“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” J. Krishnamurty
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.
I mean, it can be both
Ty worse, have you met worser?
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.
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.
If it were 1726, and we were hanging out by the livery stable, watching the carriages roll over the horseshit in the road, and we dreamed of a utopia, it would be the futuristic paradise in which we live today.
You might want to see a doctor.
Big assumption they be dreaming of working 2 job for a living wage with a nagging rectangle in your pocket that’s occasionally useful. No kids, mid to low shot of having a partner and the only way to get anywhere in socity is to go against the teaching of most religion and be a bastard. Yah real utopic, stop saying this stupid shit.
This is the problem with clinical depression. It’s a form of psychosis and if you try to talk the person out of it, they can become belligerent. You guys need professional help. You are in danger. There are mean people out here who will egg you on instead of saying “stupid shit”. They’ll feed you everything you want to hear and laugh at you as you spiral down the drain.
Actually said something, nice
Read a book. I recommend “Paris in the Terror” by Loomis.
But yeah you’re really suffering in a living Hell worse than anybody ever, oh wait, stop being ignorant of how truly blissful your life is compared to others in the past, or even today. Have you ever gone days without eating? What’s the longest you’ve been without electricity?
If you hate reading, catch a flight to Haiti.
I have gone days without eating FYI, by choice but that’s a dif story, maybe you should stfu and stop makeing assumptions or you could not be an aragent tard, you could try doing that.
And what we have now is still leagues better then what they had in 1726.
*for some people
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 😅
Just one depression please.
