I don’t trust anyone who isn’t depressed right now

Nearly everyone close to me is not depressed.

Hope things get better for you. Most likely they will.

Clinically, no.

Do I have occasional feelings of sadness, anxiety, ennui, helplessness, despair, lack of motivation, etc, and do bad things happen in my life?

Yes, absolutely, that’s a part of being human.

Am I happy?

Well that’s a more complicated question than it may seem.

Am I totally satisfied with every aspect of my life and the world around me as it is now and where it seems to be going?

No, not by a longshot.

Is my situation “good enough” for now, does it seem like things will improve for me, do my good days outnumber the bad, am I overall enjoying life and looking forward to hopefully many more years of it, am I able to spend time with people I love, in places I want to be, doing things I like and want to do?

Overall, yes. Not that there isn’t plenty of room for things to improve for me and lots of things that I would change if I could but I can’t, but I’m getting enough of the things I want out of life that I can say that overall I’m happy.

One year ago, I was told I had 1 to 3 years to live. A few months later, it turned out that wasn’t the case after all. Let me tell you, that whipsaw from impending doom to having a future really changes the perspective. Even when I’m upset or downtrodden, I remember that being able to experience it is a gift.

Years ago I used to say, “another day on my way to the sweet release of death”. Lemme tell you, knowing it’s coming is not what you want or think it will be.

I’m confused, are you talking about literal depression or just feeling generally sad/down?

I’m diagnosed with depression, have been since I was a teenager, but I don’t know many others that are.

When I was six and in first grade, the teachers directed me to the school psychologist. But it was the early 1970s and people had just seen The Exorcist and believed it was based on a true story, so when it came to me, I was just a bit odd.

It would turn into a diagnosis Major Depression in my early twenties, severe enough to get disability benefits. It would become Anaclitic Depression in my late twenties. Around fifty, I was the subject of my psychotherapist’s PHD thesis and got an ASD diagnosis out of it. I’m now enby, though through most of my life I was [M] because that’s what it said on my state ID. Whatever.

When I was in a partial hospital program, the fine doctors who answered questions explained some models regarding sanity, that almost everyone has to contend at very least with neuroses, which are characterized by internal conflicts. Those are like:

• Wanting to be a kind person vs. wanting to adequately compete in the corporate sector to gain some upward mobility.
• Wanting to be civil (and within the constraints of legality) vs. wanting to fully express outrage for local or national injustice
• Wanting my daughter to grow up with a healthy sexuality vs. Not wanting her to express her adulthood just yet.

This was in the nineties, in which the US was undergoing an epidemic of mental illness, featuring a lot of major depression. There are reservations in the academic sector as to opine why – I expect – for the same reason climatologists who are willing to discuss the expected outcome of the current climate path are rare: It leads to come uncomfortable truths that our society is not ready to address. In the case of everybody crazy, the hypothesis is that it’s intergenerational. We’re not meant to exist in a society where every adult is required to work forty-plus hours a week (plus breaks, plus commute). We’re also meant to have parents who are not exhausted all the time. The madness is intergenerational, with cumulative family dysfunction getting passed down, as people not only neglect their kids, but self medicate to cope, so they’re even less available.

So, no, the possibility that everyone is crazy is not crazy at all. It’s a product of the industrial age. What’s worse is the psychiatric community is expected to treat it as a medical issue. Toxic work life and toxic home life making you depressed? Here, take some pills. If you can afford to sob at a therapist one hour a week, do so. In any other situation we’d remove the patients from the hazardous area but that would cause the economy to collapse, because that’s the entire workforce.

There are some capitalists who are aware they get better productivity out of their workforce by acknowleding they are human beings, not machines, but those are the rare exceptions. The rest of them believe J. D. Vance has a point. So we’re not going to move towards any rational solutions for a while.

I don’t have any solutions to this.

For my own case, I’ve reframed my own life as a renegade in a society that has, itself, gone entirely rogue. We are the punk in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in. This is your YAF coming of age story where the ministries try to mold you into a solder or laborer for some billionaire’s vanity project, to be used and discarded like a disposable part. Find a way to escape and run!

Or if you’re my age, find the places where Big Brother is blind to your thoughts and actions, and subvert the system from within.

I remember just giving up on life in second grade, refusing to participate or do anything because I was sad. Got tested a bunch after that and given pills that mad me a zombie.

There on out I was treated as a weird kid and that brought a different kind of sadness. Puberty added anger and suicidal ideation. The knowledge that I was fucked up, the world was fucked up, and my life wasn’t going to work out.

Years later here I am, living with the knowledge I was right and watching myself fail at life, finding no joy or peace in anything. Everything is an open sore. Wondering when I’ll get to a point where I rage quit.

I think most of the people I know are anxious or depressed, or both. Hut I don’t know of anyone close to me who is at my level.

Where’d you grow up where everyone is depressed? Detroit? I kid, Detroiters. Y’all got some things going on.

But naw; not depressed and don’t know too many depressed people.

Are you depressed?

I guess so. Yeah, I am.

Do you know anyone NOT depressed?

IMHO, those who didn’t gaze into the abyss, yet. For “if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”. And the abyss is part of our reality, the dark emptiness that fills us all, both scientifically (99.9% of empty space inside any atom), esoterically (the primordial waters, Tohu Va-bohu, Nuith, Chaos, the Qlippoths, the Yin, Shakti, and so on) and philosophically (nihilism and absurdism). Everyone will gaze into the abyss someday, the light will and must gaze into darkness. She’s inevitable. For She is everywhere and nowhere.

I am not depressed, and I don’t think I have ever been (outside of maybe a few days or weeks of sadness when tragic things occurred, but I don’t think that would be classified as depression).

Am I happy? I think so. Maybe it’s more of a contentedness?

I don’t really think of most of the people around me as depressed either. But maybe it’s just that they hide it, or maybe it’s just that I don’t see it due to my own outlook.

I’m the proud owner of “treatment resistant depression”, so yes. I’ve been sad my whole life but I started having suicidal ideation in my late 20’s.

I have a therapist and a psychiatrist so I am medicated and working on it.

Depressions sucks, but the SSRIs that I am on have wiped out my anxiety. It’s like I am a completely new person. I can go grocery shopping without nearly panicking. Somehow I found an (ex) wife before I was medicated but dating is now not quite as painful.

But yeah, I still have varying levels of bad days and I don’t know what happy actually means for me.

Do you mean clinically depressed or just unhappy with life?

I know a couple people who are clinically depressed. They take medication for it. It helps.

Most people I know seem to be doing more or less okay. Not counting like stress about climate change and the political landscape and what not. But like one friend just did a nice trip with his partner, another guy I know just had a nice birthday party, another person’s enjoying her new job, etc etc.

I know lots of people who aren’t depressed.

We also understand a lot more about mental health than we used to, including the fact that mental health challenges are not as unusual as they were once thought to be. Growing up in the 90’s and early 2000’s, I was just a “lazy”, “unmotivated”, and “inattentive” kid. You know, a “space cadet.” I now know that I have ADHD. I have also struggled with depression since childhood. Depression, anxiety, and emotional disregularion are often comorbidities with or symptoms of ADHD. Getting a diagnosis and on proper medication was life changing for me.

But, lack of happiness is not the same as depression. I think sometimes people get those confused. You can be unhappy without being depressed. I would say that there’s a whole lot more unhappy people in the world than depressed people. I also think people often look for joy in the wrong places and expect that “stuff” is going to make them happy. It works. For a bit. But that kind of happiness quickly vaporizes and leaves you feeling as empty as you felt before.

Real happiness comes from a sense of fulfillment. That looks different to different people. I feel happiest when I feel like I’m “grounded”. When I get time to shake off all the responsibilities and BS that gets piled on my plate. Sometimes that’s when I’m kneeling in church on a Sunday morning or taking time out of my relentless schedule to play with my kids. Or when I can get my wife to go for a walk with me. Especially when I can do something that makes someone else’s day a little brighter.

It took a lot of searching to find the things that bring me joy. And the only way to really know if something will is to experience it. Life is hard. On some level there’s just no way around that. But it can also be good. Personally, I’ve had a LOT of hard days. But I’ve had a lot of good days too. For me it makes the hard days worth it.

I think I just crave an IRL connection tbh. Both of my close friends recently (1 yr ago) moved further away so I only get to see them a few times a year now. My social life has been obliterated. That makes me sad :(

Also yes, the world seems unstable right now but there ain’t much I can do, so I just have to learn to let it go.

No