I do have personal experience with depression, yes. I didn't mean to suggest that there aren't things that take effort but which yield more "spoons" than they consume.
Rather, my point was more like this: I have a friend who, right now: is in debt; is transitioning from male to female but can't afford to keep paying for the relevant drugs; is too sore (from the drugs) to work more than one shift per week at their job; is depressed (from gender dysphoria); is insomnaic (from a side-effect of an anti-depressant); is tired all the time (from insomnia); has very little willpower to do anything (from tiredness, and depression, and chronic pain, and, well, all of that.) Their only passion in life is art—but they not only have no emotional energy left over to do said art, but their wrists and arms hurt too much to work on their art even when they're inspired (because of the drugs, but also because their job is labor-intensive.) And they'd look for a new job, but...
This friend of mine would benefit immensely from anything that could "lighten the load" on them, to the point that they would be able to find both the physical and mental energy—at the same time—to do a single enjoyable thing for a minute per day. With all of it together, it's a swirling vortex that sucks them back in each time. (And I constantly wish I lived within 1000km of them, so I could go help them out a bit.)
So—I guess I was more considering the case of "depression + chronic pain" than depression alone. It's a terrible motherfucker of a place to be.
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> It was a victory to make myself get up and go to the gas station for Bugles and Swedish Fish, rather than ordering in.
Here's a question: do you think being unable to "order in" would make your depression less? If you didn't have that option?
Consider what it would feel like to be homeless+carless+penniless. You'd have to put quite a bit more effort into life each day in order to survive. Probably interact with more people. Would your disposition improve?
Because that's not my experience. I went through a period in my life where I was depressed, didn't go to work, got fired, got evicted... and continued to be depressed. All of those things made the depression worse, not better.
These experiences, at the time, served to tell me that I didn't deserve to have a job; to have money; to have a place to live. And, on top of that, they made life harder in a particular way where each day was then a reminder of how much of a fuck-up I was. Bootstrapping back up to a regular life required engaging with the world, but engaging with the world as I was meant a constant confrontation with just how far bad I had let things get. The fact that I had to get food from a food bank was a reminder that nobody thought I deserved money to eat—and I didn't want to be reminded of that, so I just didn't go, and let myself starve. Etc.
At that point, it would have been quite nice to have replaced those activities that cost emotional energy, with energy-neutral ones. Having some free Soylent laying around with no "aura of self-pity" attached to it, would have left me with more energy for the rest of the day.
Yes, it would have been nice to also add on experiences with positive affect, on top of removing the negative ones. I did do a few of those: forcing myself to dress up nicely for job interviews every day and go to a downtown library to send out resumes made me feel a lot better than doing so from home.
But those things do require some amount of a crutch, before you can generate enough initial emotional-energy "steam" to even contemplate doing them. That's the real use-case for anti-depressants, after all: they take enough self-loathing and grey affect away from things to let you contemplate ideas like actually making it to your therapy appointments every week. To me, things like Soylent solve a similar problem.