This sounds alarmingly like "don't be a baby and just get over it".
I feel good for the author that he found a way to battle his depression, but it's more of a luck thing, not a repeatable treatment.
When You Are Depressed, Make Something
141–150 of 370 posts
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#142I have about 100 things that are 5% finished. I would start a neat project and have no willpower to take it anywhere. It was a depression feedback loop.
I discovered I was depressed because I felt like any time I wasn't actively being "productive", I was wasting my life. I would come home from a long day of engineering to jump into more engineering.
Over the holidays I vowed, as an experiment, to just do nothing "productive". Maybe if I play video games and watch Netflix and be with my wife more, I'd end up being more productive in the long run.
These past 3 weeks have been my happiest in years.
The part I'm still trying to figure out is how to convince myself of this truth the next time I feel like leveling my Night Elf while watching Suits with my wife is a waste of time that I could be using to make something really cool.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#143When you are depressed, see if there's a serious problem in your life that is causing you to be depressed and devote as much time and energy as you can muster towards exploring solutions to that problem, even if they entail dramatic life-changing decisions, because that's the kind of problem we're dealing with here. Examples of such problems: you hate your graduate program. You have no friends in your city and no ide…
I disagree. Depression is like being caught in a loop. You need to find a way to break out of that by introducing something new. Creating something can give you at least a small sense of purpose and at least from my own experience I depression has emerged when I start to lose that sense of purpose.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#144The number of times I have that I felt I could do better - and then I start working on it, get 80% done, but then I struggle with the next 20% - and then almost burnout and give up and feel depressed because I'll never be able to do anything in life, is just insane. Then I start wondering - what is all of this for? and what's the entire point of even living? Talking to people does not help either (as it is, I'm not v…
Why does living have to have a point? I generally agree with your sentiment. Anything I do seems to fall so far short of my expectations that it makes me depressed. My mom used to say "when you reach for the moon, at least you'll climb a tree" but to me the image of man on a tree, reaching out to the moon fills me with hopelessness instead of inspiration.
You're right it'd be sad. But if you climb a tree, you're not gonna reach out to the moon; you're going to be a little out of breath from climbing, and notice your lungs. You'll have put your arms and legs to use. You'll notice something around the tree you didn't. And maybe then you'll do something else.
It's not actually about reaching the moon, but (I think) just doing something. Because purpose and meaning can also come after doing something which previously had no apparent meaning.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#145The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you. I have notice this a lot with math.I will work on a problem and then a Google search later reveals that the problem is not only completely solved but in a way that is far better than I could have ever conceived. Another problem is when you run out of idea…
>The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you. But the only way to get very good and end up being one of those "others" who make the best things is to push past this point and keep making things anyway. Of course you're not the best in the world at something when you first start doing it. Nobody was.…
The problem is, everyone who devoted their entire life at something, worked with insane intensity, and devoted themselves wholly to it, is not the best in the world either, except one.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#146When you are depressed, see if there's a serious problem in your life that is causing you to be depressed and devote as much time and energy as you can muster towards exploring solutions to that problem, even if they entail dramatic life-changing decisions, because that's the kind of problem we're dealing with here. Examples of such problems: you hate your graduate program. You have no friends in your city and no ide…
What do you guys think is the point of all our activities if people eventually die? Most mainstream Judaeo-Christian postulates the immortality of the soul. But it seems to come up against mainstream history and science. Hasn't anyone here felt these existential questions? Even if you accomplish so much, in the end you can't even answer basic questions about the meaning of it all. You can consile yourself with the id…
This is the kind of thinking that has, in the past, led me to being depressed. It promotes an unhealthy fixation with the future that sends me into a nihilistic, self-perpetuating spiral of inaction.
My answer has been something closer to Buddhist thinking than western religions. It's an intense effort to focus on the current moment. The past is done and cannot be changed. The future will happen, but it's largely beyond our control. It's much more productive and fulfilling to devote all of one's energy and attention to the present. Out of the past, present and future, only the present is real and open to unbiased observation. And practicing removing one's own bias when observing the present moment feels, to me, like the point of life.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#147The problem with trying to create something is once you begin to work hard at it, you realize that you're not very good and others have done it far better than you. I have notice this a lot with math.I will work on a problem and then a Google search later reveals that the problem is not only completely solved but in a way that is far better than I could have ever conceived. Another problem is when you run out of idea…
Substitute math by programming, and it becomes easy to see the pitfalls of CS's current "portfolio" paradigm.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is advice for sadness, not depression. This is the opening quote in the article: "Sadness is when you feel down because things aren’t going your way. Depression is when you feel down even when all is going well." Depression may be affected by real life problems but it is more life-enveloping than that. I've been the most depressed at times in my life when things were going objectively great. The people who asked…
>This is advice for sadness, not depression. This is the opening quote in the article: "Sadness is when you feel down because things aren’t going your way. Depression is when you feel down even when all is going well." There's no mention of that in the DSM or the ICD. People with miserable lives can still be depressed; people can have miserable lives without recognising that their lives are miserable. There is no suc…
"There's no mention of that in the DSM"
The DSM changes so often that I wouldn't really rely upon it for a definition.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#1491986 - I feel sad. Well that's life. 2016 - I feel sad. It must be that I'm depressed, let me read more about depression so I'll know even how I fail in life, because everyone around me on social media is so much successful and happy.
This is unfair. It's more like:
1986 - I feel sad. Well that's life. Kills self six weeks later
In other words, it's not that people today are getting treatment for things that people in the past just knew how to live with; people today are getting treatment for things that people in the past died from. People drank themselves to death, or ODed on drugs, or put a rope around their neck, all because they couldn't calm the storm raging inside their head.
Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. But, I think the key realization is that whenever the incentives are strong enough, a lot of hard-working geniuses will be fighting for the prize. Hard-working geniuses are really hard to compete against, and if you don't realize that natural variation is a real thing , you can get discouraged pretty quickly.
> don't realize that natural variation is a real thing Google shows me nothing but out-of-context biology-textbook material, so I'll ask: what is the relevance here of "natural variation"?
I didn't mean it as a technical term.
I just meant "some people are smarter/more productive than others for reasons beyond either person's control at the time of measurement".
So it could be environmental factors (access to better support or higher quality educational experiences in early childhood). Or just genetic. I'm not positing any specific causes, just making a general observation that I find to be true of the world I see around me: especially at the highest levels, some people really are just smarter than others, and no amount of hard work could close the gap.