The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published on our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Desi

Ouch! This hurts. You probably spent many years fighting and hoping to finally be that perfect image you had envisioned for so long in your head only to finally realize it is just not going to happen. Maybe you were not lucky enough. Or maybe you just set an overly optimistic self-projection. In fact, human beings are most of the time inherently unhappy not because of what happens to them, but because of their tendency to project oftentimes unrealistic and excessively optimistic images of themselves in the future.

A lot of this might sound a lot like petty schadenfreude, but seeing other people screw up and having to deal with the consequences has honestly cheered me up immensely. Think of it like watching an America’s Funniest Home Videos compilation — there’s just no way you’re coming out feeling at least a little bit happier after watching people wipe out (harmlessly). Depression isn’t a disease with a logical way to approach it. If petty schadenfreude and UX studies get through to my brain, I will take that as a win.

In any case, being rational human beings we can’t allow our mind to just live with the fact that we failed at achieving that so cherished image. We need to rationalize and we need to move forward. It is just human nature. We therefore reshuffle our self-projection in order to rationalise. It looks something like this:

I’m still fighting an uphill battle to improve myself every day. I’ll observe a peculiar behavior of mine and root-cause-analysis it and disappointingly find that the root is old self-hatred caused by depression yet again. My stomach always drops a little upon realizing this (“I thought I was over this already”). But regardless of what I find, I’ve firmly decided that it’s time for me to stop listening to my depression monster and break out of that self-victim bubble.

When we are in our late teens/early twenties and start to develop our self-projection, we see a long time ahead of us in order to achieve that image. We live by the bias that ‘we are going to make it one day’. And as we set our mind to achieve goals we anticipate them, we are rewarded with a vicarious pleasure from imagining what it would be like to be that person we see in our mind. After all, us human beings are a naturally optimistic bunch…

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ce for mistakes is not high. When there’s a fatality, that shut the industry down for six, nine months. So it’s going to take a long time to get the tech right, to get people comfortable with the fact that there are going to be errors. And is that okay? And then the regulations to follow.

If my self-projection incorporates, among other things, that of someone in a romantic relationship, the moment I meet and start dating someone who has all the characteristics I have always imagined in my ideal partner, I feel happy, and vice versa.

Situation A: we feel happy as that self-projection was a genuine one, i.e. matching that image that we had set for our self is really what makes us happy. Congrats! You have hit the jackpot! But unfortunately for most people this is not going to last. As you celebrate your happiness your mind is starting already to build a new self-projection and you will soon start chasing it again.

If you are struggling with your own mental illness, I hope that reading this inspires you to keep on fighting. A lot of this comes down to your own tank of energy/willpower, so please take care of yourself during this (likely) more lonely holiday season and don’t be afraid to lean on any available resources when needed.

When people talk about ‘losing their identity’, or having an ‘identity crisis’, effectively they are talking about losing their self-projection. They don’t know what to aim for as what they had thought was going to make them happy turned out not to be so.

As it turns out, the mind can’t distinguish between imagination and reality. When you have a thought, it triggers the same cascade of neurochemicals, regardless of whether you are thinking about the past, present, or future. In other words, your brain is stimulated the same way whether you are physically performing an action or simply visualizing it happen.

It’s way too easy to pressure ourselves into situations with no room for error, and then beat ourselves up when it happens. True, our stupid user judgement may be the final tipping point to a lot of domino-effect mistakes. However, fundamentally we are simply not set up for success, and neither do we set ourselves up for success. The fact that UX as a field exists is a testament to that truth.

How is it possible that when we finally match the image that for so long we thought was the link to our long-dreamt happiness we feel a sense of hopelessness and disappointment instead?

In other words, as time passes, the distance between the idealized version of our self and reality diminishes until there is very little room for anticipation. At one point, reality hits and we are forced to adjust our self-projection. Assuming that we possess full rationality, there comes a time when we realize that we are not going to become that self-projection. There is no more room to anticipate. That’s it, the reality we are in is what that self-projection has actually turned out to be.

Very often it can happen that what we thought was our genuine self-projection (i.e. the product of our genuine and true desires) is nothing but the plot society has built for us. As discussed at the beginning: movies, social media, the people we frequent etc. all contribute dramatically to building people’s egos, goals, self-projections. And unfortunately many times as a result we project an image that doesn’t really belong to us and when we reach such image we feel empty, lost and in turn unhappy — just the opposite of what we thought would have happened.