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April 21, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:55
1337 Depression Part 1

Some thoughts on the most common psychological 'ailment'...

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well, it's Steph.
It is the 21st of April, I think, 2009.
Yes, it is, in fact, the 21st of April, 2009.
And this is going to be an end-part series on the Black Dog Depression.
I have not particularly suffered from depression in my life.
I certainly do get the blues.
I certainly do feel a kind of emptiness and despair from time to time.
But I do not meet the sort of clinical diagnosis of depression.
Although, I must say that it is a problem that has plagued my family a lot.
Enormously and intensely.
Both my parents were institutionalized for anxiety and depression, and they're sort of two sides of the same coin.
And if you think of an eclipse, depression is the moon, anxiety is the sun, sort of flaring up around the outside.
And so I wanted to talk a little bit about my thoughts about depression.
I certainly suffered from this insomnia was just wretched, which hit me around the year 2000, 2001.
And that's what sort of drove me, I'm saying all these choices right now, it drove me into therapy.
And So, I wanted to talk a little bit about my sort of history and experience with depression so that maybe it will strike some chords for you.
This is certainly some, you know, fairly hard-won knowledge on my part.
This is battled knowledge that I have extracted, which has, by the by, I mean, come at A cost of over $20,000 to me in years of therapy.
So, you know, it's just part of the value proposition of Free Domain Radio to pass these nuggets along.
There's certainly, of course, no proof behind anything that I'm saying.
So this is more an exploration which is, by its very nature, going to be somewhat metaphorical.
But I think that we can gain comfort in that.
I know that I have.
I've seen it work on others.
I think we can gain comfort in that.
So, I guess the first thing to ask is sort of what is depression?
And there are a number of diagnostic criteria for depression.
Pervasive feelings of worthlessness, of lack of appetite, poor sleep, you know, some mild anxiety or I guess even stronger anxiety, although anxiety disorder would be a more appropriate term for depression.
A chronic anxiety situation.
But yeah, feelings of worthlessness, heaviness, negativity, emptiness, in its more extreme form, depression is kind of the worst thing that you can get in terms of mental ailments, aside from perhaps paranoia.
But at least with paranoia, you get the red bull of endless adrenaline.
But it's really brutal.
You know, it is dragging yourself through thick, impenetrable liquid.
It is life lived at the bottom of a well.
It is a breath as an effort.
It is a feeling of intense alienation from yourself because you can't even put into words or communicate to the people around you what is occurring for you.
And it's more... Extreme forms.
This kind of depression is debilitating.
It is crippling. People end up not being able to work.
My father was hospitalized, I think, three times for more.
I mean, this depression that led to suicidality, but it is a crippling and dangerous ailment.
And it is hard to treat at that level, right?
So, you know, you want to try and avoid getting to that point.
Certainly, you can come back from it, and some people have.
Some people here, in this very conversation, have taken the enormously brave, courageous, and willed steps to pull themselves back from that kind of brink.
But prevention is the better part of cure, and so that's what I'd like to talk about today with you.
So clearly, depression is a form of mental agony.
It's very worse. It's a form of mental agony.
And even its milder stages is something called dysthymia, which is sort of a persistent negativity or a persistent low-grade.
It can either be negativity or hostility or cynicism or feelings of worthlessness or aggression towards others.
And that's just kind of low-grade.
You know, you can function, but life is not fun for you, and it's not particularly fun for, you know, those who are around you.
And that is something which, you know, was it Emerson who said, most men live lives of quiet desperation.
That is what he was talking about, I do believe, right?
This dysthymia, low-grade, persistent depression that's so much like a dull backache that you sort of forget about it for good parts of your day, other than the fact that it's...
Cranking you into a negativity planet in a sort of almost unconscious manner.
So, a depression is a negative state that arises within the mind.
There is significant, significant, significant evidence that medications are worse than useless.
And what I mean by that is that medications...
Antidepressants and so on do no better in statistical trials, do no better than the placebo effect.
But what they do is give you the illusion that your problem is biological in origin, right?
Like, I mean, therapy won't cure an infection, and so that is a biological origin, right?
You don't go and see a shrink if you have a cleft palate, right?
Or a toothache, right? Therapy can help with persistent chronic pain and pain management techniques and so on or at least psychological services but the problem with antidepressants and there are myriad problems with antidepressants and I view them with a good deal of skepticism if not outright hostility.
The significant problem with the antidepressants is that since they do know better than the placebo effect people may feel a little better for a while but the underlying problems if they are psychological in origin are not being addressed if people have the illusion that it is a biological phenomenon and one of the reasons that people are so greedy to grab the biological phenomenon excuse or diagnosis it's not really an excuse if that's what the professionals are telling you There is a stigma,
a sense of shame, a sense of guilt about mental illness, about this kind of mental disability or problem.
I think that's unwarranted.
People who face up to depression and modern life in many ways can be considered Very mentally unhealthy.
More healthy than most periods, if not all periods in history, but still, relative to the truth and reason and evidence, we live in a damn crazy world and we're raised by, very often, damn crazy people.
And we're certainly educated by damn crazy educators.
So people say, oh, well, if it's a mental problem, if it's because of my thinking or because I have bad mental habits or whatever, then that's bad and I'm responsible and I'm guilty and blah, blah, blah.
And that to me is nonsense. I mean, we are fed our thoughts in the same way as children, in the same way that our bodies are fed nutrition, right?
I mean, if you were, you know...
If you were breastfed with Diet Coke and you ended up with health problems because of that, if you were bottle-fed with Diet Coke, then you would not say, well, this is because of me, right?
And you'd say, well, my circumstances were terrible and I have stuff that results from that, which is a problem.
But the stigma around depression and other kinds of mental illnesses that are not biological in origin, the stigma around depression Depression arises from the fact that people think that the average is normal and healthy,
and therefore, people who are not normal and healthy are failing the test called the average, and the test called the average is achievable by, you guessed it, the average, and therefore, people who don't The average are failures and have done something wrong and so on.
Like in physical health, you get an average of physical health, which is not living to be 200 and never getting a cold, but you have an average of physical health and people fail to achieve that, or an average of weight if people are excess weight or whatever.
And that arises from...
The supposition, or the assumption, I guess you could say, that the average is mentally healthy and deviances from the average, of which, you know, euphoria or depression would be deviances from the bell curve of the average, that the average is healthy and those who deviate from it are unhealthy and because it's psychological in origin, it is because they have done something wrong and what they have done that is wrong is something that the average person is not doing and therefore the average person might be healthy.
You sort of get the idea here.
So, you may get this, I apologize for any redundancy, but I'll give a couple of examples of what I mean.
The diagnosis of dysfunction is relative to the environment, to some degree, and I'll give you some examples and it'll make some sense, sense, right?
So, if a man is secure in his hometown and so on, and is experiencing terrors of persecution and so on, then we'd say, well, maybe he's paranoid, right?
But if a man is a spy deep in enemy territory where discovery means torture and death, and he is feeling extreme anxiety about potential attacks and exposure, well, that's entirely appropriate, right?
We call them panic attacks because there's not a shark in the water around your feet, because there's not a lion in the bushveld out of sight, because there's not a tiger sidling its zebra way through the grass, through the tall grasses, right? So, relative to the environment...
It may or may not be dysfunction to feel anxiety, to feel depression, and so on.
To have feelings of worthlessness if you are a thief is not exactly bad mental health, right?
In the same way that... To feel an ache in your tooth when you have an infection is not a sign of bad health.
In fact, rather it is a sign of good health functioning relative to the infection, right?
Because the most dangerous thing medically is to have no symptoms but an illness, no discomfort but an ailment, right?
Because you don't go and get treatment.
You want to feel bad, right?
Someone once said that to me.
Oh, it's the stuff that doesn't hurt that'll get you, right?
And I think that's sort of important, right?
So it's all relative to the environment.
So we understand that, to take an extreme example that's merely meant to illustrate the principle, we understand that a guy who's a Nazi guard in a concentration camp who feels no discomfort at the torture,
brutalization, rape, murder, and pillaging of gold teeth of the victims of the concentration camp, we understand that those A person who feels, a man who feels no discomfort, or a woman, in this situation, is about as mentally unhealthy as a human being can be, right? Because they are engaged in torture, brutality, murder, rape, and so on, or genocide, and they feel no discomfort, right?
That is a true out-and-out cold-blooded sociopath, right?
But this person would not be reporting depression, right?
So not reporting depression or anxiety...
When you are in a sick, evil, and insane environment is unhealthy.
I mean, it really is the worst possible diagnosis because you're evil, sick, and insane, and you have no idea, and therefore you're not going to do anything about it, right?
Depression is not a dysfunction objectively.
Depression is not a dysfunction objectively.
It is a dysfunction, possibly, potentially, relative to the environment that you're in.
So, if the world you're in is radiantly healthy and rational and empirical, and in other words, if it's the world of the future we are trying to build, and you feel depressed and anxious and so on, then yes, that to me would be a dysfunction.
But if you are in a world that is irrational or abusive or destructive or violent or whatever, hideous stuff is maybe going on, if you feel radiantly happy and secure, that is, well, then you're dead, right, already, spiritually.
So, depression and anxiety are called mental illnesses, but that really can only be sustained as a thesis if we accept that the average or the norm is radiantly healthy.
And therefore, we are in a position of security and reason and evidence and all those kinds of good things.
And therefore, any feelings that we have of fear, anxiety, paranoia, despair are inappropriate to the security of our environment.
And therefore, blah, blah, blah.
We are mentally not well.
But I strongly, strongly contend...
That basic assumption that we live in a world of radiant rationality, full of people who are mentally healthy, positive, curious, empathetic, loving, affectionate, peaceful, and so on.
And therefore, I reject the argument that depression is a sign I reject the argument that depression is a sign of mental dysfunction.
This is the duality of human nature, right?
One of the dualities of human nature and one of the ambivalences of mental health, which is that we have two things that we need to adapt to as a species to survive.
Well, one to survive, one to flourish, which is biologically significant.
The first thing, of course, that we need to adapt to is reality.
And the second thing that we need to adapt to is society.
And unfortunately, these two things are often not even on speaking terms.
And so, if you sort of look at this tripod of mental health, right, the first and foremost we have to adapt to reality, part of the reality that we have to adapt to is the social environment, which can be and often is highly irrational and explicitly and violently anti-social.
Rational, right? This is the paradox and the ambivalence of existing in the world, right?
And, you know, we're happy about human society as a whole many times.
I mean, this is why we're able to talk.
But it is a real challenge if, and inevitably, as is the case, at least so far, human society is kind of virulently anti-rational.
Because then we have a contradiction, right?
We have to adapt to reality, which is rational, and we have to adapt to society, which is anti-rational.
And goddammit, if that doesn't cause anxiety in you, if that doesn't cause concern for you, if that doesn't cause depression for you, then you're insane, right?
So, in many ways, the more irrational the society is, the greater the degree of anxiety, depression, and hostility is exhibited by those who are the most healthy, right?
If society is completely insane, then those who experience no anxiety or depression or whatever we would call it, these negative emotional and mental states.
If society is completely crazy, those who are really happy and content with it are completely crazy, right?
So, it's important to measure yourself relative to two things when you're talking about mental health.
Adaptation to reality, adaptation to social environment.
Adaptation to reality Should only cause intermittent stress and anxiety, right?
So, if you're hunting in the jungle, you're not spending your entire life completely paranoid, but you are of course alert if there's a predator around or something like that, and you listen for things, but you're not in a state of chronic anxiety.
For chronic anxiety and depression, To take root, you really need to be embedded in an anti-rational social environment.
Then you're a constant fight or flight and it wears you down and you're exhausted and so on.
And I was reminded, I think it was last September, I read a short biography of Herman Melville, the guy who wrote Billy Budd and Moby Dick and so on.
And, you know, two syllables, one syllable, that guy.
Herman Melford. No, that doesn't work.
Two and two. And he was, of course, spent a lot of his time on ships, and one time his ship was sailing past somebody who was stuck on a wreck at sea, just clinging to a piece of timber, and everybody just laughed and made jokes, and they sailed on, and he was quite anxious and depressed about this, because, of course, he was in a very primitive society where this was not, you know, the idea of stopping to help this guy would be ridiculous, right?
Yeah. And, you know, we'd be like stopping to help a fish that's wriggling on the surface and maybe in distress, right?
It wouldn't make any sense to the people who were that, you know, callous.
And so he was kind of like a new type of guy, as was Dickens, as well as a lot of other artists who had both great sensitivity and great problems with depression.
He was a new kind of guy, and the new kinds of dudes in society do experience a lot of stress, anxiety, depression, in the same way that the little rodent mammals felt a fair amount of stress and anxiety, and perhaps the rodent equivalent of depression when they were darting around the feet of the Tyrannosaurus rex, who we presume as fairly brain-dead lizards did not experience stress and anxiety as a constant state of affairs, because they're on top of the food chain and all that.
So, that new kind of, the new man, right, who is attempting to sort of shift forward, and in some ways almost involuntarily to shift forward the human condition, that new man is going to experience a lot of stress and anxiety.
Now, he's going to experience, or you're going to experience, diminished stress and anxiety relative to reality.
But you are going to experience increased stress and anxiety relative to your social environment, exactly and specifically to the degree that it is anti-rational.
And if you don't see the relationship between the anti-rationality of your social environment and your anxiety or hostility or depression, then you really are missing the key element of what you're experiencing, which is not mental ill health.
It is mental health. And one of the reasons that I have tried to cajole, pester, annoy, frustrate, nag, and try to convince people to bring rational arguments to those around them, right? Why I've been saying to you, use the against me argument, use other kinds of rational arguments to those around you, is so that you can see...
Not just the irrationality, but the anti-rationality of your social environment.
Once you understand the anti-rationality of your social environment, then you will be able to place your own anxiety, depression, and hostility into perspective, which is that you exist in a state of danger.
To be rejected by the tribe was to be condemned largely to a solitary life of a lack of protection and early death and a lack of reproductive abilities, right?
So we have had bred out of us indifference to social hostility, right?
Because those who would have been indifferent to social hostility would not have survived, right?
In the same way that those who are born without the ability to experience injuries tend to die because they don't take care of themselves and they get injured.
They have to do that visual surge of extremities that Thomas Covenant talks about in those books.
So, it's really, really important to understand that you are bred to be anxious and depressed in the face of social rejection.
Right? That's a very, very important thing to understand.
So you don't take it personally, right?
I mean, if you get an infection in your tooth and your tooth hurts, you don't take it personally, right?
You may say, damn, I should have flossed or whatever, right?
But you don't say, I feel guilty because I have a pain in my tooth.
Because of the pain you may, whatever led up to or whatever, right?
Or, you know, if you accidentally stub your toe or whatever, I mean, you may curse yourself or whatever, but for the most part, you don't sort of say, I feel guilty for having pain.
I feel stupid for stubbing my toe, but I don't feel guilty for having pain because we understand that the pain is actually quite helpful and it teaches us not to stub our toes and injure ourselves and break our bones and so on, right?
So we are bred to experience anxiety, hostility, and depression in the face of social hostility and that we have, I mean, massive amounts of empirical, objective, and fairly universal evidence to see the degree to which those around us are both irrational and And irrational in habit and anti-rational when provoked, right? So you bring rational arguments and then you get to be very hostile, right?
And we're bred to be susceptible to that.
And we are also, some of us, right?
And society is a kind of organism, right?
Some of us are bred to be okay with that.
Not to be perfectly at ease with it, because you can't be, but to have a greater capacity to process and accept social disapproval than others.
And that would be us, right?
Or a greater desire to live with integrity to reality and reason and evidence, even in the face of significant social opprobrium, attack, disapproval, hostility, and so on.
And that's sort of where we are.
I think that it's the degree to which society...
Lives in accordance with reason and evidence is the degree to which society as a whole will succeed.
And this is not to say specific members within society, but society as a whole will succeed.
And that is an important thing to remember, that people hate and fear truth and evidence and reason and reality because they're afraid of those who are being attacked by those around them, who they explicitly and probably implicitly or unconsciously Understand, or hostile, anti-rational.
So trying to lever humanity closer to truth and evidence, to reason and reality, is really tough.
And if you don't feel any stress and anxiety in the modern world, or in any world, really, that has been around to date, then you're not well, right?
You're really not well, right?
Because then you're sick and you don't even know it, right?
But if you do feel stress and anxiety, not relative to reality, But relative to the anti-rational hostilities and rages of society, that means you're healthy.
Now, this is not to say that every form of depression is healthy.
Right? And so, we'll sort of get to that, perhaps, in the next podcast.
But I just sort of first wanted to establish this tripod, this trinity, right, of reason, society, and...
Reality is rational always.
Society is hostile to reason almost always.
And you have a split focus on both.
And you are rewarded by reality for being rational, and you are punished by society for being rational.
And that is a fucked up situation to be in, to be perfectly honest, right?
And we can only, I think, be grateful that those who took the bullets and much deeper and harsher bullets, if they take them, we do these days in the past, to bring society to the point where they only attack us with words and gestures and much milder forms of attack than that which occurred throughout history in the past, right? We can at least be grateful for that minor, I shouldn't say minor, that significant step forward, that we are only attacked verbally rather than physically for being rational.
So, I would say that when...
How is it that you're going to figure out what I would call healthier productive depression from unhealthy or destructive depression?
Well, this synthesizes a bunch of stuff that we've talked about over the years and hopefully it will be helpful.
It's kind of like a checklist and this is stuff that I found to be helpful in my life.
So, I have found that if I feel depression after being in contact with certain people and not at other times, then it is very likely that the depression is triggered by the anti-rationality on the part of the people that I'm seeing.
Which is why I'm sort of over saying, hey, you know, see how you feel.
When the phone rings, right?
See how you feel when you're in contact with this person, when you have just seen this person.
How do you feel on the drive home?
Do you feel good or bad, right? So if you feel kind of depressed and anxious and hopeless and weary and, you know, dissociated and so on after you've been in contact with someone, then it is a proximity depression.
Which is based on that person's anti-rationality.
And the anti-rationality may not be at all abstract.
It may be the anti-empiricism that comes from opposing other people's emotions, right?
It may be that that is occurring.
Because emotions are the empiricism of thought, right?
We'll sort of get into that. If you're curious about that formulation, we can get into that.
I think you're sort of going to understand it, right?
So if somebody's anti-emotional or responds in a negative or hostile way to all of your emotions, then they're anti-empirical.
And if they react in a hostile way to your intellectual formulations or arguments, then they're anti-rational.
And both are two sides of the same coin.
Reason and evidence are two sides of the same coin.
They are the yin and the yang of what it means to have truth.
So, if you are in contact with someone and you feel okay when you're not in contact with that person, or at least don't feel as bad, and then you feel bad leading up to, it's like a bell curve, right?
Leading up to seeing, and then afterwards it fades, then it is not based on your thinking.
It's not implicitly based upon your thinking, but rather it is based upon your proximity to the other person.
Now, not to get too complicated, that is a kind of thinking.
You're thinking that that person is worth seeing when in fact they're making you feel bad, but it's not implicit to your own thinking.
In other words, it's not a shadow that follows you everywhere you go.
It is simply a shadow that is cast by, to put a really bad metaphor out, the light of the other person's darkness, so to speak.
An anti-shadow cast by the darkness of the other person's lack of light.
Alright, we'll reboot that one and try another metaphor in a little while when we have gone past the start screen.
So, there's that kind of proximity.
There is a kind of dysthymia depression that occurs, not necessarily with proximity to specific people, but with general circumstances.
But it's predictable and repetitive in nature, right?
So, just about every Sunday night, I will say to Christina, I can't believe how fortunate I am to be able to do Free Domain Radio because I can...
I don't have to experience, for me, the sort of mild depression that would always come about after 60 minutes was over or whatever, you know, if I was watching something, where I would be kind of mentally gearing up or preparing for Another week in the corporate world, right? In jobs that I enjoyed the creativity, the coding, the management, but the general tenor of the companies was pretty bad, was pretty irrational, and pretty corrupt in my experience.
And, of course, I think anybody who's got any brains and potential would feel that Sunday night depression looking at a new school year, right?
And when you were a kid or whatever, right?
Or at the end of summer when school would come back in, assuming you weren't terminally bored in the summer or whatever, right?
But you would feel that kind of sadness.
And there's more milder forms of this, right?
If you live in a cold climate and you can feel that when the cold weather begins and you're looking down the gullet, the sort of huff tunnel gullet of another six months of winter.
But those are sort of environmental depressors.
And they're important to keep a track of, right?
Because they'll tell you a lot about the people in your environment.
It's not very often, except for some of the weather stuff, that the environment is innately depressing, but it tells you a lot about your relationship to the people in that environment, right?
So these are things which are social in nature.
Because they come and go relative to people or predictable circumstances.
And if you introspect and understand the patterns of your ups and downs with regards to these feelings, you can quite quickly, like it won't take you more than a week or two to map out the people and the circumstances that are triggers for your unhappiness, right?
And it's really important to figure that stuff out because...
in my experience, it's almost impossible to solve those situations.
I'm sort of co-joining a lot of different thoughts here together, but let's just trust the ecosystem that is going in the right way and hopefully this will all make sense.
But... I'll come back to that.
So you've got the people and the environment.
Now, if you're in a situation where you're just chronically depressed no matter what you do, then you probably are either in a completely corrupt environment, like everyone around you is just negative and destructive and difficult and anti-rational and hostile and volatile and depressed and whatever, right?
Or your depression or the dichotomy between your...
The oppositional nature of your thoughts is relative to reality, not to those around you.
So you have a thought about reality, or you have an attitude or an opinion or a belief system around reality.
So this would be more the case with religious people.
Because they have an insanity with regards to reality.
And, of course, that results in everyone around them being crazy and then having an addiction to the craziness of everyone around them and a hostility towards rationality.
But there's no way to escape that, right?
Like, at least on Friday night I would feel good driving home from work and then Sunday night I'd start to feel bad and have a happy weekend, right?
Because I was away from work.
But if the problem that you're facing is to do with religion, then you can't escape, right?
Because God be everywhere, right?
So it's not like you're driving home from God Friday night and you get a God-free weekend and then God help you.
Sunday night you start to feel bad again.
No. Because God is everywhere and so you have a fundamental problem relative to reality, not relative to people.
One of the ways in which society defends itself against the depression of the more advanced, the anxiety of the more advanced, who will then confront society and expose the real anxiety, which is those who fear the truth-teller, Because they know the degree to which they're false.
One of the ways that society protects against this is to pretend that the norm is healthy and anyone who feels anxious or depressed is unhealthy, right?
That's one way. And another way is to get people to believe, is to get you to believe that your anxiety or depression is relative to reality, not to society.
And there's a variety of ways that people can do that.
But, for instance, if you're in a religious community, they will say, well, you're unhappy because you have not accepted Jesus into your heart, or whoever, right?
And so they're saying that your unhappiness is relative to a reality called Jesus exists, which you're not accepting.
It's got nothing to do with society or the irrational craziness or anti-rationality of those around you, but it is because you are rejecting a fundamental fact of reality.
And that's why you feel anxious and depressed, because you're opposing a fundamental fact of reality, which of course is not a fact, and that's why you're anxious and depressed, but they will portray it as a fact, right?
Your country exists.
War is noble. God exists.
And all the fundamental facts. They'll say, well, you're not depressed because people around you are anti-rational, but because you are anti-rational, because you oppose, right?
Because if there is Jesus and he saves your soul and sends you to heaven, then it would be rational to, you know, if you worship him, it would be rational to worship him, right?
If these things existed. And so, people will try to get you to believe that your anxiety is not relative to their specific insanity and anti-rationality, but rather it is...
Because you are opposing reality in some fundamental way, because you're crazy relative to reality, not that other people are crazy relative to reality and you're seeing that which is making you anxious because you know they'll attack you for, you know, pointing it out.
That's sort of another way that people will defend against those with, you know, a pair of clear eyes and significant testicles enough to see through to the truth and speak.
So when we feel depressed, what is actually occurring for us?
What is actually being said within our system?
I think that's important because we don't develop these things randomly.
We don't have these habits of feeling depressed for no reason.
One of the things that is synonymous with worthlessness is hopelessness.
And the question then is, why would nature have given us this feeling of hopelessness, of lassitude, of inertia, of this kind of stuff?
And I'm going to use a metaphor which proves nothing but I think is a good way of illustrating the point.
Because I can't provide examples from your life, I'll sort of provide examples from mine.
Well, I'm going to give you two emotional states that I think are important.
Thank you.
The first is the fight-or-flight mechanism.
So imagine you're walking through the woods and you hear a big roar and out comes a bear charging, right?
Well, your first impulse is going to be to run like fuck, right?
Get out of there as quickly as possible.
And, you know, climb a tree or something.
Get away from the bear. And you're going to be chock full of adrenaline and all that other cortisol, a lot of that kind of good stuff that makes your muscles fire incredibly rapidly and do all these useful things around getting away from the bear.
And then...
What if the bear catches you and starts to, I don't know, gnaw your scalp off or something like that?
Well, what's going to happen is you are going to go into shock, and you are going to lie there, not feeling any pain, but feeling a great sense of hopelessness, of lassitude, of inertia, and so on. You're not going to want to particularly do anything, and that's exactly what you should be doing, is nothing, right?
It will not eat you unless it thinks you're beginning to rot, and so it'll wander off and you can get away.
Right, because the initial burst is fight or flight, the situation of frenzy.
If you then get caught, you need to enter into a different mental state.
And this is true if you're attacked by a bear or a shark or a lion or anything, which is that if you get caught, Then you need to go into a situation, a sort of cold and calculating reason.
So a guy who was attacked by a shark in Australia said that, you know, he fought like crazy, but then the shark clamped down on him, began swimming him out to sea, and he went limp, and he kind of relaxed, and he kind of, you know, outside his own body, that kind of dissociation is very helpful, because it gives you the clarity to reassess the situation and try something else.
So he reached around, found the shark's eyes, and began to gouge them, and the shark released him and wandered off, right?
In the same way that a bear will stop attacking you if you go limp, it will wander off.
The play-dead situation is actually quite important, and that's a kind of instantaneous change from the fight-or-flight to a kind of depression and inertia and hopelessness, an irrational hopelessness, right?
Because you can't fight a bear once it's caught you, and you can't fight a shark once it's caught you, at least not in the same way that you were trying to escape.
And so, in my experience, I have felt that the greatest sense of depression when I've kind of ended up in a situation where...
I can't win anymore.
Like, I can't win.
And the acceptance of defeat is pretty important in this way.
So you see that distinction, right?
So we have adrenaline, we have cortisol, we have testosterone, all the good stuff that pumps out when we are in a fight-or-flight situation.
Which then ceases and changes when we lose.
And that signifies a fundamental change or requirement for a change in strategy.
And we kind of want to be alert to that, to that change in strategy that is necessary When we've lost, or when success is no longer possible, right?
And I've used a metaphor before, and I'm sure I will use it again, right?
It's the surgeon who keeps pounding away on the patient's heart after he's been mummified.
It looks kind of silly, right? He's dead, Jim.
Stand back. Put away the paddles, right?
He's dead. He's gone. I'm calling it.
I'm calling time of death, right?
You kind of want to be aware of that transition.
Because if you're not, you'll keep fighting.
And then, by rejecting the reality of your social environment, in other words, that you can no longer win, then you move from rejecting the reality of your social environment to rejecting reality itself, which is that you can't win, right?
And that's why I want to, you know, I've always suggested to people, I want to give you the opportunity to win, and by that means, that means a win-win, not a win-lose, right?
To win with the irrational people in your life by bringing them to reason, by bringing them to compromise, by having them recognize the value of who you are, what you think, what you do, and so on.
You know, give them the chance to win.
Give you both, give you all, the chance to win with the irrational people around you.
But, but, but, be alert, be aware of when that can't happen.
And that will occur for you, not so logistically, but emotionally.
Like you'll know when to play dead with a bear.
Emotionally, instinctively, not empirically.
After the next bite, I will play dead, right?
That's not how it works.
Now, if people around you—I'm talking about worst-case scenarios, of course, not everyone— But if the people around you can convince you, somehow, that it is reality that you are opposed to not their own anti-rationality, Then they become your sort of, quote, friends.
Reality becomes your enemy, and you can't get away, right?
Because you can't get away from reality, right?
So people always say, oh, well, you know, you'll bring those same problems into your next relationship.
Well, you know, that's not always true, right?
Sometimes the other person is just a jerk, and you need to kind of deal with your attraction to jerks rather than...
You'll bring all of that into your next relationship.
And I say this as somebody who had a very large number of failed relationships before a gloriously successful one.
So, you know, sometimes it is them, right?
It's not you vis-a-vis reality.
But if people can convince you that...
The reason you're unhappy is you're opposed to reality, that you're irrational, that you're crazy about reality, then you can't get away because everywhere you go, there is reality, right?
Whereas if you understand, based on the criteria that I'm setting out here, if you understand that your depression is most likely circumstantial relative to those around you rather than epistemological relative to reality, Then, well, you can't get away from the reality, but you can get away from people, right?
So you need to try to engage them and engage them and engage them in a rational conversation until you just can't do it anymore.
And then you give up.
You get the glorious, glorious, glorious release and relief.
Of giving up. Not reality, not sanity, not reason, not evidence, but the anti-rational, the destructive people in your life.
Right? So, your depression is trying to tell you something.
Right? If it's become chronic.
And again, I'm not going to assume it's depression relative to reality because those people aren't particularly interested in this conversation at all.
But, it is depression relative to The anti-rational, which is to say anti-happiness, right?
Anti-emotional, anti-empirical people around you.
It's those people who are making you anxious.
And the depression is a sign from your unconscious that you can't win, right?
That it has scanned the possibilities, the histories.
It has amalgamated and synthesized the history and given you the diagnosis, which is incurable, right?
And if that diagnosis is incurable, then you will feel depressed around these people because it's hopeless, right?
I mean, we want the surgeon to feel depressed if the patient's been dead for 20 minutes, right?
Because that tells him to stop doing what he's doing, 10 minutes maybe, right?
So, I think it's a really, really important aspect of depression is to recognize what is it telling you you have been defeated by in your life.
And we may feel a certain kind of pride and resentment about all of this.
You know, like, I don't want to be defeated.
I don't want to have lost, right?
I want to win, win, win.
And that fundamental fantasy that we can win when we no longer have any enthusiasm left for the fight, which is what depression, right?
Just give up on fighting. Maybe you have the odd rageful burst against anti-rational people in your life.
But, you know, we want to...
We want to know when we're defeated, right?
We really do. If we don't know that, then we can't ever change, right?
And since people who are anti-rational can never be influenced because they're insane, right?
You want to know when you're dealing with people who are anti-rational.
You want to know that more than you want to know anything.
Except how to breathe.
Maybe. But you want to know when people are anti-rational.
Because there is no victory.
Funny game.
The only way to win is not to play, right?
You want to stay away from these people the way that you want to stay away from horrible tuberculosis bacilli and bear hugs from lepers and Sharks in the water.
And so you want to stay away from those sorts of people.
And so recognizing when you can't win is so absolutely essential when it comes to being free in your life.
You get involved and you don't argue with crazy people.
Don't argue with the crazies.
So the first thing we generally feel is despair, right?
And hopelessness, right?
And those are good feelings.
And people will try to make us feel despair and hopelessness relative to reality rather than their own cancerous and leprous anti-rationality.
But we will feel despair.
And we will feel hopeless.
And then, if we don't recognize that those are the signs that we need to change our social environment, then we begin to experience toxicity relative to reality and relative to ourself, right?
So to feel despair is actually a sign of good self-esteem if you are in a hopeless situation, right?
So if I am seized by...
You know, some crazy-ass desire to move Mount Everest, you know, brick by brick or rock by rock, pebble by pebble.
And I start on that because I'm in some manic phase.
And then I start to come off the manic phase and I start to feel despair about my ability to ever move all of Mount Everest rock by rock.
Well, that to me would be a sign of good mental health, right?
Despair in the face of an impossible task is a sign of self-esteem, right?
Because you're saying, it can't be done.
I have a good grasp of reality of my own capacities.
It can't be done.
That is healthy. In other words, and it's high self-esteem because you're saying, I don't want to waste my time on that which cannot be done.
I'm not going to waste my time.
And it's taking good care, I would argue, it's taking good care of your capacity for enthusiasm and optimism.
Because if you want to do something that can't be done, you're going to eventually feel completely worthless, right?
Negative self-esteem. So, feeling despair in the face of an impossible task is a mark of high self-esteem.
And so, if we continue after the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness and despair, if we continue...
To place ourselves or to remain in a toxic and anti-rational social environment.
Why then we will begin to feel worthless.
Because we're placing such low worth on ourselves that we're going to stay and fight in a situation where fighting is destructive and we can't possibly win.
That is an action of low self-esteem, right?
And to give you an example that's only slightly metaphorical, if we recognize the difference, if we accidentally put our hand in a flame and we snatch it back, that is a mark of high self-esteem because we don't want to be injured, right?
If we accidentally put our hand in a flame and then we leave it there and it begins to burn through our flesh, our tendons, our muscles and our bone, we understand that this is a situation of toxic and murderous self-attack, right?
So if we get burnt and we recognize it's painful and we recognize that we can't vanquish the fire, we can't blow it out or whatever, right?
Then we take our hand away, and that's a mark of high self-esteem.
The pain and the withdrawal is a mark of high self-esteem.
If we leave our hand there, then that is an indicator of toxic self-hatred, right?
And that is why we end up feeling self-hating and worthless if we stay in anti-rational, socially toxic situations.
Because we're saying, we're going to, that this is all we're worth.
All we're worth is fighting anti-rationality where we can't ever win, and the fighting is unbelievably destructive to us.
And to our happiness, right?
That's why if we stay in situations which our emotions are crying out for us to leave, we begin to become rancid towards our own self, our own possibilities, our own identities.
And that's where really toxic people want to get us to, right?
So if you'd like to think of this in a metaphorical way, then I think it's pretty useful.
The way that I sort of think of it is that think of a balloon that's pretty full.
Think of the word depression, which fundamentally means to sort of put down, right?
Press down, to depress something, to press a button or whatever.
The way that I think of it is that depression is a downward pressure on your happiness, right?
Like a hand, two hands pushing down on a balloon.
What it is is a way of building up a kind of escape velocity.
So you're depressing your spirits in order to touch that part of you that wants to escape from this negative or toxic social environment, whatever it is that you're in.
So depression is a pushing down on a balloon, and what that does is creates potential energy, which you can then think of then, to put a coin on a balloon, you press down, you let go of your hands, the coin's going to bounce up in the air, right?
It's got an expulsion factor to it.
It goes from potential to kinetic energy.
If I remember grade 10 physics, right?
Yet. So it's a build-up of potential energy to achieve and escape velocity.
That to me seems like a very healthy and positive thing.
However, it becomes a significant problem If the depression goes on too long and by what I mean by that is if you think of taking your two hands cupping them around a balloon and then just continuing to press down and press down and press down and never release it and put more and more weight on it, what's going to happen? Well, your balloon She gonna pop.
And that's when we slide into helplessness that turns to toxic worthlessness and self-hatred.
And it becomes very hard to get the energy to escape again.
And so, if we allow that depression of our energies to continue for too long, we pop, we break, we shatter.
And then it's hard to put the pieces back together again.
And so, in my own life, I began to experience real insomnia and some levels of depression.
And this occurred when I had expended enough energy attempting to reform corrupt environments.
This is true of my family life, of my work life, of my seven-year relationship with the woman I was living with at the time.
I had expended so much energy trying to improve the quality, or try to gain any quality, at least reduce the negatives of these situations.
And what eventually happened was I wasn't listening to my instincts.
I stayed too long and I popped.
And that was a lot, a lot, a lot of work to rebuild.
And that's where the certainty comes from, that I have about certain things, right?
I've started from the ground up and I really can't get fooled by that stuff again, by that level of corruption.
And it happened to a smaller degree in my business career, and it's not happened with FDR at all, which is a wonderful and beautiful thing and has so much to do with the quality of your participation in this enlightening, incredibly enlightening conversation that we're having.
So, that's it for part one of my chittle-chattle on depression, and a lot of this could be added to anxiety, but anxiety is a slightly different flavor, and I'm sort of thinking of running through the feelings, right, and talking about my experiences of them and what I found to be useful.
Please let me know if you find this helpful and useful, and I will be happy to continue.
I've sketched out a two- to three-parter on depression, anxiety, anger.
I know I've talked about some of these things before, but not in these kinds of terms.
So let me know if you find this stuff helpful.
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