Since reading Ray Peat's work and drastically improving my wellbeing, something that had been declining for years, I've been thinking more and more often about the phenomenon of learned helpless and its relevance to my life. Sometimes, looking back to past times is useful to help reorient yourself in the present and aim towards a more desirable future. Sometimes, a new perspective or experience might instantly obliterate previous behaviour without any sort of concerted mental or physical grunt to eradicate it.

On the flipside, I have sometimes hopelessly tried to forcefully change my behaviour, employing all the en vogue self-help tricks to form long-term habits, only to practically immediately lose them not long afterwards. These kinds of experiences remind me of those hypnosis advertisements that claim to have you give up smoking after just a few sessions; sometimes it's even after just one visit. There's no short supply of stories of miracle cures or sudden, permanent breaks of addiction. Cold-turkey clean cuts that seem to arise with no obvious effort on the part of the addict, no signs of worn willpower.

When I was sixteen I spent six weeks abroad in a small town called Marburg in Hesse, Germany. Those six weeks were spent living with a new family along with my exchange student, who had lived six weeks with me and my family just prior to my arrival in Germany. Six weeks of school, new acquaintances, a new language (albeit one I had been "studying" in the Australian school system) and unfamiliar cultural quirks.

It was a barrage of stimulation, I came home every day from school and would collapse, totally exhausted, onto my exchange student's bed, which was mine for the duration of the stay. It's not like I was actually expected to learn anything or do any homework whilst I was at school here—I was basically on holidays and could really have just treated it as such. Plenty of my own friends who had taken a similar trip certainly did. I'm not manyt of them learnt or used much German beyond Wo ist McDonalds?. But I had been gradually becoming more fascinated with the structure of German before arriving. Once there, especially at that age I presume, the Deutsch on the blackboard in biology class looked more like a sophisticated puzzle game than a complete drag of a memorisation task. Each day was a new game of deductive guesswork, and better still, I got to play with new ideas about how the language works every day in the schoolyard with new friends I was making. New ways to describe how things are situated and move in relation to one another, mysterious new prefixes and other linguistic building blocks, and the insane backwards word order of German provided unlimited entertainment to see if I was up to the challenge.

On top of this, I was in the grade just above mine back home in Australia. Whilst that really shouldn't have made much difference, the amount of responsibility and independece these kids were allowed to exercise at sixteen or seventeen was nothing short of amazing to my adolescent self. I had never seen anything like it. Some of my classmates would stand out the front of school during lunchtime and smoke a couple of cigarettes with their own teachers, something that still to this day I find kind of insane. It certainly would never have been acceptable back at home. Starting in the senior school, you were allowed to just leave and go home if you didn't have class on, as long as you were back in time. And we did. School uniforms simply weren't part of the culture either. For everyone else perhaps stressful and another target of the cruel status games of teenagerhood, but for me it was like every day was casual dress day back home. To top it all off, the legal drinking age in Germany is sixteen, at least for wine, beer, and other weaker drinks.

These classmates of mine were running their own meetings headed by the Klassensprecher, the class representatives, and they actually seemed cool, like people I would like to hang out and befriend. They were