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.
lemmy will have you thinking everything sucks though. this is one of the most intense doomer spaces i’ve ever seen…
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.
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.
Well, most people came here from Reddit, so that checks out.
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.
“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.
My wife would tell me I’m depressed, and I’d agree about that.
However, she thought I should get meds, and I thought I should only get medicated for depression if the depression was chemical.
If you’re depressed because life sucks, then you should be motivated to fix what sucks. Unfortunately, that’s not how depression works.
Luckily, life started to suck slightly less.
One aspect that I think most don’t talk about enough is functional disorders.
Like way back in the day, depression was seen as a sign of weakness and a character flaw. Then we swung real hard to the opposite end and said that depression is completely outside of your control and is just a physical chemical imbalance. And while it certainly can be influenced by inherent brain chemistry, this is still not a particularly holistic understanding of it.
Many disorders, both physical and mental, can instead be thought of as functional disorders that act more like feedback loops. Think about something like tendonitis, it causes swelling, which causes more rubbing, which causes more tendonitis… Depression amongst many other mental health issues, can function similarly. It saps your motivation which can prevent you from doing stuff or taking action, which makes you more depressed.
Anti-depressants can help you break this loop, but it’s also entirely possible for anti-depressants to just ‘even you out’ enough that you feel no reason to break the loop or make any changes, and then you just end up stuck in the same loop, and just kind of end up numb to everything as a best case scenario.
The research on the long term effectiveness of anti-depressants for relatively mild - mid cases of depression is also still up for debate. A recent Australian public health report was pointing out that most studies measuring the effectiveness sof long term anti-depressant use measure the negative effects from stopping them, but many of these effects are just withdrawal, and once you control for that, they don’t look more effective than therapy, but come with a slew of negative side effects.
In my case, having my manager quit did more for my depression than any pill could do.
If you’re depressed because life sucks, then you should be motivated to fix what sucks. Unfortunately, that’s not how depression works.
Unfortunately, that’s not how life works, either. We are beset on all sides by things that suck AND which we have little-to-no power to influence.
Yeah, I wonder about people who are depressed for “reasons” masking the depression with pills - does that make the “reasons” any better? I can see some rare circumstances where the depressive behavior was a major cause of the problem, but I’m guessing that’s really rare among the population who take the pills.
Then we can ask: what would the people who sell the pills want?
Why not both - my brain
So, there’s a dark joke about why ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy) is (mostly temporarily) effective in treatment of depression.
First, you should know, ECT has a strong side effect of amnesia, mostly temporary amnesia.
So, you get ECT, you forget why (you think) your life sucks and your outlook on everything improves, depressive symptoms fade - until your memory comes back.
People in all walks of life get serious depression, including high rates of suicide.
You’re not wrong, it can be both. Which sucks.
Ignorance is bliss, and that’s why I refrain from explaining myself to other people 😅
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.
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.
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.
