5 ms·

This guy is being unfairly downvoted. A not insignificant number of cases of depression are rooted in not cultivating proper emotional awareness, and then igno

This guy is being unfairly downvoted. A not insignificant number of cases of depression are rooted in not cultivating proper emotional awareness, and then ignoring the body's emotional signals. But people are unwilling and, frankly, unable to take responsibility for their emotional life so this attitude is an unpopular one. Also worth pointing out is that it's unrealistic to expect that everyone can be happy, some unhappiness is essential to social stability.

nollidge 16y ago
They're not being downvoted unfairly. Yours was a nuanced and considered opinion (and I upvoted); theirs was absolute and unreasonable.
paganel 16y ago
> Also worth pointing out is that it's unrealistic to expect that everyone can be happy, some unhappiness is essential to social stability. Thank you for this. This was one of the most important things I learned out of my (pretty) mild depression. Since then whenever I see people pretending to always be happy or at least striving to always be happy I sense that there's something wrong. That, and the thing that I began to understand what the Stoics were saying a little bit more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism)
- eavc 16y ago
  Be careful not to be cynical - happiness works on a bell curve much like intelligence or height. Some people are naturally much happier than average.
klondikered 16y ago
No, he's not being unfairly downvoted, and I cannot upvote you either. You are basically talking out of your ass...please cite figures to back up what you mean by "a not insignificant number". And how, pray tell, is some unhappiness essential to "social stability", whatever that may be...
- noname123 16y ago
  Simple. Human nature is about survival and reproduction. Resources are limited so that only some of us will survive and reproduce. Scarcity produces unhappiness which in term induces human productivity/creativity. Case in point, Love in the Time of Cholera. You want to get the girl but you are a victim of socioeconomic scarcity. You become a life-long melancholic but are motivated to climb the social/professional ladder to get what it is that you couldn't get in the first place. All great literature, music, scientific discoveries were of products of unrequited love, jealousy, or the urge to overcome a self-inferiority complex.
  - zackattack 16y ago
    Or check this study out. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12167510 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12167510
  - eavc 16y ago
    >Scarcity produces unhappiness Beyond a basic level, this fails to be true. >which in term induces human productivity/creativity. Show me that depression leads to greater productivity. I expect that you cannot. >climb the social/professional ladder to get what it is that you couldn't get in the first place. This has nothing to do with depression and little to do with happiness. >All great literature, music, scientific discoveries were of products of unrequited love, jealousy, or the urge to overcome a self-inferiority complex. This is trite, wildly hyperbolic, and almost certainly baseless.
  - mannicken 16y ago
    Not necessarily. Depression paralyzes you, leaves you too scared to leave the house or do anything. "Stars" are more likely to be hypomanic. Or just people who like writing or composing music too much :) People like to blame success on mental disease or drugs because it helps them justify their laziness. Also, attempt to claim that Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Kobain wrote their music because they had a self-inferiority complex might be caused by the self-inferiority complex and envy :P
dtf 16y ago
Being depressed is not like being unhappy, it's like being dead. It's not sadness, or fear, or grief or any other normal human emotion. Grief and sadness are mental manifestations, and they have character and facets which may be approached and reasoned with. But depression is physical. It is the void, infinite and eternal, pounding incessantly from every single cell of your body. Terror and hopelessness, real emotions for sure, are just a side-effects of this physical sensation. There is no reasoning with depression, because it is entirely physical, and it often robs you of any faculties which you might otherwise muster to defeat it. The author is quite correct - it is deadly.
noname123 16y ago
No worries, bro. One doesn't live by karma points (that would be pretty sad). I'd say that it's pretty funny that so many people took it upon themselves to explain how their life is so perfect and that any possible explaination for their depression could not lie in that their life sucks. The reality is that most people's lives suck (including mine and yours) and that most people spend their lives covering up how their lives suck by buying more crap, settling & self-medication. As you said, if it didn't suck, human civilization would not progress. People make a simple problem into a much more complicated one. If your life sucks, then fix it or accept it. The caveat is that you have to either man up to fix it or swallow your pride to accept it.
- zackattack 16y ago
  Send me an email if you feel like it Edit: on second thought, don't. It probably won't help me overcome any of my personal rationalizations or bring me any closer to my goals. But I have a recommendation. Read Nassim Taleb's Bed of Procrustes.
  - noname123 16y ago
    Funny because the next book I'm going to read is Nassim Taleb's "Dynamic Hedging" which I'll try to apply to my volatility trading. IMHO, Taleb is an expert in finance not in life in general.
    - zackattack 16y ago
      ok, so who is an expert on life? and have they published a book?
eavc 16y ago
I downvoted you for the same reason I downvoted the other guy. You are speaking in vague generalities, with authority, on matters about which you are apparently ignorant. Moreover, your propagating this misinformation is detrimental to attitudes about depression, both for those who might be afflicted and the public as a whole. Depression is a serious problem which should be addressed through science, credible education, and consultation with professionals. The comment you are defending is utterly asinine. Persistent depression is far more likely to be the result of cognitive-behavioral factors and/or physiological factors rooted in genetics than it is to be the result of bad life circumstances aside from some negative extremes. Furthermore, you grant that people are "unable to take responsibility for their emotional life" and yet somehow also support the patent contradiction to that idea in suggesting that "fix it or accept it" is acceptable advice. Your final line (in addition to conflating freedom from depression with "being happy") belies a kind of moralistic thinking about mental health. Would you say that broken legs are essential to social stability? Or ulcers?
- zackattack 16y ago
  You make an excellent point. I should have distinguished between severe depression and dysthymia. I do not know much about severe depression but I have plenty of knowledge about dysthymia. Many people casually conflate the two and I made that fundamental error in my post. My apologies.
  - eavc 16y ago
    I appreciate that. I honestly don't care about winning arguments or looking smart on this point. I just wanted to get out my critique of your post for people to read after yours so they can see another angle. Warm regards.

nollidge 16y ago

They're not being downvoted unfairly. Yours was a nuanced and considered opinion (and I upvoted); theirs was absolute and unreasonable.

paganel 16y ago

> Also worth pointing out is that it's unrealistic to expect that everyone can be happy, some unhappiness is essential to social stability. Thank you for this. This was one of the most important things I learned out of my (pretty) mild depression. Since then whenever I see people pretending to always be happy or at least striving to always be happy I sense that there's something wrong. That, and the thing that I began to understand what the Stoics were saying a little bit more (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism)

eavc 16y ago
Be careful not to be cynical - happiness works on a bell curve much like intelligence or height. Some people are naturally much happier than average.

klondikered 16y ago

No, he's not being unfairly downvoted, and I cannot upvote you either. You are basically talking out of your ass...please cite figures to back up what you mean by "a not insignificant number". And how, pray tell, is some unhappiness essential to "social stability", whatever that may be...

noname123 16y ago
Simple. Human nature is about survival and reproduction. Resources are limited so that only some of us will survive and reproduce. Scarcity produces unhappiness which in term induces human productivity/creativity. Case in point, Love in the Time of Cholera. You want to get the girl but you are a victim of socioeconomic scarcity. You become a life-long melancholic but are motivated to climb the social/professional ladder to get what it is that you couldn't get in the first place. All great literature, music, scientific discoveries were of products of unrequited love, jealousy, or the urge to overcome a self-inferiority complex.
- zackattack 16y ago
  Or check this study out. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12167510 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12167510
- eavc 16y ago
  >Scarcity produces unhappiness Beyond a basic level, this fails to be true. >which in term induces human productivity/creativity. Show me that depression leads to greater productivity. I expect that you cannot. >climb the social/professional ladder to get what it is that you couldn't get in the first place. This has nothing to do with depression and little to do with happiness. >All great literature, music, scientific discoveries were of products of unrequited love, jealousy, or the urge to overcome a self-inferiority complex. This is trite, wildly hyperbolic, and almost certainly baseless.
- mannicken 16y ago
  Not necessarily. Depression paralyzes you, leaves you too scared to leave the house or do anything. "Stars" are more likely to be hypomanic. Or just people who like writing or composing music too much :) People like to blame success on mental disease or drugs because it helps them justify their laziness. Also, attempt to claim that Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Kobain wrote their music because they had a self-inferiority complex might be caused by the self-inferiority complex and envy :P

dtf 16y ago

Being depressed is not like being unhappy, it's like being dead. It's not sadness, or fear, or grief or any other normal human emotion. Grief and sadness are mental manifestations, and they have character and facets which may be approached and reasoned with. But depression is physical. It is the void, infinite and eternal, pounding incessantly from every single cell of your body. Terror and hopelessness, real emotions for sure, are just a side-effects of this physical sensation. There is no reasoning with depression, because it is entirely physical, and it often robs you of any faculties which you might otherwise muster to defeat it. The author is quite correct - it is deadly.

noname123 16y ago

No worries, bro. One doesn't live by karma points (that would be pretty sad). I'd say that it's pretty funny that so many people took it upon themselves to explain how their life is so perfect and that any possible explaination for their depression could not lie in that their life sucks. The reality is that most people's lives suck (including mine and yours) and that most people spend their lives covering up how their lives suck by buying more crap, settling & self-medication. As you said, if it didn't suck, human civilization would not progress. People make a simple problem into a much more complicated one. If your life sucks, then fix it or accept it. The caveat is that you have to either man up to fix it or swallow your pride to accept it.

zackattack 16y ago
Send me an email if you feel like it Edit: on second thought, don't. It probably won't help me overcome any of my personal rationalizations or bring me any closer to my goals. But I have a recommendation. Read Nassim Taleb's Bed of Procrustes.
- noname123 16y ago
  Funny because the next book I'm going to read is Nassim Taleb's "Dynamic Hedging" which I'll try to apply to my volatility trading. IMHO, Taleb is an expert in finance not in life in general.
  - zackattack 16y ago
    ok, so who is an expert on life? and have they published a book?

eavc 16y ago

I downvoted you for the same reason I downvoted the other guy. You are speaking in vague generalities, with authority, on matters about which you are apparently ignorant. Moreover, your propagating this misinformation is detrimental to attitudes about depression, both for those who might be afflicted and the public as a whole. Depression is a serious problem which should be addressed through science, credible education, and consultation with professionals. The comment you are defending is utterly asinine. Persistent depression is far more likely to be the result of cognitive-behavioral factors and/or physiological factors rooted in genetics than it is to be the result of bad life circumstances aside from some negative extremes. Furthermore, you grant that people are "unable to take responsibility for their emotional life" and yet somehow also support the patent contradiction to that idea in suggesting that "fix it or accept it" is acceptable advice. Your final line (in addition to conflating freedom from depression with "being happy") belies a kind of moralistic thinking about mental health. Would you say that broken legs are essential to social stability? Or ulcers?

zackattack 16y ago
You make an excellent point. I should have distinguished between severe depression and dysthymia. I do not know much about severe depression but I have plenty of knowledge about dysthymia. Many people casually conflate the two and I made that fundamental error in my post. My apologies.
- eavc 16y ago
  I appreciate that. I honestly don't care about winning arguments or looking smart on this point. I just wanted to get out my critique of your post for people to read after yours so they can see another angle. Warm regards.