Meaning?

I have been thinking about depression and the possible role of the loss of meaning in life as a factor, and that reminded me of a story idea I had a few years ago....

So, a tech company has realized that all the information harvested from social media could enable a complex programme to work out what would be the best psychotherapeutic interventions for specific people. With all that data from millions, billions, of individuals, the computer could construct an accurate model of each person’s personality, triggers, schemas, passions, fears and so on and also what would be the best means to help each of them find well-being.

This company, let’s call it Deep Wisdom, wants to focus on depression and anxiety because the World Health Organisation has made that a priority, in the wake of the second global pandemic in thirty years, the increasingly turbulent weather conditions and the challenging levels of social inequality.

So far, they’re in Phase 1 trials, testing the algorithm on say twenty people. All these people access the cyber-psych (catchy name for the avatar of the algorithm that interacts with the clients) in a rather wonderful Virtual Reality environment. The cyber-psych will create the experience most conducive to the individual’s healing: maybe a glade in a wood, or on a golden beach, or in a cozy room, or in a paneled office. The cyber-psych themself takes on the appropriate gender, age, ethnicity… the plan is to go non-speciesist at some point, so someone like me might be granted a cyber-psych-cat. Anyway, you get the gist.

The plan is to have six sessions and to perform pre- and post- protocol analysis using the best depression determinant: the Van Nuys Test, which has proven to be 103.5% accurate.

The problem is that nothing happens. The subjects do not improve.

This is devastating for Deep Wisdom.

Their top programmers investigate the system – and, of course, it’s something of a black box, with much of the processing too complex for even these Ivy League and Oxbridge educated Silicon Valley dudes to follow. But they do find something. There is one option which seems to have been deemed invalid, not by the system itself, but through the initial programming protocols. They don’t know what this option actually is: it was determined as an aggregate of various ‘biases’ put in during the first stage of development. As it would take so much time to work out what exactly is going on and as there is so much media hype about this project and so much money at stake, the programmers recode this section of the algorithm so that option is allowed.

They get another group of test subjects and put them through the Deep Wisdom Depression Alleviation protocol. For experimental reasons, the subjects are not allowed to talk about their therapy until after they have filled in their second Van Nuys Test. This time all of them are not just free of depression, they are blooming, blossoming, flourishing and utterly blissful.

Deep Wisdom sends out an ecstatic press release. But then there’s radio silence. Or Internet silence. Reporters are denied access to the subjects. In fact, the subjects are sequestered in a 7-star spa resort with private security while the company decides what to do. They appoint an investigator, a psychologist with many years experience, who has to sign a non-disclosure form before starting her investigation.

She interviews the subjects. All say the same thing: I met God! And She loves me and She says I genuinely am special and She told me that really everything WILL be OK!