I mean, both can be true.
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.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” J. Krishnamurty
I mean, it can be both
Ty worse, have you met worser?
you really mean that?
No.
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.
Like I said, I don’t disagree with things sucking in general.
Perception is very important, though.
It would be possible to be perfectly depressed, even if things did not, in fact, suck.
But of course, it’s a lot easier to be depressed and to believe, that everything sucks, if that is actually reflected in reality.A big part of combatting depression, is to focus your perception on things, that don’t suck and changing the ones that can be changed, to suck less; instead of making yourself sick by fussing about the things you cannot change anyway.
I struggle with that every day.
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.
Do you mind sharing, what kind of changes those were and how they were important for you to feel better?
I was letting some people take advantage of my strong work ethic and was therefore overextending myself. I needed encouragement to escape a bad living situation and move out to another city nearby. I was confused with about my sexual orientation following a series of advances from a gay person that didn’t seem entirely unwanted at the time. I also needed encouragement to speak to my doctor about some embarrassing health issues which turned out to be easily treatable.
I’m still being actively treated for anxiety and a panic disorder ancillary to PTSD following my volunteer work in the aftermath of hurricane Helene.
That really sounds like you worked out some important things. I can totally understand how those issues can wear you down, especially if you can’t bring yourself to resolve them. Glad you found someone who could help you deal with them. And I hope you can make progress on the rest of your issues as well.
Honestly, you sound like a good person, who deserves to be happier, just from that glimpse, I’ve read. All the best!
Thanks for the kind words! I hope this encourages you or someone else to pursue a better life! Have a wonderful day
why isn’t everybody depressed
It’s because they’re stupid and self centered.
That explanation falls a bit short. While it surely explains a lot of people, it doesn’t apply to everybody. There are definitely also people (some of whom I know personally) who are neither stupid & self-centered nor depressed.
Then they aren’t paying attention which makes them either stupid or self-centered.
I guess there’s no point arguing against a closed worldview.
I think, at least for Americans, they are absolutely brainwashed. They can’t imagine a different world and think this is the Pinnacle of human existence. Then it turns out they are so EVIL they don’t really care and ignore school children getting killed by guns and systematically raped by elites.
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?
I’d much rather grow my own food.
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.
People had markets and commerce for thousands of years before capitalism.
Markets are a proto-form of capitalism. Producing something for the whole purpose to make a profit at a market is the core of capitalism.
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.
“I thought i had mono for a year, but i was just bored.” - Wayne
came here lookin for this comment lol
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.
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.
This is both my biggest love of, and gripe with, Slavs.
“Why smile? Everything is shit? Look around!”
But also, the world is amazing AF if you look around. There’s joy and love in anything and everything of you choose to look for joy and love.
But also, everything is fucked, so let’s drink rakja until we don’t feel feelings.
But also, flowers and sunsets.
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.
My senior year quote was from Doctor Who Matt Smith era, I think its a Christmas special or something. It goes “Why do you make them happy when they’re going to be sad later?” Rory or River asks, the Doctor replies, "Because they going to be sad later ". I’m probably forgetting the exact wording the episode aired 13 or 14 years ago.
you can have depression from outside causes. some of it will be internal. I have major depressive and general anxiety. I don’t think current events created it but they did push it to where it is not manageable by me with things like walks and breathing excersises.
I definitely have both. Before 2016, my anti-depressive medication did an amazing job.
But then there was an election in the US, and that one day made me realize just how fucked we all were in a profound, unmitigatable way. I never looked at the people in my country the same way again, I never looked at the political system the same way again, and my perpetual-hopefulness for the world was completed crushed.
I know some people will say that’s overly-dramatic, but those people clearly hadn’t been paying attention or connecting the dots. I knew immediately when that election was called that there would be no peaceful way back. All this fascism and violence was written on the wall that day. To be able to recognize the patterns forming, but lacking the ability to stop it (and even being called “alarmist” for pointing it out), meant being stuck in a perpetual feeling of helplessness. It’s been 10 years, shit’s played out just as I feared it would, and the only sliver of hope I’ve seen ever since was the rise of Mamdani in NYC. However, awesome as that is, it’s just not enough to lift me up anymore.
I also know I’m not alone. We are collectively traumatized, there’s no other way to put it. It’s going to take a long time for us to heal (if we’re able to at all.) The worst part is, this was all done on purpose. Those in charge of the Republican party absolutely, 100% wanted us to feel this way - Project 2025 proved it.
Then there’s the non-political stuff that I didn’t predict, adding insult to injury. Like a network of cameras being installed everywhere, and gen AI furthering the confusion between reality and fantasy. Oh, and that whole year where the world shut down due to a disease, which was more bizarre than anything I could’ve expected on that first election day.
Anyway, you’re right, there’s no amount of nature walks or breathing exercises that can resolve the perpetual stress so many of us are under. I don’t want to be a “doomer” but how the fuck am I supposed to not feel doomed? Even if I didn’t look around and try to understand the world, there’s my own empty wallet, grocery stores full of disease-infected food, all the clothing available is shit quality that starts to unravel before being worn (so it has to be purchased more frequently), and the never-ending bills that get higher even when our wages stay the same. It’s not like we’re working hard in order to eventually get relief; we’re just working hard today in order to survive to work harder tomorrow. There’s no end in sight.
Everything truly sucks and now I daily contemplate things that I never thought I would have before, even with my anti-depressants.
I completely understand and while I don’t think we can avoid eventual collapse I do see a narrow path through with the next election. Granted its a best case scenario when we continually have been following a worst case. If both houses of congress have a massive democratic win. Like red states that were considered unassailable and such. then maybe we can get impeachment and enough action to get us off this dysfunctional train wreck of a government. So a lot of things would have to go right. I know its thin but im holding onto it for the next month or so.
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.
Just one depression please.
