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How did you get yourself out of these? I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement.

How did you get yourself out of these? I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement. I used to be more energetic and fairly optimistic. I’m not even stressed and have overcome a few minor health issues that used to bother me. Yet at this point, I can’t help but feel the best years have passed and now it just a slow decline to the end. (But no thoughts of suicide/self-harm). I know this probably isn’t entire true but can’t get away from the feeling.

david-gpu 4y ago
> I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement. Been there. It gets better, but you will have to change some things. This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be. Once you commit to spending some time every day/week simply to enjoy yourself and have fun, now you can choose an activity. At first it may seem difficult because everything may seem pointless or discouraging. Passive activities like watching TV/podcasts/videogames are a bad choice. They may be easy and tempting, but really must be avoided. The best choices are social, such as team sports, board games, ballroom dancing, etc. Outdoor activities are also great: walking in nature, riding a bike, etc. Artsy stuff like painting or embroidery are okay, but being neither social nor outdoorsy means they won't be as beneficial. If you are particularly industrious you may be tempted to learn a new skill like a new language, or going to the gym. Beware: your actual goal is to lighten up your mood and enjoy yourself, not to "be productive" or "be the best version of yourself". Your obsession with productivity is probably what got you in this mess in the first place. Simply allow yourself to be a kid again. Do fun stuff that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
- delusional 4y ago
  > Passive activities like watching TV/podcasts/videogames are a bad choice. I'd like to chime in and say that social video games like CSGO or Dota or whatever with friends on discord can be wonderful social activities.
  - david-gpu 4y ago
    I bet they are, but they are also sedentary. Exercise and the outdoors are great at reducing anxiety, and depression is often caused by chronic anxiety, which is why videogames would not be my weapon of choice to combat it.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  > This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be. The act of "scheduling" fun makes it hard for me to actually have fun - it feels like a chore. Fun is only fun (to me) if it's spontaneous. Obviously, that creates quite a vicious cycle... I'm stuck in one right now, actually. I'm just grinding, hoping something's gonna change. I doubt it will, though.
ElFitz 4y ago
I am not entirely sure that I have. And often wonder if I ever will feel it is truly, once and for all, all behind me. A few things have been helpful though. • First, the obvious Quitting the jobs that burned me out. Avoiding, like the plague, hyper-political or hypocritical work environments. I’ve got better things to than play Game of Thrones or The Young and the Restless. • The usual Finding a good therapist. Most will be utterly useless. Competency aside, one that works for one person will be completely unhelpful to someone else. But one that works for you will help you identify and change patterns, in both your everyday life and your "macro" life. They won’t do the work for you, but they will be of tremendous help. Started doing what I wanted to do as a kid but never did, or not enough. In my case it was surfing and skating. As a child I used to watch those people surfing and skating in movies and wanting to do it too. Turns out, it’s quite fun. Tedious (surfing), and sometimes painful (skating), but really pleasant. It won’t change your life, but in the moment it might just make going through the rest feel like it was worth it. I went back to activities I used to like but had stopped. For me, it was snorkelling, hiking, and scuba diving. I had entirely forgotten the sense of wonder and excitement that came with it. Scuba diving with a stubborn one year old otitis wasn’t the best of ideas, but we didn’t go below 6m, so it was fine. • The less obvious and slightly unrelated: Letting go of high-maintenance friendships and relationships, and letting them die off. It’s incredible how much cognitive and emotional bandwidth these things can take. • Others But what has really stuck with me is experimenting. Freeing up some time to experiment with new things. Trying out new things, making new things. Seeing what gets me excited, what sticks, what tickles my brain, and getting back that sense of play in my day to day life. Lately for me, it’s been stable diffusion and LLM applications, but it can really be anything. The important part is that it should feel more like play than work. The kind of thing that makes you feel so excited you genuinely want to tell everybody about it. Which unexpectedly reminds me of two people. The first, a pilot. I wanted to be one at the time, and had somehow gotten a job at the airport so I could see planes all day, meet some pilots, and ask them everything that came to my mind. One of them told that most people didn’t understand that when they (the pilots) went to work, they weren’t going to work. They were going to play. It stuck with me. I obviously didn’t become a pilot, but it stuck. And the second is Feynman, or more accurately his autobiography ("Surely you’re joking M. Feynman", which I can only wholeheartedly recommend), when he somehow grew bored with physics. It’s a rather long excerpt, but having looked it up to make sure I wasn’t making it up, here you go: > Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment. > So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever. > Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. > I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate. Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics?” > I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance… I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations. > He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?” > “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked. > It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate. All that being said, I don’t really know wether I am truly out of depression, for good, or if it’s just an exceptionally long relief. While it feels okay now, I can regularly see patterns that I wish were long gone creeping back. And I honestly can’t tell wether it’s just me just overreacting, or if it means it will be a life-long struggle. But it does seem to get easier with time. It takes some effort, every day. But it gets easier
CapstanRoller 4y ago
You need to build a steady trickle of small wins outside of your work environment. These can be anything as long as they can be broken down into small, timeboxed, digestible, repeatable, and rewarding bits. For example: find a local plant store, pick up some pothos[0], and get some roots going. Get two: one that's a little more established in soil and one that's just a bare cutting. All you need is a jar/glass/mug/bowl of water and a sunny spot. Do not plan! Stop making plans and checklists and calendar events! Feel free to block off time on your calendar for self-care, which is your plant-tending experiment. No more lists or plans after this. You can plan this all in your head: 1. A plant piece (money optional) 2. A humid container (plastic lunch bag? old yogurt tub? something out of the recycling bin? use trash) 3. A sunny spot or a bright light (sun is free) Just get some vines get the things to grow some roots[3]. Ask the friendly plant store person for some light nutrient solution, or get a tiny amount of Miracle-Gro and dissolve it in water. You don't need anything fancy, this is just an experiment. Eventually the vine will start growing. After it forms roots and a few new nodes, you can cut it apart[1] and grow more roots. Keep repeating this process and propagating your vines. Do not stress about messing it up. There is an infinite amount of pothos vine out there. It propagates itself. Try rooting small sections until you can do it confidently.[2] Take more cuttings, root them, grow them out, gift them to friends, give them away, etc.[3] Alternatively: ask your plant store for leafless scraps of pothos (or philodendron, or similar) and try propagating from nothing[4] Yes, your work output will suffer, and it should suffer considering the amount of suffering you've done for it! What helped me was accepting that there was an infinite amount of work to be done in the world, and that working generated more future work. There is no shortage of pending work, and the overall to-do list is endless much like a river is endless. You don't need to tame the river, but it is useful for navigating the environment. Don't hyperfocus on the river, don't fetishize the river, and stop trying to rapidly get to somewhere else via the river. Splash around, do the basic chores, and hang out by the riverbank and watch things happen. This probably sounds very stupid right now. Feel free to email me. There are some chemical shortcuts one can take, but that's outside the scope of this post. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epipremnum_aureum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epipremnum_aureum [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FfQ_nWrxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FfQ_nWrxo [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D89Ia_phck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D89Ia_phck [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8 [4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8

david-gpu 4y ago

> I find I just don’t have ambitions for anything anymore. I simply exist without any hope/expectation of joy/excitement. Been there. It gets better, but you will have to change some things. This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be. Once you commit to spending some time every day/week simply to enjoy yourself and have fun, now you can choose an activity. At first it may seem difficult because everything may seem pointless or discouraging. Passive activities like watching TV/podcasts/videogames are a bad choice. They may be easy and tempting, but really must be avoided. The best choices are social, such as team sports, board games, ballroom dancing, etc. Outdoor activities are also great: walking in nature, riding a bike, etc. Artsy stuff like painting or embroidery are okay, but being neither social nor outdoorsy means they won't be as beneficial. If you are particularly industrious you may be tempted to learn a new skill like a new language, or going to the gym. Beware: your actual goal is to lighten up your mood and enjoy yourself, not to "be productive" or "be the best version of yourself". Your obsession with productivity is probably what got you in this mess in the first place. Simply allow yourself to be a kid again. Do fun stuff that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.

delusional 4y ago
> Passive activities like watching TV/podcasts/videogames are a bad choice. I'd like to chime in and say that social video games like CSGO or Dota or whatever with friends on discord can be wonderful social activities.
- david-gpu 4y ago
  I bet they are, but they are also sedentary. Exercise and the outdoors are great at reducing anxiety, and depression is often caused by chronic anxiety, which is why videogames would not be my weapon of choice to combat it.
bheadmaster 4y ago
> This is what worked for me: allow yourself to have fun. It is not frivolous. It is not insignificant. It is an important part of a fulfilling life, so make time for it. Literally carve some time for it and put it in your daily/weekly schedule if need be. The act of "scheduling" fun makes it hard for me to actually have fun - it feels like a chore. Fun is only fun (to me) if it's spontaneous. Obviously, that creates quite a vicious cycle... I'm stuck in one right now, actually. I'm just grinding, hoping something's gonna change. I doubt it will, though.

ElFitz 4y ago

I am not entirely sure that I have. And often wonder if I ever will feel it is truly, once and for all, all behind me. A few things have been helpful though. • First, the obvious Quitting the jobs that burned me out. Avoiding, like the plague, hyper-political or hypocritical work environments. I’ve got better things to than play Game of Thrones or The Young and the Restless. • The usual Finding a good therapist. Most will be utterly useless. Competency aside, one that works for one person will be completely unhelpful to someone else. But one that works for you will help you identify and change patterns, in both your everyday life and your "macro" life. They won’t do the work for you, but they will be of tremendous help. Started doing what I wanted to do as a kid but never did, or not enough. In my case it was surfing and skating. As a child I used to watch those people surfing and skating in movies and wanting to do it too. Turns out, it’s quite fun. Tedious (surfing), and sometimes painful (skating), but really pleasant. It won’t change your life, but in the moment it might just make going through the rest feel like it was worth it. I went back to activities I used to like but had stopped. For me, it was snorkelling, hiking, and scuba diving. I had entirely forgotten the sense of wonder and excitement that came with it. Scuba diving with a stubborn one year old otitis wasn’t the best of ideas, but we didn’t go below 6m, so it was fine. • The less obvious and slightly unrelated: Letting go of high-maintenance friendships and relationships, and letting them die off. It’s incredible how much cognitive and emotional bandwidth these things can take. • Others But what has really stuck with me is experimenting. Freeing up some time to experiment with new things. Trying out new things, making new things. Seeing what gets me excited, what sticks, what tickles my brain, and getting back that sense of play in my day to day life. Lately for me, it’s been stable diffusion and LLM applications, but it can really be anything. The important part is that it should feel more like play than work. The kind of thing that makes you feel so excited you genuinely want to tell everybody about it. Which unexpectedly reminds me of two people. The first, a pilot. I wanted to be one at the time, and had somehow gotten a job at the airport so I could see planes all day, meet some pilots, and ask them everything that came to my mind. One of them told that most people didn’t understand that when they (the pilots) went to work, they weren’t going to work. They were going to play. It stuck with me. I obviously didn’t become a pilot, but it stuck. And the second is Feynman, or more accurately his autobiography ("Surely you’re joking M. Feynman", which I can only wholeheartedly recommend), when he somehow grew bored with physics. It’s a rather long excerpt, but having looked it up to make sure I wasn’t making it up, here you go: > Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference. I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment. > So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever. > Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling. > I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate. Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics?” > I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance… I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is …” and I showed him the accelerations. > He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?” > “Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked. > It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate. All that being said, I don’t really know wether I am truly out of depression, for good, or if it’s just an exceptionally long relief. While it feels okay now, I can regularly see patterns that I wish were long gone creeping back. And I honestly can’t tell wether it’s just me just overreacting, or if it means it will be a life-long struggle. But it does seem to get easier with time. It takes some effort, every day. But it gets easier

CapstanRoller 4y ago

You need to build a steady trickle of small wins outside of your work environment. These can be anything as long as they can be broken down into small, timeboxed, digestible, repeatable, and rewarding bits. For example: find a local plant store, pick up some pothos[0], and get some roots going. Get two: one that's a little more established in soil and one that's just a bare cutting. All you need is a jar/glass/mug/bowl of water and a sunny spot. Do not plan! Stop making plans and checklists and calendar events! Feel free to block off time on your calendar for self-care, which is your plant-tending experiment. No more lists or plans after this. You can plan this all in your head: 1. A plant piece (money optional) 2. A humid container (plastic lunch bag? old yogurt tub? something out of the recycling bin? use trash) 3. A sunny spot or a bright light (sun is free) Just get some vines get the things to grow some roots[3]. Ask the friendly plant store person for some light nutrient solution, or get a tiny amount of Miracle-Gro and dissolve it in water. You don't need anything fancy, this is just an experiment. Eventually the vine will start growing. After it forms roots and a few new nodes, you can cut it apart[1] and grow more roots. Keep repeating this process and propagating your vines. Do not stress about messing it up. There is an infinite amount of pothos vine out there. It propagates itself. Try rooting small sections until you can do it confidently.[2] Take more cuttings, root them, grow them out, gift them to friends, give them away, etc.[3] Alternatively: ask your plant store for leafless scraps of pothos (or philodendron, or similar) and try propagating from nothing[4] Yes, your work output will suffer, and it should suffer considering the amount of suffering you've done for it! What helped me was accepting that there was an infinite amount of work to be done in the world, and that working generated more future work. There is no shortage of pending work, and the overall to-do list is endless much like a river is endless. You don't need to tame the river, but it is useful for navigating the environment. Don't hyperfocus on the river, don't fetishize the river, and stop trying to rapidly get to somewhere else via the river. Splash around, do the basic chores, and hang out by the riverbank and watch things happen. This probably sounds very stupid right now. Feel free to email me. There are some chemical shortcuts one can take, but that's outside the scope of this post. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epipremnum_aureum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epipremnum_aureum [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FfQ_nWrxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FfQ_nWrxo [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D89Ia_phck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D89Ia_phck [3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8 [4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uihDjFj3X8