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I think it is totally bizarre that so many people seem not to acknowledge the possibility that people can be depressed because their life sucks. It has to be ch

• reayn 5y ago
  It’s comments like these that slowly start to extinguish that flame i once had in me that wanted to work and chase after a “good life” once i became an adult, is it truly like this? I look around me in real life however and see what appears to be a reality that contradicts this (people seem mostly happy with where they are, though that could just be my environment or lack of perception), i’m not quite sure how to feel anymore.
  • elzbardico 5y ago
    Don’t take someone who saves 60% of their income and still feel miserable seriously. In general be empathetic to depressed people but don’t let them trap you with their despair.
    • anm89 5y ago
      Just curious, what is the implication here? That im sad because i dont consume anything? I live in a very cheap country where i can consume drastically more than the average american (housing and food mostly, not much material stuff) at a much lower price. My lifestyle would seem pretty extravagant to many. But im trying to return and realizing the numbers are insane.
  • rwnspace 5y ago
    I personally think of it as 'conditional' depression. Mine was conditional on getting out of poverty wages and into a decent job. I'm still cash poor but I also have a place of my own and stuff. I was in a depressed or depression-adjacent place for years, treatment didn't help, either felt nothing or went manic depending on the med. I dont expect to ever own a house, I don't expect to find a wife and settle down any time soon. I don't expect a big number in the bank. I leave that up to future me. Present me is doing the best he can to keep moving forward and doing right by himself. Can't worry about what I can't control. Can take control of what I can now, and trust the person I evolve into in the future to handle more, having learned how that works first person.
    • anm89 5y ago
      Awesome attitude. I hope you succeed.
  • anm89 5y ago
    I mean, its different for everyone. If what society wants to give you is naturally pretty close to what you want then it will be a lot easier for you. This is true for many many people and most of them are probably reasonably happy. If you are the polar opposite just know you are in for a battle and you likely will hqve to take om extreme personal risk to make it work. But i mean, certainly there are plenty of happy people out there.
  • syntheweave 5y ago
    Moment to moment, everything in society is at equilibrium and therefore looks "normal". Even wartorn countries experience a strong impulse to normalize themselves and return to day to day living, despite compromise and sacrifice. Likewise people can't become depressed and suddenly cease to have any interest in anything at all. It's more a case of something becoming top-of-mind more often and coloring whether they see "a future". Like throwing the match before it's over, depression makes you relax your grip on striving for things, and on enjoying that struggle. And, to speak to the quandary of the article, it can be relentless if your engagement with everyday life is constantly mediated by commercial elements, which it is, today. Poverty strikes harder in that instance because you don't seem to be able to "do" anything that matters to other people without engaging your financial brain(which you equate to survival, since you have to constantly calculate rent and groceries). So you're going to just be in survival mode all the time which is likely to give you a mix of anxiety and depression - all routes closed off except the worst and riskiest ones. But then flip the situation into a non-commercial one and suddenly a whole segment of the discouraged-depressed can be creative and engaged, and I think that's really telling. So long as you have the strength, it's worth it to try to move forward in your life, because you can't really help the people around you by holding yourself back and staying still.
• waterlaw 5y ago
  In the exact same position. Live in Canada making $200k. After taxes and pension that's $123k, because I'm self employed. After living expenses I have 90k left. To buy a house without a loan (religiously I don't do loans with interest.) That's 1.2M for a bungalow (that I don't even want for 400k.) 1.2M / 90k is 13 times my annual savings rate. Not to mention lack of infrastructure, the mathematical impossibility of the economic system and a Healthcare system that cannot withstand the demographic pressure incoming. There's serious risk and uncertainty for debt ridden Canada. I don't care what anyone says. The future looks unreliable for this country. Living standards have depreciated sustaintally. My income has tripled, but real estate purchasing power is a third of what it was 10 years ago. I want to move back to the middle east, but people think I'm crazy. I think they're crazy. TLDR; most in Canada became rich based on debt + assets, not labor, they prefer the status quo. The parasite is killing the host.
  • anm89 5y ago
    Yeah pretty close to the numbers im looking at. To have a 5 acre home stead with a 2500sqft house im calculating i would need about 1.25m in most of the markets im looking at.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    > Living standards have depreciated sustaintally. Sounds wrong. By what metric?
    • anm89 5y ago
      If you judge by real estate prices it is probably true. I would rather be making 100k 10 years ago then making 300k now in terms of housing prospects.
      • barbazoo 5y ago
        Interesting that's not what I'm seeing in my area. Here, houses doubled, maybe tripled in "value" over the last 10+ years. But that's from 200k to 600k which doesn't mean my salary has to double or triple, just that it takes longer to pay off. But working in tech, the last thing I do is complain since it's still quite doable. For a median income, true, not so much. Real estate isn't everything though, definitely not enough to judge living standards. I might be wrong but though.
• waterlaw 5y ago
  This is an opinion post on how Real Estate and other sectors took most of the wealth generated by the technology sector in Canada. https://palladiummag.com/2019/09/19/how-not-to-build-a-country-canadas-late-soviet-pessimism/ https://palladiummag.com/2019/09/19/how-not-to-build-a-count... There's a great book on this topic by Michael Hudson called "Killing the Host"
• barbazoo 5y ago
  Speaking from experience, feeling "depressed" about ones status measured on some scale might not be what is meant by "depression" which often goes way deeper and renders a person unable to do certain things. Simply being unhappy with ones life, that's just not it. At least in my experience.
  • anm89 5y ago
    I'm not comparing my status to anyone else. I'm comparing the elements of my actual life to the elements of the life I would like.
    • barbazoo 5y ago
      Gotcha. I saw you mention "middle class" which definitely sounds like a comparison to me.
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      I think expectations are a big part of it. I have met homeless who are much happier despite their lack of material wealth. Similar differences apply when you look a cross countries and cultures.
      • DarylZero 5y ago
        It's less about current situation than belief about the future. The homeless can believe that they will catch a lucky break, even irrationally. Highly-informed internet people with very realistic understandings of the prospects available in 21st century capitalism find it harder to delude themselves. If you don't believe in the future, you become unable to act for yourself (depressed).
        • s1artibartfast 5y ago
          I strongly disagree with your first sentiment and strongly agree with the 2nd. It isn't a matter of knowledge or irrationality. Someone with a difficult life can be happy without the expectation of improvement.
• mbfg 5y ago
  Here's an honest question. Is it called depression when your mental state accurately reflects your situation. I suspect for many people, life really is bad, and they feel commensurately bad as well. Is that depression? Or is depression when you feel worse than you "should" given your actual state? I generally have no hope for my own future, i have no real sense of happiness in any meaningful way, i am trapped in my circumstances, with no way out. I generally feel bad all the time. I don't think i'm depressed however, because i believe my mental state more or less depicts my actual situation.
  • DarylZero 5y ago
    The diagnostic criteria make exceptions for mourning but not for realistic evaluation of future prospects. In practice psychological diagnosis is not a science of any kind. It's not like a medical diagnosis.
    • sjg007 5y ago
      Future prospects are inherently unknowable. So by that definition you should consider this depression.
      • nbvb5464 5y ago
        I think not quite so unknowable. Economic and resources close future quite certain availability prognosis is in the range of even the most basic common sense, and yeah, for many, the prospects are shockingly depressing.
• the_only_law 5y ago
  Conversely there’s this idea that you can’t be depressed if you have material comforts and your life is good by the standards of the person judging you.
• sjg007 5y ago
  You are not alone in the housing situation. It is a big problem in many places. I think we need real leadership to make any progress there and probably grass roots organization.
• asveikau 5y ago
  The thing about it is that things are never all good or all bad. Everything is relative or has a frame of reference to it. If you try and you have good coping skills that are well exercised, you find the things that keep you going. An example, there is a lot of injustice in life and world hunger and crime or whatever, and if we took it all at once it would be horrible. But we can look around the room, or at stable relationships we have in life, and find joy and things we appreciate. In a global sense things can suck for this and that reason. But there are other frames of reference that are good, joyful, give us hope. If you are depressed, the lack of appropriate coping keeps you stuck in the frame of reference where everything is bad, and you don't find a way out of it, it becomes self re-enforcing. There is even a thing called psychotic depression (feel free to Google that) where this depressed state makes you delusional and when you find evidence that things are all right you reject it, and you invent false reality where things are worse than they are.