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I often hear that people today live in luxury compared to people 150, 200, 400 years ago, etc — but why is it so hard to appreciate this luxury without making relative comparisons to only people around us today?
I've followed this thread since it was started and wanted to write a response. But I have had covid and felt like crap and just didn't feel like it or know if I could say what I wanted to say.
Here's the thing. I'm not sure OP or a lot of the respondents understand what depression is to be honest. Depression does not need a reason to rear it's ugly head. Some people are just depressed, period. You don't have to have a bad break-up or a death in your family or to lose a job to feel depressed. That is generally sadness and eventually with the passage of time, you pass through sadness. Yu don't always get over depression without the help of a doctor, therapist and sometimes medicine.
So to suggest that someone should not be depressed because (you believe) they have it better than someone other person 150 years ago is definitely looking at it the wrong way. First of all, we don't know how badly depressed people were back then. But even today, living a nice life -- or what we think looks like a nice life from the outside -- is not indicative of being happy. Just think of the celebrity suicides over the last thirty years, anyone from Chris Cornell to Sinead O'Connor's 17 year old son. From the outside, they may have seemed to have great lives. But in our own circles, life is awful messy a lot of the time.
Here is what one blogger wrote of his own depression
Quote:
It's disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it - you can listen to sad music and imagine yourself as the protagonist in a dramatic movie. You can gaze out the window while you're crying and think "This is so sad. I can't even believe how sad this whole situation is. I bet even a reenactment of my sadness could bring an entire theater audience to tears."
But my sadness didn't have a purpose. Listening to sad music and imagining that my life was a movie just made me feel kind of weird because I couldn't really get behind the idea of a movie where the character is sad for no reason.
I would urge caution because what I see in the OP is someone questioning another person's depression. It's awful judgemental and can be victim shaming.
I've followed this thread since it was started and wanted to write a response. But I have had covid and felt like crap and just didn't feel like it or know if I could say what I wanted to say.
Here's the thing. I'm not sure OP or a lot of the respondents understand what depression is to be honest. Depression does not need a reason to rear it's ugly head. Some people are just depressed, period. You don't have to have a bad break-up or a death in your family or to lose a job to feel depressed. That is generally sadness and eventually with the passage of time, you pass through sadness. Yu don't always get over depression without the help of a doctor, therapist and sometimes medicine.
So to suggest that someone should not be depressed because (you believe) they have it better than someone other person 150 years ago is definitely looking at it the wrong way. First of all, we don't know how badly depressed people were back then. But even today, living a nice life -- or what we think looks like a nice life from the outside -- is not indicative of being happy. Just think of the celebrity suicides over the last thirty years, anyone from Chris Cornell to Sinead O'Connor's 17 year old son. From the outside, they may have seemed to have great lives. But in our own circles, life is awful messy a lot of the time.
Here is what one blogger wrote of his own depression
I would urge caution because what I see in the OP is someone questioning another person's depression. It's awful judgemental and can be victim shaming.
Actually the OP (me) was written from the perspective of someone that HAS battled severe depression since childhood…nearly 3 decades now.
Part of my own self reflection has been to realize that my often negative thoughts have existed within this bubble of my own life and experiences — it has been somewhat therapeutic to put my thoughts in perspective by thinking about how others have faced far greater challenges. Sometimes I find inspiration in others and hope that my own struggles can be inspirational to someone.
But even today, living a nice life -- or what we think looks like a nice life from the outside -- is not indicative of being happy. Just think of the celebrity suicides over the last thirty years, anyone from Chris Cornell to Sinead O'Connor's 17 year old son. From the outside, they may have seemed to have great lives. But in our own circles, life is awful messy a lot of the time.
I would urge caution because what I see in the OP is someone questioning another person's depression. It's awful judgemental and can be victim shaming.
This thread to me is about putting yourself in a better state mentally.
Helping yourself mentally so to speak. Appreciating what you have.
You are implying that some people get depression and it's akin to cancer. Basically, there's nothing those people can do to put themselves in a better mental state short of medication and clinical help, if that will help at all. And nothing you can do to convince yourself that your life is or can be better.
I would argue this thread is not for those people. And I don't see why you would be offended.
Nobody implied that kind of depression is a joke or minimized the seriousness of it.
This thread to me is about putting yourself in a better state mentally.
Helping yourself mentally so to speak. Appreciating what you have.
You are implying that some people get depression and it's akin to cancer. Basically, there's nothing those people can do to put themselves in a better mental state short of medication and clinical help, if that will help at all. And nothing you can do to convince yourself that your life is or can be better.
I would argue this thread is not for those people. And I don't see why you would be offended.
Nobody implied that kind of depression is a joke or minimized the seriousness of it.
Minimizing the badness of something with some greater badness is an instance of the Fallacy of Relative Deprivation. There is a fine line where a truly ridiculous "first world problem" (for which we have an entire ongoing humor thread) that might exasperate you in the moment can be "put in perspective" by just accepting the absurdity of life on its own terms. But that line is crossed when someone is experiencing real sadness. It delegitimizes lived experience. All anyone has is their own context ... all contentment and dissatisfaction is relative. They have a right to feel whatever it is they are feeling, and work through it in their own way.
I can't remember any source of sorrow in my life ever being assuaged by some allegedly greater sorrow in someone else, past or present. The most that can do is suggest that I might get through what I'm experiencing, but it doesn't make it better or easier. That comes from integrating an unwanted experience and coming to a place of acceptance. Maybe at times the unhappiness comes from unrealistic expectations and you find peace by accepting that what you wanted didn't come with the guarantee you thought it did. But the unhappiness, disappointment and pain was no less real for that. And attempting to disparage it, even if you think you're just trying to help, is never right.
Minimizing the badness of something with some greater badness is an instance of the Fallacy of Relative Deprivation. There is a fine line where a truly ridiculous "first world problem" (for which we have an entire ongoing humor thread) that might exasperate you in the moment can be "put in perspective" by just accepting the absurdity of life on its own terms. But that line is crossed when someone is experiencing real sadness. It delegitimizes lived experience. All anyone has is their own context ... all contentment and dissatisfaction is relative. They have a right to feel whatever it is they are feeling, and work through it in their own way.
I can't remember any source of sorrow in my life ever being assuaged by some allegedly greater sorrow in someone else, past or present. The most that can do is suggest that I might get through what I'm experiencing, but it doesn't make it better or easier. That comes from integrating an unwanted experience and coming to a place of acceptance. Maybe at times the unhappiness comes from unrealistic expectations and you find peace by accepting that what you wanted didn't come with the guarantee you thought it did. But the unhappiness, disappointment and pain was no less real for that. And attempting to disparage it, even if you think you're just trying to help, is never right.
I didn't disparage anything.
I think this thread has actually been helpful to me. It's helped me to put my life in perspective. I was already starting to do that. Not the specific situation, but the overall concept.
If it doesn't help other people, and they get no use out of it, then, it doesn't help them.
1. There's a good proportion of US society that is feeling pretty happy and satisfied, a larger percentage of the whole than was the case 150 years ago. We haven't managed to eradicate dissatisfaction, people are still free to make wrong life choices which result in a world of hurt despite that hurt being emotional rather than life threatening. People have the option to have really healthy diets, yet that's not everyone's choice obviously. But there's a larger subset of pretty healthy people now than in the past. Just because everyone isn't happy doesn't mean that humanity hasn't gotten appreciably happier as times gone on.
2. Emotions are dictated by experience some, but not entirely. There are times when you feel happy and you shouldn't really be feeling that way and vice versa. I think people don't always realize that sometimes it's just your brain chemistry cycles at work, sometimes you have mental energy, other times you don't.
There are several reasons why we aren’t happier, but one of them is the adaptation effect. Whatever you have, you just get used to having it. There was an account of the holocaust I read where a train car load of victims were suddenly really happy because they realized that they weren’t going to Mauthausen after all. Then you have billionaires who are upset because their mega yacht is the smallest in town. It’s not that the holocaust victims were all wise and the small yachted billionaire stupid. They are just all being human.
That's a very good point you make. When life is full of extreme hardship, even the smallest glimmer of hope could make you ecstatic.....while if you have everything you want in life and then some more, you almost become desensitized to it...and even the smallest and most trivial things could seem upsetting.
I think that with this money printing like there is no tomorrow...almost everyone is been living above their means. For decades. It is not sustainable.
For instance, if I make 10 dollars an hour (hypothetically), I personally save 6 and spend 4. But in the US, where I live, many people spend 12. Putting the 2 dollars on their credit cards.
How we think has a great deal to do with depression, both in its creation and in continuance. Our brain pathways become well-worn roads.
I am convinced that Twenty-First Century Depression is created or at least reinforced by our lifestyle. We live crowded into cities built of glass and concrete, artificial light, nearly divorced from nature and natural law. We've been subject to decades of political thought that tells us we never did well enough and even after efforts to improve still aren't doing well enough, we eat things that are unnatural, and we breathe unclean air.
It makes sense that our bodies are telling us something isn't right.
I've wondered that too and glad I'm able to appreciate the outstanding and incomprehensible luxuries I have relative to what people long ago could hardly have dreamed of. It could be that I study history, which most people don't, so they take what they have for granted. It may be good, if possible which probably isn't for the majority, for people who are depressed and have no real reason (like there's no chemical imbalance or nothing catastrophic has happened in their lives) to visit a third-world country for a few months and actually live there like a someone who isn't a tourist. They will likely come back cured for the most part of their depression.
And some days we can still get down, I get it. Comfort isn't everything. But it really does help to have an appreciation of how easy we have it compared to a couple hundred years ago. Just two simple things now--climate control and trips to a grocery store (usually well-stocked). These were things that just didn't exist a while back. And which made life a real pain and drudgery nearly every day.
And any day those things can be taken away and then they'll have a real reason to be upset. Not sure what they'll do then. Glad I'm not one of them (that whine and complain about people who have "more" than me).
I think it’s more that we just can’t relate to it. How can we relate what people went through hundreds of years ago? You don’t even have to go back in time. By logic, we should be happy if all we have is toast for dinner, because starving people in other countries don’t have anything to eat. But if all you had was toast for dinner, chances are you’d be upset by it. I don’t think it means you’re an ungrateful person or anything like that.
I don’t think it’s any different than a physical ailment. If my knees are killing me, I’m going to be depressed about it, not say “some people have no legs so I should be grateful”. It’s just not human nature to think like that.
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