It feels good to be depressed sometimes - believe it or not - which is why so many people do it. But long-term, depression isn't very fun at all.
NOTE: This is an older draft posting from 2020 (!!) that I just finished today.
I harp a lot about mental hygiene in this blog. You can't move forward with your life if you wallow in depression and learned helplessness. If you are negative and pessimistic all the time, well, you are not going to succeed very well in life, other than to live up to your pessimistic expectations.
This is not to say mental illness can be cured by positive thinking. Really crazy people - psychotics and schizophrenics - need medical attention and usually prescription drugs. Sadly, those sorts of folks think they can think their way out of mental illness, and stop taking their medications and end up having an "episode" which results in them falling further back. Hopefully they don't hurt themselves or others in the process.
And yes, I have seen this tragic scenario play out several times, to decent people, who fall off the wagon, so to speak, and lose their minds and act out strange fantasies, until usually the Police are involved, institutionalization (again) and then back on the prescription medication until the process repeats. Such folks often don't live very long, and their short lives are filled with misery and unhappiness. It is sad.
Sad, but then again, I discovered that I could not save them from themselves, nor should I, nor was I qualified to, nor was it my responsibility. As selfish as it sounds, I realized my primary responsibility was to make sure I didn't end up a burden to society myself - something that is incredibly easy to do in this world, particularly if you go around trying to save others and not take care of yourself.
Even hanging around with crazy or depressed people will make you depressed. Depression is an interesting beast and present in all of us, to some extent, at one time or another. In some, it dominates their lives to the point where it is a malady. For others it is a transitory thing. There must be some survival skill involved, or it would have been bred out of our line ages ago - or at the very least, it is a Darwin-neutral value.
I suspect it has some survival value. It is said that one reason that most creatures sleep is that if they were awake all the time, running around, doing things, they would not live as long. Sleeping and inactivity is a survival skill, in that if you just stop doing things you are less likely to fall victim to an accident or your own malfeasance. If squirrels never slept, I suspect most would be run over by cars or eaten by hawks. Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something.
So, depression may have a positive survival value, in that it promotes inaction, and inaction is sometimes better than action. And this may explain why many people who are well-off, well-fed, and want for nothing are often depressed. Why should they be active, when all their needs are met?
In my own life, I have seen this to be true. The times in life when I had to struggle and work hard to get ahead, were some of the happiest times. When I was going to school part-time and working the overnight shift at UPS and riding my bike to school 20 miles on the Erie Canal towpath, I was having fun. I didn't have two nickels to rub together, and I was living on peanut butter and bags of rice. But it was fun - it was hard work, but leading toward a goal.
It is only when work is too easy and when you have too much in life, that boredom sets in - there are no challenges in life, and you are probably better off doing nothing than risking it all doing something. The heir to a small fortune, for example (and I've known a few) spends their days dilly-dallying and indulging themselves. But rarely do they take that money and risk it by starting a business or making risky investments. No, they are better off doing nothing, other than to gossip with the other millionaires at the Country Club. And yes, a lot of such folks are depressed, as evidenced by the line of pill bottles on the nightstand.
Depression, though, can also be a way of getting your brain to motivate itself. I know this sounds axiomatic, but depression is your brain's way of saying you are unhappy - unhappy with your situation in life. One way to fight depression is to change your situation - and it doesn't have to be all that dramatic a change. When we realize we have some modicum of control over our lives, we become less depressed, even if it is something as trivial as a new haircut. Or a new job. Or a new spouse.
Perhaps this is why people have hobbies, or love to travel. You have new experiences and realize you have some control over your life and can change things, which in turn staves off learned helplessness.
But the opposite is also true. Depression can become a death spiral, as depression feeds on depression, and inactivity causes more woe which leads to more depression. The depressed person drinks heavily or does drugs and hangs out with other depressed people. As they pass around the bong and crack open yet another six-pack, they exchange tales of woe about parents who are a "hassle" and ex-spouses or girlfriends who are "just materialistic bitches" or bosses who are "assholes" and companies they work for that are "all messed up." Nothing is good, nothing is decent, everything is falling apart, and the whole world is stacked against them, so it is OK to not bother trying. You see where this leads - not only does it bootstrap depression, but it makes you feel good to be depressed, because you are somehow fighting the system.
Even when the talk turns positive - such as it is - the topics are little more than flashy consumer goods that one will never be able to afford - or afford only on onerous terms. The bitchin' car or SUV or pickup truck, motorcycle or speedboat. Now that would be cool! But as experience shows, owning things is just owning things - it takes no talent and provides fleeting pleasure, and often means decimating your personal wealth.
And I know this because that describes my youth pretty succinctly.
Such folks (and for me this includes family members) just hung out all day long doing drugs, and complaining how awful it was to live in the wealthiest country in the world. Funny thing that - being middle-class in America is to be fabulously wealthy by world standards, yet all we do is complain, complain, complain. And I think you can make yourself insane doing this as well - or at least I saw people slip down the slope of mental health, one bong-hit at a time, devolving into conspiracy theories and yes, gun collecting (drugs 'n guns - a healthy combo!) and basically giving up on their jobs, careers, spouses, and even children.
You can't save people like that. But you can't hang out with them either. No amount of "safe distancing" will prevent you from catching that sort of illness by association. You hang out with drunks, you become a drunk. You hang out with drug users, you become a drug user. You hang out with depressed people, you become depressed as well. Pretty soon, you too will believe in conspiracy theories and start giving up on life. You become the company you keep. Choose your friends, wisely.
I am not sure what got me started on this, other than there is this Greek Chorus of negativism on the Internet, denouncing just about everything as awful and bad. Maybe this is fueled or amplified by Russian trolls (I suspect so) but it strikes me that an awful lot of people in this world are depressed and it isn't healthy. I like to read online comics as a diversion sometime, and many are very talented artists and have clever punchlines. But the majority, it seems, have a theme of depression and helplessness (which is probably related to how hard it is to make money as a freelance cartoonist these days) which gets to be a drag after a while.
Not only are these themes of depression common, they are presented as if an assumed baseline by the reader. "We're all depressed, broke, and unhappy!" seems to be the message. If you are happy, there is obviously something wrong with you! Um, just a thought, but maybe that is the other way around? Maybe happiness is a baseline condition and depression means you have to change something.
Yes, I get it, if you are living in Sudan or Somalia and haven't eaten in a few days and some warlord or terrorist just shot your whole family, that you are depressed and rightfully so. But people living in the wealthiest country in the world? Complaining about being too overweight? Do you realize how obscene that is?
Maybe that is why my perspective is different. Coming of age in the age of HIV, it seemed an early death was all but preordained. Or so that was the story we were told. Living as long as I have, I feel almost giddy. People always say we're so positive and upbeat and smiling. Why is this? Well, maybe when you see someone wasting away from AIDS, you go home and stop bitching about how the bathroom scale has betrayed you yet once again. You realize there are people in this world with real problems and you ain't one of them.
Life is just a ride - a set of experiences - and not measured by how much stuff you own, or who you owe. Yet so many of us get depressed about losing "things" in life, or obsessing about how much money we owe (which sort of just happened somehow, without any intervention on our part). In doing so, people miss out on life - while rushing around to get to work to make payments to have things and worry about losing their job because the granite counter tops are not paid for and the neighbors will think we are poor if we didn't have them.
We waste our lives away this way - worrying about stupid stuff and what people who we don't even know, think of us. Happiness isn't that hard to do, for most people. It does take a reorientation of values, though.
