“I thought i had mono for a year, but i was just bored.” - Wayne
came here lookin for this comment lol
I recently thought my depression was getting way worse but actually it was just intestinal parasites giving me anemia.
So now I get to experience this shitty world with slightly more energy.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” J. Krishnamurty
I mean, it can be both
you really mean that?
No.
Ty worse, have you met worser?
What you gotta ask yourself though: If it is really, that everything just sucks so bad, then why isn’t everybody depressed.
I mean, I don’t even disagree. Everything indeed does suck so bad. But there’s a surprising number of people, that seem to cope with that fact way better than I do.
Turns out, I actually do have depression. If you suspect, that you do too: seek help. It won’t change that everything sucks so bad. But I already learned to cope a little better, and I hope you can, too.
There is a surprising number of people too dumb to see just how profoundly everything sucks and hence is going to suck even more
Then there is a number of people who have the capability to see but actively prevent themselves from it lest it breaks them
Two things can be true. And your depression can be because everything actually sucks. Instead of being because you simply believe it sucks.
Seeking help for depression is what lead me to a therapist. She helped me make the changes in my life circumstances that I needed to make my life suck significantly less. I am no longer chronically depressed.
why isn’t everybody depressed
It’s because they’re stupid and self centered.
When I was a tween my family moved from Connecticut to Florida.
For a long time I was really depressed to the point where they thought I had Mononucleosis or I might need antidepressants.
Turns out I was just hot. It’s fucking hot in Florida. I was hot. I just didn’t understand why I felt so shitty, because I had never really experienced oppressive Florida heat and humidity.
Sometimes there are actual reasons and feeling depressed isn’t coming from inside you.
Ain’t that something, When you open your car door and it’s as if you were baking something, except they smell like steamy mildew, but that sweet hot heat blasts you in the face and it makes you think of the terminator movie.
If your environment is totally things that sucketh bigly, your noggin becomes Yugely scrambled and the mind therein disturb-ed. A disturb-ed mind is a depress-ed mind. Hie thee to one who may prescribe and partake of their services. It shall be a balm to a disturb-ed noggin.
Getting on the eightfold path has changed my worldview and mood for the better. True story.
Edit to add: But even before that, just going anti-consumerist gave my mood a healthy boost. When I stopped buying shit, I stopped wanting shit. Felt good.
I mean…. I still got antidepressants a year ago thinking it was just dopamine burn out. I feel like I have the motivation of my mid 20’s. It’s amazing. I’ve met so many of my neighbors and been to all the bars/breweries/restaurants with them.
I was in my 40s when I realized that the thing that gave me severe depression for over 25 years was capitalism. Even as a teenager I could not comprehend why anyone would go to school so they could get a job so they could hopefully pay the bank the rest of their lives so they can mow grass.
Yup and patriarchy. My father is low functioning and constantly has temper tantrums/outbursts, and it baffled me why the family was run by him. If he was a woman he wouldn’t be the head of anything.
Re capitalism, I never understood why people wanted to have a house and car. It also doesn’t make sense to have most of your assets sitting in real estate and not diversified.
Having a house isn’t suppose to be about owning an asset. It’s suppose to be having a place to live and not worring about owing someone money for it. Going from being a home owner with a mortgage to being a renter don’t really change your place in capitalism.
You still owe money for taxes and insurance, and of course you have to pay for the upkeep. It’s interesting that home ownership isn’t an asset since you’re not renting it out, but investing the same amount of money is considered an asset.
I don’t want to do those things either. My taxes are more likely to pay for bad cops and subsidize new data centers and insurance companies will always look for a reason not to pay out. “Upkeep” is just fixing things, which existed before capitalism.
I disagree with ur last bit. With a mortgage u are working toward being part of the “ownership class”, where as a renter ur funding somebody else to be in that class this putting u “down a peg” in the sick game we have to play. Even if u spend 1 mil on a house that is worth 300k at the end of ur stint there, that’s better than paying similar monthly and getting back zero. Any return is better than no return, and some dickhead can’t sell ur home from under you.
Money makes the world go round, the world go round, the world go round. Of that we both are sure.
But you do understand that money makes other people grow your food, right?
People grew food for eachother before capitalism. A book that opened my eyes to the various systems that people organized themselves under before capitalism monopolized world is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Add: “The Way We Never Were” by Stephanie Coontz.
While she deals more specifically with society in the US she also covers things like how people didn’t really have or use money in society. Money was what rich people used, the rest of everyone traded and bartered work and goods for what they needed.
People where mostly growing food for themselves and their family, not for each other. This changed when the first basic forms of capitalism where invented, things like markets, guilds, and skyrocketed with industrialization.
No other system that we tried ever worked as good and produced so much peace and prosperity like capitalism. Is it perfect? Fuck no! Nothing that involves humans could ever be. But it is the best we have from a bunch of broken and fucked up systems.
Could you, though? Do you realize the level of knowledge, work, and risk that entailed?
Unless you’ve actually done it and survived without external inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, emergency food, tools… what do you know about growing your own food?
You’re living in a fantasy world.
that’s rage bait.
I’m just saying there are more ways to form a society than exclusively through the complete control and exploitation of people and the environment like we’ve been doing for the last 100 years.
Just because capitalism is the only way you know to live , doesn’t mean it’s the only way to live.
Can you describe one that is better?
Whenever we tried something else in the last 150 years it created a living hell for nearly everyone who was lucky enough to survive. And what we had before that was not paradise either, far away from it.
The problem is not capitalism but unchecked, uncontrolled capitalism.
What are you trying to say? People only grow food because of a financial incentive? We know that isnt true because agriculture is older than any monetary economic system. Money simply acts as a means of smoothing out larger trade volumes, you don’t even need it for basic local trade.
Capitalism isn’t even the only market system, so that doesn’t really work either.
Capitalism is definitially a cancerous socioeconomic system. Prioritizing infinite growth in a finite system above all else inevitably causes systemic collapse on a long enough timeframe. Not to mention capitalism cannot hand the Matthew principle, aka power/money attracts power/money. Again, on a long enough timeframe inevitable leads to wealth disparities that collapse the system and society trying them.
The logic is plainly right there, staring us in the face that this cannot go on forever.
“It all started the day I was born and then things went rapidly downhill from there.”
Title of my autobiography.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Yeah, shit does suck and having financial security is better therapy than therapy.
First, everybody should have financial security - it’s better not to have justifiably pissed off desperate members of society.
Next, everybody should have decent healthcare, physical and mental - society is not stronger having weak / broken members.
Then: people are still going to be depressed. People who have all the financial security, access to all the best therapy, no “real” problems in their lives still get depressed - like: Carrie Fischer suicidally depressed. She’s not an isolated case. Some of it’s genetic (runs in families), some of it’s environmental, some of it’s just mental. Most of it’s based in feelings of hopelessness / helplessness. The AA serenity prayer is very applicable:
…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
Genuinely internally actualizing those three things alleviates a lot of depressive feelings. Not everybody can do it on their own, even with support many people still struggle. It’s likely underreported, but globally 1/100 deaths are ruled as suicides. Among ages 15-29 it is the third leading cause of death.
Success is the best antidepressant. Weight loss does wonders.
Don’t know about that. We hear about celebrities that had depression.
Celebrities, multi-millionaires, all kinds of people with what look like imaginary problems to outsiders - but those problems leave them with the same helpless feelings, unable to change the “unacceptable” things in their lives. Depression is “all in your head” no matter what your circumstances are. Suicide is a pretty undeniable indicator that it was real / serious. Suicide rates are higher in people with financial stress, but they’re far from zero all the way up the economic pyramid.
Yeah, but that’s a different mechanism of addiction to feeling good due to a surge of emotions.
That should just be the bare minimum for everyone and whatever other issues can be handled by therapy, but instead we live in a world of constant, easily preventable trauma and the ones who have it the worst have the least access to therapy. Great system!
But if that was true Elon would be the happiest person on earth.
Offer valid only up to $150k, turns out. After that, it starts going downhill.
*different cities may experience slightly higher or lower values, terms and conditions apply
After that, it starts going downhill.
No study suggests this. It keeps going up - you’re just hitting diminishing returns.
Above the $150K threshold (was $70K when they first widely published the idea, but inflation…) it really depends on what you are doing for that $150K, what kind of responsibilities you have taken on, stressors you have, and zero responsibilities or stressors is not a great place to be on the curve, people with no reasons to live aren’t in a great spot.
There’s a trillionaire that is desperate to get into pedophile parties, and between him and the common person, there’s a lot of millionaires and billionaires in those pedophile parties, so there’s clearly a downward trending curve.
Yeah but that’s because he’s a shit excuse for a human, and is fundamentally broken. Whereas a normie would self-actualize with the resources to do so.
Feel like that used to be true, now you need that and stability.
Maybe his happiness is so far up the scale it folded back in on itself and circled back to depression. Like getting a burn from dry ice.
unsigned integer overflow in real life :o
No, you’re picturing a linear curve on a graph (i.e. a straight line). Most systems in life do not behave linearly though. An S shape is probably more accurate, with happiness levelling off past a certain point.
I’ll agree with the S, but there’s also probably a bit of a bump up at the low end when you get into “nothing left to lose” territory.
Having financial security eases with financial worries to an extent but doesn’t entirely solve even that issue nor does it even begin to deal with the unrelated issues. One can be financially secure and absolutely miserable.
well I am financially insecure and miserable :(
They say misery loves company, you have a lot of that today…
I often think about how if I was financially secure for the future it would not change the state of my country or the world. I would be happier day to day to some degree but it would not change whats going on.
Turn that on its head: what if the world were to change where not only you, but everyone was more financially secure…
oh yeah that would be great. my dream scenario is a world where I am the lowest on the totem and that is not so bad a thing to be. I mean I can be content on pretty small amounts but its gotta be in a rational caring system.
My brain to me: Sounds like you need a drink buddy.
Me: I dunno, liver, what’s your take?
Liver: Fuck it man, take that drink.
This reads like an inner monologue from Disco Elysium.
lemmy will have you thinking everything sucks though. this is one of the most intense doomer spaces i’ve ever seen…
Well, most people came here from Reddit, so that checks out.
Lemmy is filled with terminally online shut-ins that barely interact with the real world, yet talk like they’ve travelled the world and are an expert in anything.
As someone who’s an active union member; everything sucks. You gotta have your head reeeaaaal deep in that sand not to notice. Or live a really priviliged life.
Said the Internet shut-in terminally online tough guy
“I sure told them.” He said smarmily.
“Don’t they know I’m the expert?” He quietly reflected, repressing his self doubt before posting some other inane and trifling bullshit.
Aw dude
Some of us have in fact travelled the world before becoming terminally online shut-ins.
Just gotta get through a few years of the grind now, and I’ll be back to travelling.
Not even close to as bad as Reddit. Have you opened that recently…? I can’t scroll more than 4 or 5 posts before I have to nope out of there because I can feel the ragebait radiating from my phone.
Ragebait is everywhere, if you choose to take it.
You also have the choice to look past / through it and see non-rage inducing aspects of life both closely related to and entirely different from the ragebait.
That’s not to say that the ragebait is false, just that how you engage with it - or not - is more important to improving outcomes in your life and the lives of those you impact than directly addressing the particular spin the baiters put on their hooks.
I have the opposite reaction. I feel like reddit is easier to curate for good things.
I still look at communities like DIY, personalfinance, Timberborn, etc over there. Some of these are topics where Lemmy doesn’t have much coverage.
*Well, this prompted me to search, and I found a couple of equivalents here. Lower traffic, though.
One feature that Reddit has that Lemmy still hasn’t managed to replicate is that it’s feed will weight your subscribed subs higher but still include non-subscribed posts. On Lemmy, I can only choose between local/subscribed/all, where local/all ignores the comms I’ve subscribed to (they still show up but in their default sort location), and subscribed only shows the comms I’ve subscribed to.
I miss that hybrid sorting… it meant that I could sub to stuff that makes me happy, and still get posts from other places mixed in.
not really! people are mostly talking about their day to day experience whether it’s their work or just general life.
I find it a lot better then reddit, and exponentially better that Facebook or Twitter (refuse to call it stupid ass X).
I mean you still get a lot of the echo chamber opinions and such, but I think that’s more of a reflection of the current state of society and not Lemmy.
Facebook or the status update bar from facebook. When Twitter launched i was like no fucking way anyone uses this.
There’s a few studies that link low self esteem and depression with accurate understanding of the world and oneself. Lookup depressive realism. It’s actually mildly depressing!
Incidentally, using high self esteem may also lead to looking down on others, defensiveness, inability to critically analyze oneself, among other things. That’s just kinda how it goes when you think highly of yourself…
Woody Allen did a movie “AntZ” which opened with a therapy session where he (an ant) had a breakthrough: he realized he was insignificant. As fantastical movies often do, it followed him through an outrageously improbable rise from insignificance through super-stardom.
Sounds like a very mild case of “billionaire syndrome”
I read the Wikipedia page, it seems to be focused on specifically their assessment of themselves and their impact on the world, not the state of the world as a whole.
I am sorry, but this is nonsense. Even if the world sucks, the logical, smart response would not be dispair and depression, because that fixes nothing.
Also things like looking down on other or defensiveness are symptoms of low self esteem, not a high one. If you really are confident in yourself, you don’t need to feel better than others, because you feel good about yourself.
You can understand the world and still try to enjoy your life. The world always sucked and people found ways to cope with it. But that is a skill, that doesn’t always come naturally, but you should always strife towards that.
I am sorry, you are going through this, but don’t try to rationalize it. It is nearly rational, nor is it an inevitable outcome of high intelligence (this is not a judgement of you personally by the way).
the logical, smart response would not be dispair and depression
There’s nothing logical or smart about depression. That doesn’t make it less real or debilitating.
Yes, that’s not what I am saying at all. I am just refuting the claim, that depression is an inevitable outcome of understanding the world properly. And that means, even if you are depressed and understand the world, you should try to do something about your depression.
Even if the world sucks, the logical, smart response would not be despair and depression, because that fixes nothing.
How logically do most people act, in your estimation? How logically would they act, if an unbearable depression descended upon them through looking at the shape of the world today? How many active genocides are taking place? How quickly will climate change destroy our way of life, and is there anything you, as an individual, can do to stop it? What about food and water insecurity being faced by millions of people? Millions of Americans, even? Lack of healthcare, the widening income gap between the 1% and everyone else? What can you logically do to address these global, ever worsening issues?
Perhaps the fact that you can’t do anything about these very real issues can also be a source of depression? Especially when you’re struggling just to keep your head above the metaphorical water?
One of the last vestiges of hope is a belief in karma. That the evil people perpetuating these evil things will one day face justice. But that’s not true, is it? kissinger never faced consequences. Somehow I doubt trump or netenyahoo will either.
I imagine your answer is probably something along the lines of “focus on your immediate needs and community.” Which boils down to, ignore these problems, because there’s nothing you can do. Kinda like telling an employee aboard a star ship to tidy their working area as the main computer counts down the self-destruction sequence.
I, for one, cannot imagine that Sisyphus is happy.
Ok here’s a counterpoint, sure the world sucks in that all the things you mentioned are happening, but also - compared to the conditions we were genetically programmed to endure, modern life is amazing. For the vast majority of people, our base biological needs are met effortlessly. The majority of human existence has historically been a struggle for calories. Like, thats it. That’s 99% of your life: either hunting, foraging, farming, or directly supporting the people in your family who do. Also, the strong dominating the weak wasn’t even questioned it was just a fact of life.
Transport one of those people from the hunter-gatherer/bronze age/iron age/midevial era and they would be ecstatic in the modern day. Try to tell them about Netanyahu or Trump and they would probably say “wow they sound like an asshole but not as bad as the guys I had to deal with”.
There are no objectively good or bad human conditions. Things can always be better or worse. People’s emotions and perception of human conditions, therefore, are all about whether they perceive things are getting better or worse. The good part about that is it gives you agency. All most people have to do to be happy is improve their quality of life, or adjust how they perceive the world in order to give themselves a more positive outlook.
Tldr get tf off of Lemmy and the rest of social media
All most people have to do to be happy is improve their quality of life, or adjust how they perceive the world in order to give themselves a more positive outlook.
Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and imagine yourself happy!
Not trying to be flippant but… not good advice.
Also I think trump has probably raped more children than most mean midevial guys.
It IS good advice I swear to god. Its not even controversial its what any therapist would tell you. Make lifestyle changes and improve your mindset.
Yeah Trump is a bad dude but tell me with a straight face hes worse then Genghis Kahn or Vlad the Impaler.
wasn’t Genghis Kahn like, famously benevolent to his men and tolerant of other beliefs and customs?
The principal source of steppe wealth was post-battle plunder, of which a leader would normally claim a large share; Genghis eschewed this custom, choosing instead to divide booty equally between himself and all his men.[209] Disliking any form of luxury, he extolled the simple life of the nomad in a letter to Changchun, and objected to being addressed with obsequious flattery. He encouraged his companions to address him informally, give him advice, and criticise his mistakes.[210] Genghis’s openness to criticism and willingness to learn saw him seeking the knowledge of family members, companions, neighbouring states, and enemies.[211] He sought and gained knowledge of sophisticated weaponry from China and the Muslim world, appropriated the Uyghur alphabet with the help of the captured scribe Tata-tonga, and employed numerous specialists across legal, commercial, and administrative fields
He also fathered over a thousand children. If you think all of that was consensual, well… idk what to tell you. And I can’t give him very much credit for invading peaceful nations, plundering them, enslaving their scribes and then using their language. Even if he did divide the booty equally among his men.
Trump is also famously pretty generous with for example tipping people a hundred dollars for carrying his golf clubs. And enriching his own inner circle.
Transport one of those people from the hunter-gatherer/bronze age/iron age/midevial era and they would be ecstatic in the modern day.
Would they? Would they appreciate property rights, being locked in a box every night, processed foods, competitive employment, paying for food and shelter instead of making it yourself, sexual harassment prohibitions? These things all have both good and bad aspects and somebody transported from another reality into this one could focus on either. At the very least they would be homesick and perpetually at odds with modern laws.
Processed foods would blow their fucking minds. Yeah im sure they would be a little homesick so lets let them take their friends and family.
Living in the woods or like a peasant in an undeveloped country is still an option, there’s a reason nobody does it though.
Living in the woods or like a peasant in an undeveloped country is still an option, there’s a reason nobody does it though.
Starting with: people who try to do it get arrested / evicted / victimized.
As opposed to the legal protections given to people in ancient times?
I partially agree. Depression has nothing to do with logic and Depression is kind a Symptom of messed up brain or hormones i think. People dont decide to be depressed.
And i would like to throw in the theory that high and low selfesteem does not really exist, but rather stabile and fragile ego. People with high or low self esteem tend to struggle with critic and be defensive or tend to feel bad about themselves. But that is gross generalisation and fragile/stable ego makes a lot more sense to me
There are a few conflicting frameworks, plus what I describe is normative behavior rather than people with diagnosable conditions (depression in abnormal psychology tends to be more a dysfunction of the brain). I teach social psychology to undergraduates, so I’m familiar with the other frameworks at a fairly broad level-- the one the person you responded to is a bit of an older perspective, but the direction you’re taking I’ve heard discussed.
Still, it’s difficult to get into the details in a Lemmy comment on a shower thoughts thread.
None the less, I mostly don’t like the fragile/secure ego approach because it’s harder to measure something like that, meaning there’s less evidence that’s what’s going on.
I will say more generally though, our brains seek out acceptance and avoid rejection, much like we do physical pain (fMRI confirms it’s the same part of the brain). That includes good things, like behaving cooperatively, and bad things, like confirmation bias. Self-esteem, similarly, cuts both ways-- it makes us feel better without needing external sources of esteem, but it also rejects external threats to that self esteem.
I simply worry that excess of anything leads to bad outcomes, like certain politicians we’re dealing with now. But now we’re getting more into my opinion and less about the research.
If you’re curious, the textbook I use is open source. https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/
It’s not perfect, though. I find it covers the topic well enough not to need to force my students to buy a text.
True on the measurability but to me its a concept that explains a lot of social behaviour. The following is my current understanding of it. It of cause has a lot of root causes playing together, like internalized / toxic shame, fears, self doubt, socialization etc.
Depending on the framework, it can be Interpreten differently i think: Overcompensation (big ego) or surrender (small ego) are modes we slip into and both are part of a fragile ego which means low selfesteem. And also low confidense.
Being and accepting myself is high selfesteem and means a stable ego and high/realsitic confidense. Or also realistic self image.
I thing understanding and recognising those behaviours in oneself is helfpul to reach a stable ego but they are a very generalized view and can habe many causes. So it only helps a bit to recognize ones own patterns but its not possible to improve the selfesteem etc by working on selfesteem, as its just a symptom.
I think to improve selfesteem we have to gain proficiency and confidense in multiple fields by repetition and training which will spread to other areas. We habe to overcome our shame and fear by facing them and being open about it. And learn that people are different and that is beautiful becsuse everyone will find their tribe.
