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Problems persist when expecting reality to fit into our convenient binary categories. Take the sick-well binary. Or the right-wrong binary. Or the politically left-right binary. Until we honestly acknowledge the continuum that naturally exists beyond these oversimplifying categories, we will continue to suffer pain, trouble and problems. Anankelogy provides you the nuance overlooked by our many failing institutions.
Which do you think is more likely?
You are either well or sick with little room in between.
OR
Wellness is a matter of degree between full wellness and full illness.
Peakfunctionality - prioritizing resolving needs
Symfunctionality - prioritizing easing needs
Dysfunctionality - prioritizing relieving pain
Misfunctionality - prioritizing survival
Every need you experience only exists so you can function in life. Apart from functioning, there are no needs. The less your needs resolve, the less you can function and the more pain you will suffer. The more your needs resolve, the better you can function and reach more of your potential.
Your nuanced needs could care less about those convenient categories and labels heavily trusted by medical professionals. Psychiatry traditionally relied on the medical model. It categorizes you as either sick or not sick. Its disease model threshold between sickness and wellness gets easily muddied.
Letting these conventional categories reify, into something we take literally, can ironically contribute to our sickness. If what we need to effectively address dysfunctions like addiction remains overlooked by our conventional categories, then let's replace our black-and-white thinking with something that better appreciates the gradient nature of reality.
Anankelogy recognizes a range between full wellness and a lack of wellness. It sees wellness as a level of your ability to function. The more you can function, the more well you are. The less you can function, then the less well you are. Or the sicker you become.
Anankelogy identifies four key levels of your ability to function. This illuminates the overlap between full wellness and slipping into a lack of wellness. With this functionality array, anankelogy recognizes four dominant levels of your ability to function in life. Each presents a distinctly different priority.
Peakfunctionality - prioritizing the full resolution of needs to fully function.
Symfunctionality - prioritizing easing needs with help from others.
Dysfunctionality - prioritizing relieving pain from unresolved needs.
Misfunctionality - prioritizing survival while overwhelmed with pain.
You prioritize resolving needs.
Your needs fully resolve so you can fully function. You embrace the sharp pain of each alerted need, then that pain fades promptly as such needs fully resolve.
This touches on peak experiences and a flow state, and speaks to concepts like wu wei and samādhi. You function at your best, or even better as you stretch your expanding capacities. You reach more and more of your full potential. You thrive.
You function in life by sustaining equilibrium. Any causes of pain or desire get promptly answered. Any threats are promptly removed. Depletions get promptly replenished.
You can freely focus. All your present needs fully resolve. No pain or desire persists long to distract you. Your mind sits at-rest.
You react where appropriate, to promptly resolve needs in routine incidents. You respond properly in novel situations unfamiliar to you, to reflect and learn how best to respect all needs.
You quickly recognize what you need to resolve each need. You do not get stuck on oversimplified options. You intuitively resolve needs with the right resources and move on.
You function at your peak capacity.
For example:
Your physical wellbeing. You maintain good eating and exercise habits. You eat to live instead of living to eat. You keep fit. You take good care of your body. You promptly address any ailments. You guard your health from intolerable risks.
Your social wellbeing. You feel deeply connected to at least one other person, who knows almost all of your secrets and still loves you. You enjoy knowing that you provide deep meaning for them. You can trust them to support you through any crisis.
Your vocational wellbeing. You love what you do and get paid well to do it. Your career provides rich meaning to your purposeful existence. Instead of exhausting you, your work energizes you. You look forward to serving others through your vocation.
You prioritize easing needs.
Your needs partially resolve so you can adequately function. You endure the dull pain of your partially resolved needs, which alert you of this ongoing threat to your ability to fully function.
This touches on group conformity, herd behavior, and herd mentality. You function at the level your group enables you to function.
Your life settles close to equilibrium. Your daily causes of pain or desire are eventually answered. Any threats get slowly removed. Depletions are gradually replenished.
You can adequately focus. Some or all your needs do not completely resolve. A minimal level of pain or desire may distract you, but not much. Your mind remains aware.
You react to situations the way you learned from others. You respond as others model a response. You usually take your cues from what is socially acceptable.
You rely on others to help ease your needs. You risk getting drawn into oversimplified options. At times, you settle for less-than-ideal resources to address your needs. You make it work.
You function at a practical level in accordance with others.
For example:
Your physical wellbeing. You eat what you find reliably accessible. You exercise when you can. You gain some weight and work it off. You easily find whatever weight you lose. You rely increasingly on meds. You’re generally doing okay.
Your social wellbeing. You get along with others quite well. You trust your friends accept most things about you. Some secrets you hold as unsafe to share. You rely more on social norms than personal encounters to inform how to respect others.
Your vocational wellbeing. You are generally successful on your job. You do what’s expected most of the time. You get along with your coworkers. Your boss can always count on you. You may not love your job but you do value the steady income.
You prioritize relieving pain.
Your needs hardly resolve so you can barely function. You repeatedly suffer the pain of your unresolved needs, since your emotions persist in warning you of threats to your ability to fully or even adequately function.
This fits closely to the sociological construct of dysfunction. You cannot fully function if too many of your essential needs remain unresolved.
Your life falls into a rut of constant disequilibrium. Threats overwhelm you. Cravings consume you. Pain builds up to intolerable levels. You increasingly feel emotionally paralyzed.
You cannot freely focus. Too many disruptions. Too many of your needs remain unresolved. Mounting pain distracts you. You obsess how to escape all this pain. Your mind remains vigilantly alert.
You easily overreact. You find it practically impossible to reflectively respond where appropriate. Not while you remain buried in so much pain.
You constantly seek what can relieve your pain. Concrete black-and-white thinking becomes your norm. You easily get stuck on oversimplified options. You likely accept any alternative resource, to ease your pain.
You function at a significantly diminished level.
For example:
Your physical wellbeing. You tend to overeat and indulge in a lot of junk food. You likely drink a lot of alcohol. You’ve got more important concerns than whether you’re in shape or not. You look forward to getting high to cope with life’s pain.
Your social wellbeing. You get easily angry at others. You seek out friends and family who tolerate your emotional ups and downs. You gravitate toward those also in much pain and like getting high all the time. You generally take more than you give.
Your vocational wellbeing. You struggle to find and hold down a job. You hustle to get what you can. Maybe you sell drugs or something you know desired by the kind of company you seek. You’re classified as disabled, and rely on public assistance.
You prioritize survival.
Your needs rarely resolve enough for you to function at all. Your emotions warn you that your basic needs remain so unresolved as to severely threaten even your minimal capacity to function in life.
This equates closely to pathology, but without the reductive medical model that presumes your problems are primarily internal. Basically, you enter a threshold where you, or part of you, cannot function at all.
Your life falls out of balance, where you risk being stuck imbalanced. You may even grow numb to much of your pain. Short of resolving some needs, you cannot escape the overwhelming pain. You reduce it the best you can.
You can barely focus. You obsess in survival mode. You feel at risk of permanent and severe damage, even death. Your mind goes into high alarm.
You react instantly when triggered. You must. Survival leaves you little if any room for any reflective responses. You must wait for others to respect your intense needs before you can give any sustainable thought to theirs.
You feel helpless, and you likely are. Urgency overwhelms you. Any saving option will do. Perhaps even violence. Anything to get you out of this hellhole. If you haven’t already given up hope.
You barely can function at all.
For example:
Your physical wellbeing. You slip into poor eating and drinking habits. You eat and drink mostly to cope with your overwhelming pain. You have no room to even think about your physical health. Especially if you think about ending your life.
Your social wellbeing. You likely don’t have any meaningful friends. The closest thing to a reliable friend is a professional counselor. If emotionally volatile, you probably lost connection with most or all of your family and friends.
Your vocational wellbeing. You most likely have no job, no career, no vision for your immediate future. Your only job is how you will be able to manage day by day, or hour by hour, or minute by minute. Your number one job is to somehow survive.
We can take this gradient perspective a step further. Each level can be subdivided into its highest, middle and lowest version of itself.
Prioritizing the resolution of needs can mean your own or out of love the prioritizing of other's needs to be resolved.
Apex peakfunctionality | The top functionality level possible, when promptly resolving needs to optimize life in ways that also maximize other’s ability to resolve their needs, enabling them to also live optimally. Enabling others to more fully function tends to bring returns to your ability to more fully function. Let’s call this love. |
Mid peakfunctionality | A high functionality level when promptly resolving needs to optimize own life in ways that potentially has a positive impact upon the needs of others. Assisting others to function can cultivate some returns to your ability to function. |
Least peakfunctionality | A high functionality level when promptly resolving needs to optimize own life in ways not negatively impacting the needs of others. If slipping into isolation, and rarely contributing to another's ability to function, you risk sliding into the impersonal dependency of symfunctionality. |
Prioritizing to ease needs with others can have different results. The highest result could fall under "wellness" but not so much the lowest symfunctionality level.
Threshold symfunctionality | The top functionality level when actions done humanly together contribute to easing human needs without hindering other human needs. For example, driving on the right side of the road in the U.S. |
Mid symfunctionality | A pragmatic functionality level when arbitrary actions done humanly together contribute to easing human needs with some hindrance to other human needs. For example, a terse manager ordering staff to serve a customer. |
Worst symfunctionality | A minimal functionality level where arbitrary actions done humanly together contribute to easing human needs mostly by stalling resolution of such needs. For example, structural problems. This can become a gateway to dysfunctionality. |
Applied anankelogy breaks these down into three stages of "symfunction capture".
Symfunction creep: when you drift into only partially resolving your needs.
Symfunction strain: when you feel a mounting strain of needs not fully resolved.
Symfunction trap: when getting stuck in the mediocrity of partially eased needs.
Prioritizing pain relief could have little to no impact on others nearby, or could have major impacts on others.
Threshold dysfunctionality | A moderately painfilled functionality level when you start prioritizing relief of unresolved needs in ways that actually limit resolution of such needs. For example, a steady junk food diet. |
Mid dysfunctionality | A significantly painfilled functionality level when you prioritize relieving your pain from unresolved needs with minimal or no negative impact on the needs of others. For example, binge eating junk food. |
Worst dysfunctionality | A severely painfilled functionality level when you prioritize pain relief over resolving anyone’s needs, resulting in significant negative impacts on the needs of others. For example, alcoholism. |
Prioritizing survival may come with minimal impacts on others, or risk hurting others in some significantly damaging ways.
Threshold misfunctionality | When unresolved needs result in temporary damage of oneself, with likely negative impacts on others. For example, trauma. |
Mid misfunctionality | When unresolved needs result in long-term or permanent damage, lowering ability to function. For example, CPTSD. |
Worst misfunctionality | When unresolved needs result in imminent or immediate death, termination of all functioning. For example, suicide ideation. |
Sometimes you grow sicker. Other times you get better. Sometimes you cry in pain. Other times you grin with joy. Sometimes you can hardly get out of bed. Other times you find your second wind to perform some amazing feats. Anankelogy provides a window for you to better understand these functional changes you're experiencing.
Just when you learned some new terminology, get ready for some more. Anankelogy offers a fresh new understanding largely by labeling what often gets overlooked.
Defunctioning is what anankelogy labels when slipping down to a lower functioning level. Refunctioning is what anankelogy labels when rising up to a higher functioning level.
Dynamism is the primary word for refunctioning upward, to restore yourself to wellness. Defunctioning depends on which level you slide down to: drift, deviate, or depart. This chart can help explain it best.
Dynamism to sustain fuller functioning | A cognitive lens for prioritizing the resolution of needs for optimal functioning. This utilizes testable hypotheses of relational knowing. Dynamism seeks better questions to test to replace outmoded assumptions. It embraces ambiguity, welcomes juxtapositions, sees life rich with meaningful paradoxes, remains suspicious of certainty, integrates relevant nuances, embraces life's natural discomforts while experiencing needs, and keeps open a path to fully resolve needs. Dynamism is a key ‘how’ for refunctioning. |
Peakfunctionality | You function at your peak potential, as your fully resolved needs sit at-rest. When peakfunctional, you prioritize resolving needs. |
Drift from peakfunctionality into symfunctionality | A cognitive bias of prioritizing the easing of unresolved needs. The more you compromise for the group, moving toward symfunctional cooperation, the more your unresolved needs compel you to see primarily or only what your unmet needs require you to see. Drift is the initial threshold of defunctioning. |
Symfunctionality | You function suitably with others, as your partially resolved needs remain aware. When symfunctional, you prioritize easing needs. |
Deviation from symfunctionality into dysfunctionality | A cognitive distortion for prioritizing relief from grinding pain. The longer your unresolved needs keep you locked in pain, the more you must see what can promise you relief from your mounting pain—even if not quite accurate. Deviation is a more significant form of defunctioning. |
Dysfunctionality | You function painfully, as your chronically unresolved needs shout in alert. When dysfunctional, you prioritize relieving pain. |
Departure from dysfunctionality into misfunctionality | A cognitive delusion for prioritizing survival amidst severe damage. The further you sink into survival mode, the more your mind invents possibilities for you to escape painful damage, and to somehow avoid the likelihood of your imminent demise. Departure is the most severe form of defunctioning. |
Misfunctionality | You barely function, as your persistently unmet needs scream continually at alarm. When misfunctional, you prioritize survival. |
This chart lays out functionality in largely academic anankelogy terms. Later posts aim to illustrate, in more accessible anankelogy language, how you could stray from optimal peakfunctionality into symfunction and onto dysfunction and ultimately misfunction. And the risk stems less from you making poor personal choices, and more from the creeping normality of our many societal imperfections.
Your responsiveness to these levels of your functionality
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