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If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

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Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#171

Post by 50 »

avgDev wrote: post #28

The more you know about the world and tech especially, the more you will get depressed, IMO, maybe I'm wrong. Humans in general are pretty shitty, driven mostly by self-interest. I guess there are people driven by doing good but most people are capable of doing terrible things, especially when in a group. I do suffer from existential depression, I'm generally pretty happy, but as I learn more and live longer my outlo…

I read this a few days ago, it might resonate with you, despite it seeming like spiritual jargon: https://prashantadvait.tumblr.com/post/180867077354/without-...

The main highlight, I think, is this:

> The world is not the cause of misery, our perception of the world is. What we think of the world is the cause of misery.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#172

Post by criddell »

gabriel34 wrote: post #61
ganzuul wrote: post #26

I have had to deal with inexplicable anger and irritability for a long time. It is possible this traces back to being misdiagnosed and prescribed 5 antibiotic recipes back-to-back as a child. Long and tedious story short, when I cut milk, gluten/short carbs/whatever pesticide they use for wheat, and excess sugar from e.g. prefabbed food from my diet I gained 10kg and my life basically turned around. Turns out having…

mental health and gut bacteria seem to be heavily correlated. Anecdotally, if I don't eat sugary "reward" food I tend to feel better. That is also why I adopted intermittent fasting. I tend to fell better mentally if I fast 24h once a week.

> if I don't eat sugary "reward" food I tend to feel better

Within the past few years (I'm 48), eating a lot of sugary foods would leave me feeling like I was hungover the next day. Headaches were especially common 12-18 hours after lots of sugar.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#173

Post by tabtab »

sjjshzvuiajhz wrote: post #121
tabtab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The average human is illogical. It's not easy for Vulcans to live among Ferengies. I don't claim to be "mostly right", but I do claim to use and be able to produce a logical train of thought for recommending courses of actions. I can write it out in detail if and when requested. However, few are really interested in a logical justification: they usually use office politics and their "gut" to decide. Sorry, bu…

People are constantly constructing internal narratives to explain their actions. From the perspective of the narrator, with a life’s worth of context, those actions fit into the narrative in a perfectly logical way. From the perspective of others who lack that context, those actions can seem illogical. Maybe you really are more logical than the people around you, but on the other hand you can’t read minds - maybe you…

I'm willing to share my reasoning and logic with anybody who asks, and will refine it if it lacks clarity. I enjoy having my logic tuned by other minds; it makes me even MORE logical to be challenged, even if it hurts my pride in the short-term. Others are not so open and don't want their thinking process challenged. I don't know why, other than pride, ego, or office politics. If you know why, please tell me. Don't be shy: share it, people!

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#174

Post by guntars »

solarkraft wrote: post #87
ryanstorm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment aligns with an old HN comment that I have saved that resonated with me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402387 I'd also recommend people feeling this way to read The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. It helped me.

Thanks for sharing this comment. I do have a bit of trouble with the last paragraph. Am I understanding correctly that the author claims depression is neccessary for building a better model of the world? I'm sure depression has caused me to think about things and get a better understanding of them, but is it neccessary? What am I currently building a better model of?

In the beginning the author of the comment said that a broken model results in a loss of confidence which then prevents us from acting on that model and forces us to figure out a better one. They're saying that's what depression is - the downtime when you're supposed to play it safe and re-analyze the data and build a better fitting model. I can see how it can be better to not act on a broken model in case it could result in some harm, but it also stops us from gathering new data that might be important.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#175

Post by ganzuul »

coleifer wrote: post #170
ganzuul wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to imply that. It's difficult to describe... - The archive unzips and the files seem to be OK but the checksum fails, maybe? You should feel good when you do good deeds, but there are other motivations to do good too. When depressed, you can process things like understanding enlightened self-interest, but the evolutionary reward system fails to fire.

I didn't mean to contradict you. Speaking personally, I would go through these bouts of "trying to be good" and I could pull it off for a couple of days max before the mask dropped. I just couldn't ever stop judging, criticizing, blaming, etc. I love the analogy, by the way. Or, "I double-clicked it, it's right there! Why the fuck won't it open?"

Judging etc. seems to me to correlate with blood sugar... So I don't think anyone can or even should try to completely exorcise their dark side since, I mean to say, it is a symptom and not a cause.

I think that when your body is working well, your mind is working well, and that we waste an awful lot of time not being well.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#176

Post by eeZah7Ux »

magduf wrote: post #84
ergl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your tl;dr is alarmingly defeatist. If you're in tech and feeling angry all the time, the answer is not to try meds, the answer is to get politically involved and change the moral bankrupty of our industry. If you're US based, check your nearest TWC ( https://techworkerscoalition.org/ ) chapter.

There's not much you can do in US politics if you're a techie working in the tech industry. Face it, you're probably not a highly charismatic person who has a chance of winning any serious election beyond the local school board. The answer is to go someplace else where you don't feel angry all the time.

The majority of social change in history has been fueled by influential writers and thinkers, and also scientists.

Political movements have all sort of needs: people can contribute by writing software or running it, or cooking food for others, or setting up a wifi repeater, doing translations, organizing an event, mopping the floor.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#177

Post by ganzuul »

criddell wrote: post #172
gabriel34 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mental health and gut bacteria seem to be heavily correlated. Anecdotally, if I don't eat sugary "reward" food I tend to feel better. That is also why I adopted intermittent fasting. I tend to fell better mentally if I fast 24h once a week.

> if I don't eat sugary "reward" food I tend to feel better Within the past few years (I'm 48), eating a lot of sugary foods would leave me feeling like I was hungover the next day. Headaches were especially common 12-18 hours after lots of sugar.

You can have yeast growing in your gut too; your own personal micro-brewery.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#178

Post by watwut »

agumonkey wrote: post #146
ozzyman700 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Humans in general are pretty shitty, driven mostly by self-interest. Water takes the path of least resistance, Humans take the path of least expected effort expenditure to accomplish their desires Both are just doing as nature does, being themselves. Why be sad that every person will do the least amount of work to satisfy their desires, when it is an inevitability, but your sadness is not.

Except we're supposed to be intelligent. Early on in my life I felt something, I never get angry at nature, no matter harmful, but disappointment by other beings hurts deeply. Nature doesn't pretend to choose, it just is. That made me a lot more at ease with objects than people.

Intelligent and ethical are orthogonal categories. Intelligence does not stop greed, hate nor pleasure from mistreating others. They just makes such people more effective.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#179

Post by GlenTheMachine »

criddell wrote: post #169
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #53

This was precisely my wife's symptoms when we were first married. She was angry nearly all the time. She could hold it together in public, but at home it was miserable. She would go a full day at a time, alternatively not speaking, stomping around and throwing things, and yelling. It took a long time for her to be correctly diagnosed. It wasn't clear to me that depression was the issue, because as discussed in the ar…

If in her mind all of the anger was justified, why did she ever go looking for a doctor and a diagnosis?

Two things. What she says was the most motivating one is oddly prosaic.

She is a veterinarian. She has loved animals her entire life, considers them her guardian angels. We had finally moved into a rental house that allowed pets, so we got a dog, an Australian Shepherd rescue dog who turned out to be the best dog who ever lived. I took her all the way through advanced obedience classes. I don't really have the words to express what a wonderful animal she was; in my mind, she was the Platonic ideal of a mother sheepdog. She also had distinct ideas of propriety, a phrase that could only make sense if you have ever had a female Aussie, and as a consequence was about as low maintenance as a high energy dog could be.

One day my wife looked at the dog lying next to her on the bed and thought “You're nothing but trouble, I wish you were dead”. The next second she realized that that thought was so unlike her, and so different from the reality of our dog, that it was clear something was wrong in her head.

The other was that at the same time we had had a daughter, a beautiful baby girl. My wife started taking her anger out on the baby as well as me. To be clear, this was not physical - but she resented our daughter crying and so on, and was brusque and short tempered with her. She was introspective enough to recognize that this was a problem.

So some combination of those two experiences acted as sort of an intervention.

Re: If You're Often Angry or Irritable, You May Be Depressed

#180

Post by tabtab »

mjevans wrote: post #125
magduf wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you live around people who resemble Ferengi (that's the proper plural form), then maybe you should look at relocating to a different country where the people don't share the attitudes of the Ferengi.

Tell me, when can we begin construction of a new utopia in international waters with emigration and citizenship requirements that are angled at attracting Vulcan-like types? What are your plans for getting world nations to recognize the sovereign authority of such a region and for being economically healthy over the long term? I've never run the numbers, but pre-napkin estimation makes me believe such ventures are to…

Being a Vulcan type won't necessarily make you wealthy. Most commerce is based on the art of selling, not the art of logic. In other words, tricking people. The best products from a technical standpoint often fail in the market. Better and cheaper GUI's than MS-Windows existed in the 80's, but MS's marketing muscle steam-rolled them.

If you are talking about "smarts" in terms of inventing new things in the lab, as I mentioned earlier, being right or smart and being logical are not necessarily the same thing. In my book, being logical is being able to produce a clear line of reasoning for a suggested course of action. The "givens" in the "proof" may be wrong, but at least the proof is correct using the stated givens. The debate should then be on the givens, not on the proof logic.

For example, my suggested UI designs often make assumptions about what confuses end-users. I often don't have inspectable studies to justify such, and others are welcome to disagree with human UI interaction psychology. But at least my assumptions are clear, and I make a decent attempt to explain the steps user may take or think in based on my experience, such as inconsistencies between screens, or variances from other common products an org uses.

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