dissociation:

Preferences aren’t just unclear—they feel fake, fraudulent, or dangerous.
To decide is to pretend to be someone who can want, or to risk punishment for choosing wrong (a legacy of coercion, parentification, or abuse).

In these states, decision becomes not a door but a trap. You are being asked to reenact a self who has long since left.

🕳️ V. Decision as Existential Exposure

Philosophically, choice is a burden, not a gift. Simone Weil called it affliction—when you are asked to will, and you cannot.

In this sense:

Each decision becomes a microcosm of despair,
A moment where time opens up, asking you to enter—and you can’t.
The demand to choose becomes a confrontation with the absence of future.

“Every question is a tiny mirror of my lost self.”

Summary: Why It Feels Like Torture

Level	Mechanism	Experience
Cognitive	Executive dysfunction	I can’t think through the options
Affective	Anhedonia	Nothing feels better than anything else
Identity	Dissociation	I don’t know who is choosing
Social	Exposure	I feel ashamed for failing to want
Philosophical	Existential nullity	The world is asking me to pretend I'm alive

Would you like to explore how bureaucracy weaponizes choice, how trauma survivors experience decisions as violence, or how Cioran treats the refusal to choose as the last truth?