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When You Are Depressed, Make Something

byrslf.co

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Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#291

Post by iak8god »

ZeroFries wrote: post #238
iak8god wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If everything was going well (including your own health), you would not be depressed. This is tautological, and hence true, but an uninteresting point. Just pretend it says "... Depression is when you feel down even when all is going well except of course for the disorder in your brain ."

No, I'm saying depression is when you feel down but cannot account for the cause. - Depression is when you feel down even when all is going well except of course for the disorder in your brain." I'm saying this is not a possible situation. The disorder is a result of things not going well, including your own physical health.

Oh. Well, no, that's not what depression is. That's what sometimes causes people who are not clinically depressed to say "I'm depressed about X," but that's not what depression is.

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#292

Post by dragonwriter »

whenwillitstop wrote: post #279
ars wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you are depressed, see if there's a serious problem in your life that is causing you to be depressed 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 se…

Right but your assertion here is completely unfounded. It is a theory. Quantifying that nothing in someones life (or their past) is causing them depression is near impossible. This charade is completely scientifically unprovable. Edit: changed the word sadness to depression.

Depression is not sadness; to the extent that it hmay have environmental or experiential contributing factors, the relation between them and the resulting depression is very different than the relation between circumstances causing sadness and the emotion of sadness, and treating depression is generally not a matter of dealing with issues producing an emotional response.

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#293

Post by whenwillitstop »

ars wrote: post #286
whenwillitstop wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but your assertion here is completely unfounded. It is a theory. Quantifying that nothing in someones life (or their past) is causing them depression is near impossible. This charade is completely scientifically unprovable. Edit: changed the word sadness to depression.

No, it is a fact. If you actually spoke to people with depression you would know that. > Quantifying that nothing in someones life (or their past) is causing them sadness I didn't say sadness, I said depression. They are not the same. > This charade Wow. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never experienced depression, and don't know anyone with it. If that should change you'll quickly realize ju…

Because peoples interpretations of the situation are believable enough to call fact. Subjective interpretations are not reality. If you think they are then we dont have much to argue here. I have experienced depression for most of my adult life.

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#294

Post by dprsdmrmn »

ars wrote: post #286
whenwillitstop wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but your assertion here is completely unfounded. It is a theory. Quantifying that nothing in someones life (or their past) is causing them depression is near impossible. This charade is completely scientifically unprovable. Edit: changed the word sadness to depression.

No, it is a fact. If you actually spoke to people with depression you would know that. > Quantifying that nothing in someones life (or their past) is causing them sadness I didn't say sadness, I said depression. They are not the same. > This charade Wow. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never experienced depression, and don't know anyone with it. If that should change you'll quickly realize ju…

Sometimes depression does have a cause. Some long-standing cognitive dissonance. I finally found some relief when I left the religion of my upbringing and embraced agnostic atheism/humanism. Don't let the true fact that depression often seems causeless stop you from making life improvements or searching for hidden burdens.

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#295

Post by bduerst »

icc97 wrote: post #218
KeytarHero wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, creativity is hard. As Ira Glass put it: > All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. (full quote: https://www.good…

I've run across this quote a few times recently and like it a lot. But there's always the nagging doubt / imposter syndrome telling that you don't really have taste either. Like the people who can taste good food, can't necessarily cook good food. Perhaps it's just enough that you care about something and want to get good at it. I liked Sal Khan's TED lecture [0] about the possibility of us all having the capacity to…

Developing the skill to evaluate something is different from developing the skill to produce it.

If they were the same, then all the front-end developers and UX experts would both work the same job. Some people can, and it's usually those who have developed skills for both.

Self-awareness of your skill level is the first step to developing it.

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#296

Post by [deleted] »

icc97 wrote: post #218
KeytarHero wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, creativity is hard. As Ira Glass put it: > All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. (full quote: https://www.good…

I've run across this quote a few times recently and like it a lot. But there's always the nagging doubt / imposter syndrome telling that you don't really have taste either. Like the people who can taste good food, can't necessarily cook good food. Perhaps it's just enough that you care about something and want to get good at it. I liked Sal Khan's TED lecture [0] about the possibility of us all having the capacity to…

[deleted]

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#298

Post by supervillain »

Depression is nature and unescapable, you just have to bare it and build endurance to lower the threshold of the stimulus that trigger it. It needs to be running simultaneously with your other natural brain activities.

In 2011, I found a job of my dreams, but it ended in 2012, since then I began to took jobs that I'm not comfortable and I do not like just to provide for my family, it was hard and sad, and it lasted from 2012 to 2016. Now I'm happy I have a new job that I'm very comfortable with.

Depression is not new to me, I've experienced it since childhood, teenage period and throughout college. There's no OFF switch for it, the only way to turn it off is build strength and endurance for it, sooner or later it it will attack again, but it would be too weak to affect you.

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#299

Post by wott »

Bartweiss wrote: post #214
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to me it's more that everybody is born with a certain set of multipliers, say the "average" human has 1.0 everywhere, to reach competency level X you need Y * 1,000 hours. You can be born super lucky to get, say, a 100 multiplier in playing the oboe, you will be considered "gifted" and you will rush past your peers, however all you have is a multiplier, if you put in 100 hours and somebody with a 1 multiplier puts in…

This is a great model - honestly it's much closer to my intuitive sense than what I wrote up. I think most people can be decent at most things, certainly. Humans are (almost always) normally distributed, and odds are you're between 0.5 and 2 on most scales. If you want to run a 5k, or play guitar for fun, or make a website, your multiplier probably won't stop you. But if you want to be the best, or you're choosing a…

> If you want to [...] play guitar for fun [...], your multiplier probably won't stop you.

Well, mine did :-D

After 3 years of practice, I could still not accurately do what a kid can do after 1 week, or someone who plays another instrument after 20 minutes.

It was time to throw in the towel and admit that there are hopeless cases and that I was one of them :-)

The worse thing is that I did not have great expectations when I started, since I don't have any interest and even dislike complex music. But I couldn't even reach my very very low expectations... By far... since 3 chords were 2 too many and the other one would never come at the right time :-D

Re: When You Are Depressed, Make Something

#300

Post by zenpusher »

We are all slaves to dopamine. The higher the karma a user on HN has, the more enslaved he or she probably is ;)

More seriously, making things and having a sense of accomplishment was one of the dopamine-triggers I used in my new system for breaking bad habits: https://repla.xyz/

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