Original Sin
There was something about the message in Viktor Frankl's book "Mans's Search for Meaning" that didn't sit right with me: "Meaning" is is simply made up or subjective, and when new facts about reality gets revealed to us in time we have to adapt whatever meaning which we saw as driving our lives. And to create such "meaning" that can last, or keep creating new ones to get through the day is a futile endeavor in my opinion because the subjective stuff lack substance unlike the objective stuff. It just can't last.
Yet despite its lack of substance, subjectivity is something that shapes our perception of reality, and certain views of looking at the world has a sort of deathgrip on our minds. I understand that such ways of looking at reality is called "archetypal". While the stories in religion have no reality value, their form seems to have some ungodly influence of our mind. One such form is that of the "Original Sin".
I don't care about the specific plot of the Original sin, but its basically an irreversible decision that has done irreversible damage, a kind of betrayal of your (man's) true nature, the consequence of which you have to live with for the rest of your life.
Now if you were a Christian, you might believe it was the devil that tempted man to make the irreversible catastrophic decision. Atheist might look at the content of this myth and reject it because it sounds nonsensical, but yet they're just as likely as the Christian to fall prey to such narratives or maybe even more.
The irreversible decision could be anything that lead to a setback or disappointment in life. You're not going to blame it on the devil because you don't believe in such things. You'll put the blame on your own incompetence or that of others. For the rest of your life, you may be haunted by memory of the point in time where you made that decision. You might look at it as the point at which everything fell apart. Your future self informed by hindsight might be unable to accept you could do something so stupid. Your psychiatrist will diagnose you with OCD. Pop psychology will say you're just on the extreme end of perfectionism. You'll be put on psychiatric drugs, which in itself may cause irreversible changes to your brain which becomes the new original sin your brain will latch on to. The intensity with which the Christian blames the devil you'll blame others or yourself. I reckon the latter is what drives suicide more than the actual consequences
I hope you see where I'm getting at. Even though we can rationally dismiss the contents of myth, we're still susceptible to the archetypal patterns of myth. Its almost as if religion was designed knowing that our minds were susceptible to such patterns and made use of it as a means to control us (for the sake of the greater good it seems).
This brings me back to the my relation with the general theme of subjectivity: why I felt the search for meaning is a futile one. Any "meaning" is getting progressively corroded by the new information revealed in time. The most practical advice you can give someone is to delay decisions that has irreversible consequences.
Search for meaning and subjectivity must be viewed as something that deserves to be studied as a hindrance to objecivity and has objective worth because some of them are archetypal: pervasive across minds and capable of possession.
So I think its more useful to see them as possessions rather than viewing them as a personality trait or labelling them as a condition like OCD or what not.