I want to write something about my depression. I don't have a chemical imbalance and am not on medication. I basically self medicate with beer, probably too often.
I've battled depression since my mid teens, going on this long crusade to be "successful" (whatever that means), trying to meet girls, working odd jobs that weren't in line with my degree, sort of living an antiauthoritarian hacker lifestyle that might sound familiar.
Anyway, one thing I've learned that's helped me largely overcome it is that things change. The world is a lot bigger than you are. My depression was largely caused by isolation, spending too much time in my own mind, trying to fix big problems that nobody else could see. Most of my days were filled with this ongoing saga of trying to solve programming problems or money problems or political problems, but the common theme is that I always failed to really "solve" anything, and felt like my life was a kind of revolving door, every day was the same, rinse, repeat.
So the last two years I was unemployed, maybe earning $6,000 a year and making up the rest by borrowing or selling things on eBay, all the time living under about $40,000 worth of debt and student loans. I had a falling out with my business partner after making a somewhat notable Mac game.
Then all at once two months ago, a good friend I grew up with got me a contracting job earning six figures, depending on how long the contract lasts. I'm not making this up. I hesitate to say I love my job, that's an awfully strong word, but it's certainly not terrible. I have that sense that I should have tried it a decade ago.
I've done all kind of things, I worked out for years and got ripped, I womanized, I snowboarded, I traveled, I visited my father in the third world and fixed some family bonds, I bought a house with my girlfriend, I bought the truck I always wanted from Back to the Future, and got a puppy. This was in the years before I started my job, when I was depressed. In fact, in some ways I think I was more effective when I had nothing going for me.
Now by bank account has more than $100 in it for the first time in years, I'm still relatively young, I have my health. But I know in my heart that I didn't really do any of this. Life is a dream. I'm still the same old fraud I always was, bumbling along like all the other morons. What I'm trying to say is that even though the universe reconfigured itself around me for some reason, I'm still not really sure why, I'm still haunted by the same existential questions that have always bothered me. Even if I had a million dollars, I would still be unable to achieve the things I really want to see in this life like meeting aliens or curing death or talking to a sentient computer, that are unlikely to happen anytime soon. There is always another reason to feel gypped. And it's not like I ever had a need for money anyway other than to get people to leave me alone.
Basically the cultural framework we've all built around us, concepts like money and achievement, being in the zone, selflessness, love, are all a distraction. There's just you, interacting with this strange reality that is both insubstantial and more clever than you could ever conceive of. The universe doesn't care that you're depressed. It keeps trying things to test you and taunt you and nobody knows why.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there's no magic bullet like pills or diet or exercise that will make you feel not depressed. I think of depression as misdirected free will, and only because you feel bad because of it, there's nothing inherently wrong with it in and of itself, and I think most people have felt it even if they're in denial about it. If you think of the things that make you feel bad, and what it would be like to let them go, ask yourself why you don't do it.
For example, if bills have got you down, have you tried not paying them yet. If work is bumming you out, have you tried quitting. If you don't feel loved in your relationship, have you taken a break. I tried checking out of my responsibilities several times over the last decade, and although it didn't fix my depression, it gave me some breathing room to meditate on why I was still unhappy. It's kind of nice to feel that people needed you and were relying on you, and I didn't feel all that bad that I let them down. At least not as bad as I expected to.
I assume that anyone reading Hacker News is a highly effective person, so if you find that you are unable to perform at the level that you know you can, then something is wrong, and it could very well be something outside of yourself. Sometimes the universe needs signals that you are unhappy so that it can recalibrate its approach and give you something more to your liking.
I've sort of begun to take a philosophical view of all of this, that somehow our collective consciousness forms the reality around us, and that we have a responsibility to be true to ourselves so that we can contribute something beyond our basic survival to the soup. You could literally fail today, completely and utterly, and wake up tomorrow with an opportunity you couldn't have possibly foreseen. Then the real kicker is that when you look around at the seemingly improbable configuration of the world, it seems that this is actually the general nature of things. I look at it as, the only real responsibility any of us has is to keep living, and by just doing that, it gives the universe a stage to play on.
I take it a step further, that when it's my time to expire, that I'll be reincarnated before I can blink in another arrangement of atoms somehow sentient enough to comprehend its own existence. But I don't want to get into religion. I'm just saying that to think that we can somehow end our consciousness may very well be a fallacy. We may have spent a million generations as amoebas and sea cucumbers to reach this level of sophistication, and there are no guarantees that the next life will be any more fulfilling than this one. We have billions of years of evolution at our fingertips and we don't even realize the power it gives us. We sit around feeling sorry for ourselves like a Greek tragedy and fool ourselves into thinking that this is all there is. It's really quite extraordinary.
So I hope that all of you keep living and doing what you do so I have something to do while I'm trapped is this crazy reality too.
P.S. Almost deleted this just now. Then decided to leave it. Serendipity and all that.