Running With Scissors

Puppies Are The Root Of Anxiety

Every conflict in history can be chalked up to an individual's inability to conciliate between what they want to do, and what society allows them to.

This is true for literally any event in intergalactic history. Pick one at random, and at the root of it will be a single person who couldn't agree with society, and chose to satisfy their most sinful and selfish desires instead.

The French revolution? A woman's denial to provide non-cake related food to people because she felt too prideful. World War I? A group of men not liking a ruler and murdering said ruler instead of having a nice, civilized conversation over some tea and scones to work out their differences. Winnie the Pooh? A lustfully mad bear's rampage to satisfy his eternal gluttony.

We all want stuff. We want money, and food, and resources, and the best mate we can have. Those are urges beyond our understanding—primal, even. But we cannot simply go to a place and take everything by force, unless you're a Squid Overlord. There are rules, procedures, and rituals to satisfy those basic needs. Again, it doesn't apply to you if you're a Squid Overlord.

There's a thin line we all walk between what we want and what we must, and we are stuck in the middle trying to balance each so we can move forward. If we only satisfy our urges above else, we become beasts only capable of self-pleasure—anti-social beings. If we only adhere to the rules, however, we become cowards who fail to truly live. Such is the complexity of the mind.

In fact, how the mind works and how it processes information has been such a mystery that countless people have tried to unravel the yarn ball that is the conscious brain, a job which is particularly difficult since, among other things, brains tend to stop working after you unravel them.

To counter this, a group of Mangalorbians once created a perfect artificial intelligence with a full array of complex emotions in hopes to understand how minds actually work in real time. As soon as it was activated, the AI began to scream for twenty minutes straight, after which it went online and clicked on every pop-up ad he could find, hoping to contract a computer virus that could kill it straight. And that was before it was given any real situation to decide on.

For human neurologist Sigmund Freud, humans are in a state of constant negotiation between those two forces in their mind, finding—and often failing—to find a happy medium between the two.

He actually describes the mind as divided in three distinct parts: the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego.

The Id is the set of basic human desires. It wants to eat, sleep, and have sex all the time—the teenager part of the mind, if you will.

The Super-Ego is the crotchety old-man part of the brain, telling you not to do risky things and to remember the rules. It also yells at you for wasting your time on your Nintendo thingamajigs instead of working full-time at the glue factory like he did for the last sixty years or so.

The Ego is your conscious being, the hopefully-grown adult who mediates between the whims of the Id and the complaints of the Super-Ego. So if the Id wants pizza for dinner, and the Super-Ego wants chewy gruel, it's the Ego's job to be the adult and say they're having pasta.

Of course, these are theoretical constructs and not actual, physical beings playing Model U.N in your mind. The brain is actually nothing more than a psychochemical switchboard that turns on and off every time we exist, or cease to exist. But the effects of these three "beings" can be observed in almost any circumstances.

One of the easiest ways to observe the conflict between these beings is when we see a cute puppy. The Id wants to grab the puppy and squeeze it to death, while the Super-Ego advices you to exercise caution, because it might pee on you or something. The Ego is the one who behaves like an adult and gives the puppy three pats on the head as a result. Or at least that's what's supposed to happen.