When You Are Depressed, Make Something

You are under the common delusion that depression is caused by something in a person's life/environment.

This is NOT TRUE!

Depression is often caused by nothing whatsoever. Someone is simply depressed with absolutely no reason at all.

Depression that is caused by something is not strictly depression, it is a semi-normal response to difficultly and people will automatically fight to try to make life better - you don't have to tell them to do that. (The problem comes when they aren't able, or don't know how, to fix things.)

Depression is caused by nothing. The brain is just not working right. You just have to wait it out, learn coping methods, sometimes drugs, or sometimes you may be able to do a physical activity that gets the brain working right again.

If you can internalize that depression is not caused by circumstance you will go a long way toward understanding people with depression.

When I'm just sitting around saying "am I happy yet?", I never am. It just reinforces the depression by reminding me of the challenges. Happiness, in my experience, is the sort of thing that I can't usually produce on demand.

But I can set yourself up for success. I ask myself what tends to make me happy, and then I make the hard decision to legitimately engage with it: I challenge myself to be swept up in the moment, even though it really seems like I won't be.

For example, I generally find happiness by making progress on the things I'm invested in. But, even though I am invested in being happy, I can't just dive into coding and expect it to work, because coding isn't actually what makes me happy: coding helps me accomplish things I care about, and that makes me happy.

So, first, I find a self-contained goal, like "I'm gonna work on this really cool project because it's really cool", or "I'm going to make progress in this video game because it challenges me to think in new ways". Fulfilling this goal for its own sake, because I'm legitimately invested in it, is what makes me happy. In order to succeed at happiness, I carefully choose a different target, and focus on it instead.

That's what's been working for me recently, anyway.

This statement is true only in the narrowest sense and is actively harmful to people with mental health issues. Let's compare depression and cancer to see why.

It is common to say something like "cancer is independent of external factors" to mean that anyone can get cancer. It doesn't matter how healthy of a lifestyle you live. Due to random chance, the guy who regularly works out and eats fresh vegetables and avoids toxic substances can get cancer when the guy who watches tv all day, eats nothing but twinkies, and smokes like a chimney might never get cancer. The first guy's cancer was out of his control.

When people talk about depression being "independent of external factors" what they're trying to say is depression can happen to anyone. It doesn't matter how healthy your "mental lifestyle" is. Depression, like cancer, is a disease. Some things may make depression more likely, but anyone can get it at anytime and there's nothing you can do to completely prevent it.

No one feels ashamed for getting treatment for cancer because society recognizes that cancer is disease that can happen to anyone. But people feel ashamed for getting treatment for depression because most people believe "depression doesn't happen to normal people." If you make statements like the parent's about depression but don't make similar statements about cancer, then you are actively contributing to the problem even if your statements are factually correct.

Exactly. With math, you must focus on the journey at least as much as the destination. While the proof motivates the effort, the mastery of math comes not in deriving elegant proofs, but in devising 'A' proof, then remembering how you did it so you can later: 1) use the method again in other proofs and 2) improve on the proof, often by learning from others. Nobody jumps straight from zero to hero.

Like chessmasters, only the best mathematicians invent techniques. Most just employ what they've learned in inventive combination play.