Celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern is asking you to save the foods we love.
— Read on www.huffpost.com/entry/andrew-zimmern_l_65bd4ef4e4b0102bd2d9263f

—- but we will adapt. Humans only change when that’s the only thing left to do.

While Andrew Zimmerman is calling for acting upon our hope and faith of a bleak reality, as a counselor I’m going to make a comment, as my first comment right there likely is not seem very ‘counselory’ or ‘maemtally healthily’. Likely bleak to many minds.

 I am a totalist. If there’s anything that really characterizes how I think about things, just reflecting on how have been in my life, it is that the pieces are always pieces of a totality that we indeed do know.

When I say that human beings never change until that’s the only thing left to do, it’s because of the fact of the matter.

And if you’re philosophical mind is bristling at this, take a breath, find yourself, and continue reading.

Mental Health Exists

There is a kind of silly philosophical question that is never really taken in it’s full weight. And what I mean by that is when you ask the question, people all of a sudden give a quick answer. I say that the reason why we give such a quick answer to it is because we really don’t want to think.

Human beings really do not want to think, they just want to live their lives. We just want to live our lives. We just want to eat food. We want to be reasonably happy. We want to have sex. Raise our children. And we wanna go water skiing or play video games (and other recreation).

We don’t really want to think about things. And this is so much the case that even people that we would call intellectuals like academics and philosophers and critical theorists, get offended at this question that I’m going to ask because they really don’t want to think about what they’re thinking about. Ultimately, they are really just paying attention to what I said above that human beings really want to do.

In this sense, counseling and mental health is different from anything else we do in our lives .

Of course, the 95% of counselors and psychologist and psychiatrist are doing the same thing, and I’m not saying that I’m an exception, but I am saying something about mental health that informs what we’re doing as counselors, and what we are actually doing when we say that we’re working on our mental health.

The question is : how could you have chosen differently?

The only answer that people can give, at least the only routine answer that people feel they can logically give, it’s some sort of answer that jumps back into our ability to think real creatively about things in about our life condition, and, indeed, given that we are trying to do some thing with our lives.

And this answer is exactly Existential in the true 1950s sense.

This is why I say we aren’t really getting anywhere in knowledge, at least knowledge of being human, anything further in our modern lives then they talked about in mid 20th century. As well, it’s the reason why in the early aughts and teens of this century people were having these are discussions about the end of history in the end of philosophy.

The true answer is that we only choose, we only act and make a choice when there isn’t anything else that we can do. It is the having nothing else to do that is freedom in the existential sense. Any other idea, as many authors argue, is a type of religious faith. A type of religious operation.

And I don’t say this to say that everyone is screwed up or they’re wrong. I say this to say like how wonderfully human it is. Again, not in the Neitszche sense of “all to human” filled with his sarcastic and angry irony. I say it in the sense of that human beings are beautiful, and they are worthy of compassion, because we live on our hopes.

Mental health problems arise because this kind of function, this kind of algorithm, has faltered .

And so one of the main tasks of mental health counseling is to bring people back to that moment of choice. Wherever it is, whatever it is, however they think about it even if they don’t think about it in the terms that I’m talking about philosophically.

Whatever you’re doing that you think you’re working on your mental health, you are ultimately working on what it means to choose . And this doesn’t mean that you have to do existentialist therapy, or any sort of philosophical therapy whatsoever; every single mental health intervention already operates from this standpoint, regardless of how it frames it in semantics.

And the world reflects this truth .

🙈