7 ms·

This is so accurate it's astonishing. Both the quote about Gray and Black and the original post about the inability to feel. They're 100% on the spot. I used t

This is so accurate it's astonishing. Both the quote about Gray and Black and the original post about the inability to feel. They're 100% on the spot. I used to get a mix of both grey and black depression for years, I eventually learned to just deal with it as it always goes away with time. I normalized to it. Then I relized that I actually liked the grey anhedonia. It made me feel free from forced emotions. I talked about it a few times on HN. I love being depressed for a week or so ever other month. It always goes away but during that time my thoughts & views feel so, authentic. I feel like I'm experiencing the deep nothingness that is life, no hormones, no feelings, no hope. Just a meaningless purposeless universe. It has a sort of depressive beauty to it. A dark enlightenment. Pure logic. No emotion. Some of the best song writers and poets wrote their best work when they were depressed. It really allows you to reflect and think about things. As long as the depression doesn't turn into misery or suicide, it can be a valuable tool for creative people. btw For me sunlight and exercise gets rid of depression within 2 days.

dmd149 13y ago
You might appreciate this book: A first rate madness. It's about how some of the best crisis leaders are manic-depressives. Depressive periods give them the ability to see the world as it is, and the mania gives them the energy to do something about it. http://www.amazon.com/First-Rate-Madness-Uncovering-Between-Leadership/dp/0143121332 http://www.amazon.com/First-Rate-Madness-Uncovering-Between-...
- mikecane 13y ago
  Oh wow. Thanks for that recommendation. That looks like it belongs with Kay Redfield Jamison's book and Arnold Ludwig's.
- trentlott 13y ago
  Everything's well and good until they walk in to a lake.
loceng 13y ago
It's generally the habit of blocking feeling, unpleasant feelings you don't want to feel - you repress them - which then leads to the habit of all feelings starting to get blocked, as it's the action of reenforcing blocking of feeling, which you don't have the ability to control which would get blocked or not; The healthy thing in certain situations that are too tough or don't allow you to deal with them in the immediate or all at once is through suppression - though suppression turns into repression if you ignore it for long enough, or don't have the tools to work it out / talk it out with yourself or someone else.
intended 13y ago
I think the term you are looking for is depressive realism. I forget the study (its been a while - please correct me if I am wrong), but depressed people were checked for accuracy in their self assessment/ understanding their world/environment. The thesis was that their thinking skewed them towards overly negative assessments of their ability, chances, and position in life. Turns out that several people had a more accurate understanding of their state than the base line. This fact actually bugged me for a while. If being depressed is more accurate then isn't my mind being the most honest with me. It was useful for me to think about it in these terms: The issue with depressive realism is that it tells you a very prosaic truth - that the world doesn't care. As you said: we already know that the universe has no inherent meaning or purpose. So why does it matter that base line people are more optimistic about their chances? Or their aims? Why does it make a difference? What matters fundamentally isn't the way the world is - Its a crummy place. What matters to me is the world I can imagine and want to be in.
- sigkill 13y ago
  [begin rant] Your post sparked a thought. We've been hearing about 'cure' for depression. From the point of depression, isn't the baseline a 'high'? Yet, we're told right from childhood that drugs that put you on a high are not acceptable. Is our brain not on a high naturally then, and could you classify depression as the wearing out of the hormonal high? Just as one is able to make better judgement at the base line if compared to being high, (as you say ->) people are able to make better judgement at 'depressed' than normal. I don't even know what I'm talking anymore, but I think we should stop seeing the depression as a problem and start accepting it as a state of not high/not baseline, just as the baseline is accepted as a state of not high. [end rant]
  - uxp 13y ago
    > I think we should stop seeing the depression as a problem This Grey depression rarely comes without the Black depression described above, which really is a bad disease. I've only recently been diagnosed with depression, and one of the reasons I went in to see a doctor about it is because of the self-doubt. Right now at work, I've been told to convert an existing synchronous system into an asynchronous workflow engine, and I don't know two shits about workflow engines. So, even with a "normalized" view of what I know and what I can do, I get anxious about the responsibilities I've been assigned, which leads to physical manifestations of anxiety, which leads to physical ailments, which leads to sick days. I know I can sit down and within a week, learn exactly what I need to do, but my mind keeps telling me I'm stupid and I should just quit my job. Your rant reminds me of the people that claim autism spectrum disorders are just a rung on the evolutionary ladder. It might have one little part that sounds good on paper when you completely ignore the disease as a whole, but it's still a fucking disease. edit: if you want to try and pretend to know what it's like to have a "baseline" like mine, take a week and instead of saying yes or no, just say "I don't care". Coworker asks you where you want to go to lunch, you don't care because it's all food at the end. Significant other asks if you want to go out to a movie, you don't care because it's all the same action packed or slapstick comedy crap. You no longer care about anything, because it's all stupid crap. You go through the motions of waking up, showering and go to work every morning, not because you like your job (even if you do), but it's because that's what you've been told to do. This is the brink of suicide, and it's a very real thing for people with depression. Nothing excites you, so there's no point in living. </endrant> edit2: If anyone else is thinking they might have depression, please go see someone. It really does help. Greg Baugues, a developer out of Chicago, recently gave a talk about developers and depression at Mountain West RubyConf, and I would suggest watching it (http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2341-mwrc2013-devs-and-depression http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2341-mwrc2013-devs-and-depre...). It gave me the courage to go seek help, hopefully it can do the same for others.
benjamincburns 13y ago
Sunlight and exercise definitely help when I get the "blahs" (what I call the week-long negatively introspective period you describe). That feeling that depression is beautiful or somehow correct is very dangerous, however. During my senior year of high school and the first two years of college I was definitely suffering from the gray/black depression mentioned above. Life was feeling pretty meaningless, and I was in a constant state of demotivation. Anything which registered positively on the emotional scale was severely blunted. If nothing matters, does anything even exist? I'd often just sit around and wonder about if I was real, if the space between my fingers was real, or if the person sitting next to me was real. Somehow the lucidity of that thought process was exhilarating but paradoxically it also served to deepen my depression. Now when I meet people who seem preoccupied with existential thoughts I wonder how depressed they are. During this time I was in the best shape of my life, and I frequented the beach so I got plenty of sunlight. I wouldn't describe myself as having been suicidal, but I didn't see much point to living either. That is, I had no desire to cease living, and if faced with the choice I would have definitely chosen life over not life, but I often thought deeply about what the point of living really was. I lost close to three years to this. It's a permanent scar in the form of my undergrad GPA. I understand the feelings very, very well. However the one thing I don't understand is what brought me out of it. I didn't have anything like the experience Allie (author of the OP) had with the weird giggling fit. I just slowly became distracted from anhedonism by the meaning that life gradually seemed to have. Around that time I sought treatment for ADHD, as I was flunking out of school. Maybe treating my ADHD caused me to find meaning in my newfound ability to direct all of my intellect toward a common goal? Maybe it was just the drugs? Maybe anhedonism was my childhood toy that slowly became less enthralling? Conversations about depression and what depression is like are absolutely beneficial. It's powerful to be able to empathize with a person in this situation. I just wish we understood the mechanisms behind this super "stable" form of deep depression well enough to reliably pull people out of it.
- seanp2k2 13y ago
  "preoccupied with existential thoughts" This is important and really struck a chord with me. Totally agree.
aperson123 13y ago
"meaningless" "purposeless" implies something that should be there, but isn't. What is your argument to yourself that this thing that you "lack" should be there? Some framework you don't even believe in? there is no "lack of a meaning". We are all from Nature, we follow our nature and thus follow Nature. Nature is sometimes ugly, but it is more beautiful than ugly.
kunai 13y ago
You described exactly how I feel a hell of a lot of the time. Depression is a drug. It causes a change in mental state, resulting in thought processes not consciously thought of during normalcy. Whenever I'm in this state, falling deeper down into a deep abyss of existential thought and blank, bleak unawareness, I feel... enlightened. Vehemently, I obsess over the meaning of things, waiting for an answer but never getting it. In a perverse way, I enjoy it. I think about death. I think about what regrets I would have if I ceased to exist. I explore my subconscious and bring it to the forefront of my thoughts. While this depressive state is a state of emotion, I feel like emotion fades away and allows me to focus on logic and the purity of feeling itself. I improvise a chord voicing or an accompaniment in a way I wouldn't have thought of before. I find my right hand playing a melody I never knew I had the capability of doing so. Pragmatic code flows from my fingertips without thought. I feel disconnected. Disengaged. I feel individual, which is perhaps why I enjoy it so much. As if being fourteen years old wasn't tough enough.

dmd149 13y ago

You might appreciate this book: A first rate madness. It's about how some of the best crisis leaders are manic-depressives. Depressive periods give them the ability to see the world as it is, and the mania gives them the energy to do something about it. http://www.amazon.com/First-Rate-Madness-Uncovering-Between-Leadership/dp/0143121332 http://www.amazon.com/First-Rate-Madness-Uncovering-Between-...

mikecane 13y ago
Oh wow. Thanks for that recommendation. That looks like it belongs with Kay Redfield Jamison's book and Arnold Ludwig's.
trentlott 13y ago
Everything's well and good until they walk in to a lake.

loceng 13y ago

It's generally the habit of blocking feeling, unpleasant feelings you don't want to feel - you repress them - which then leads to the habit of all feelings starting to get blocked, as it's the action of reenforcing blocking of feeling, which you don't have the ability to control which would get blocked or not; The healthy thing in certain situations that are too tough or don't allow you to deal with them in the immediate or all at once is through suppression - though suppression turns into repression if you ignore it for long enough, or don't have the tools to work it out / talk it out with yourself or someone else.

intended 13y ago

I think the term you are looking for is depressive realism. I forget the study (its been a while - please correct me if I am wrong), but depressed people were checked for accuracy in their self assessment/ understanding their world/environment. The thesis was that their thinking skewed them towards overly negative assessments of their ability, chances, and position in life. Turns out that several people had a more accurate understanding of their state than the base line. This fact actually bugged me for a while. If being depressed is more accurate then isn't my mind being the most honest with me. It was useful for me to think about it in these terms: The issue with depressive realism is that it tells you a very prosaic truth - that the world doesn't care. As you said: we already know that the universe has no inherent meaning or purpose. So why does it matter that base line people are more optimistic about their chances? Or their aims? Why does it make a difference? What matters fundamentally isn't the way the world is - Its a crummy place. What matters to me is the world I can imagine and want to be in.

sigkill 13y ago
[begin rant] Your post sparked a thought. We've been hearing about 'cure' for depression. From the point of depression, isn't the baseline a 'high'? Yet, we're told right from childhood that drugs that put you on a high are not acceptable. Is our brain not on a high naturally then, and could you classify depression as the wearing out of the hormonal high? Just as one is able to make better judgement at the base line if compared to being high, (as you say ->) people are able to make better judgement at 'depressed' than normal. I don't even know what I'm talking anymore, but I think we should stop seeing the depression as a problem and start accepting it as a state of not high/not baseline, just as the baseline is accepted as a state of not high. [end rant]
- uxp 13y ago
  > I think we should stop seeing the depression as a problem This Grey depression rarely comes without the Black depression described above, which really is a bad disease. I've only recently been diagnosed with depression, and one of the reasons I went in to see a doctor about it is because of the self-doubt. Right now at work, I've been told to convert an existing synchronous system into an asynchronous workflow engine, and I don't know two shits about workflow engines. So, even with a "normalized" view of what I know and what I can do, I get anxious about the responsibilities I've been assigned, which leads to physical manifestations of anxiety, which leads to physical ailments, which leads to sick days. I know I can sit down and within a week, learn exactly what I need to do, but my mind keeps telling me I'm stupid and I should just quit my job. Your rant reminds me of the people that claim autism spectrum disorders are just a rung on the evolutionary ladder. It might have one little part that sounds good on paper when you completely ignore the disease as a whole, but it's still a fucking disease. edit: if you want to try and pretend to know what it's like to have a "baseline" like mine, take a week and instead of saying yes or no, just say "I don't care". Coworker asks you where you want to go to lunch, you don't care because it's all food at the end. Significant other asks if you want to go out to a movie, you don't care because it's all the same action packed or slapstick comedy crap. You no longer care about anything, because it's all stupid crap. You go through the motions of waking up, showering and go to work every morning, not because you like your job (even if you do), but it's because that's what you've been told to do. This is the brink of suicide, and it's a very real thing for people with depression. Nothing excites you, so there's no point in living. </endrant> edit2: If anyone else is thinking they might have depression, please go see someone. It really does help. Greg Baugues, a developer out of Chicago, recently gave a talk about developers and depression at Mountain West RubyConf, and I would suggest watching it (http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2341-mwrc2013-devs-and-depression http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2341-mwrc2013-devs-and-depre...). It gave me the courage to go seek help, hopefully it can do the same for others.

benjamincburns 13y ago

Sunlight and exercise definitely help when I get the "blahs" (what I call the week-long negatively introspective period you describe). That feeling that depression is beautiful or somehow correct is very dangerous, however. During my senior year of high school and the first two years of college I was definitely suffering from the gray/black depression mentioned above. Life was feeling pretty meaningless, and I was in a constant state of demotivation. Anything which registered positively on the emotional scale was severely blunted. If nothing matters, does anything even exist? I'd often just sit around and wonder about if I was real, if the space between my fingers was real, or if the person sitting next to me was real. Somehow the lucidity of that thought process was exhilarating but paradoxically it also served to deepen my depression. Now when I meet people who seem preoccupied with existential thoughts I wonder how depressed they are. During this time I was in the best shape of my life, and I frequented the beach so I got plenty of sunlight. I wouldn't describe myself as having been suicidal, but I didn't see much point to living either. That is, I had no desire to cease living, and if faced with the choice I would have definitely chosen life over not life, but I often thought deeply about what the point of living really was. I lost close to three years to this. It's a permanent scar in the form of my undergrad GPA. I understand the feelings very, very well. However the one thing I don't understand is what brought me out of it. I didn't have anything like the experience Allie (author of the OP) had with the weird giggling fit. I just slowly became distracted from anhedonism by the meaning that life gradually seemed to have. Around that time I sought treatment for ADHD, as I was flunking out of school. Maybe treating my ADHD caused me to find meaning in my newfound ability to direct all of my intellect toward a common goal? Maybe it was just the drugs? Maybe anhedonism was my childhood toy that slowly became less enthralling? Conversations about depression and what depression is like are absolutely beneficial. It's powerful to be able to empathize with a person in this situation. I just wish we understood the mechanisms behind this super "stable" form of deep depression well enough to reliably pull people out of it.

seanp2k2 13y ago
"preoccupied with existential thoughts" This is important and really struck a chord with me. Totally agree.

aperson123 13y ago

"meaningless" "purposeless" implies something that should be there, but isn't. What is your argument to yourself that this thing that you "lack" should be there? Some framework you don't even believe in? there is no "lack of a meaning". We are all from Nature, we follow our nature and thus follow Nature. Nature is sometimes ugly, but it is more beautiful than ugly.

kunai 13y ago

You described exactly how I feel a hell of a lot of the time. Depression is a drug. It causes a change in mental state, resulting in thought processes not consciously thought of during normalcy. Whenever I'm in this state, falling deeper down into a deep abyss of existential thought and blank, bleak unawareness, I feel... enlightened. Vehemently, I obsess over the meaning of things, waiting for an answer but never getting it. In a perverse way, I enjoy it. I think about death. I think about what regrets I would have if I ceased to exist. I explore my subconscious and bring it to the forefront of my thoughts. While this depressive state is a state of emotion, I feel like emotion fades away and allows me to focus on logic and the purity of feeling itself. I improvise a chord voicing or an accompaniment in a way I wouldn't have thought of before. I find my right hand playing a melody I never knew I had the capability of doing so. Pragmatic code flows from my fingertips without thought. I feel disconnected. Disengaged. I feel individual, which is perhaps why I enjoy it so much. As if being fourteen years old wasn't tough enough.