Created: February 08, 2020
Modified: January 24, 2022
Modified: January 24, 2022
depression
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Depression is the worst thing. Why?
- Ultimately we care about global utility. Depression is literally the state of finding it difficult or impossible to feel positive utility.
- Almost all of the things that we see as good or bad in life are only good or bad 'on average'. Getting a good job, getting married, having children are causes for celebration, but the felt experience isn't always positive. Deprivation is usually seen as bad, but it can be positive: fasting is good for you, backpacking helps you better appreciate our built world, and an entire pandemic year of no restaurants or in-person social events can be liberating. Comfort can lead to purposelessness, while discomfort can generate purpose and energy. China is objectively less comfortable than America these days, but has a lot more purpose. every branch has high-value leaves: many of the things that we instinctively view as 'bad' might not be as bad as we thought.
- But depression is bad by definition. There is no good depression.
- We know that material conditions don't affect happiness that much---and to the extent that bad conditions make people unhappy, a lot of the effect might be through hopelessness, which is basically depression.
- I've been happy in objectively unpleasant material conditions, like when camping. On the other hand, I've been extremely unhappy while being one of the most privileged people in the world, as a Berkeley grad student, with plenty of material comforts.
- attention matters more than almost anything else. We don't live in the physical world; we live in our own reality tunnels in the space of things that we attend to.
- Society tells us to be scared of death; that it's the worst thing in the world. That's wrong. The felt experience of death is fine---often it's a release from suffering. The real source of our negative associations is grief. We will do anything to prevent our loved ones dying because, at some level, we don't want to grieve them. grief is depression.
- What does it matter that depression is bad?
- Interventions that can help with depression are more impactful than maybe anything else.
- At the physical level:
- Obviously there's evidence that serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc. are involved somehow at least in depressive symptoms, since SSRIs and other antidepressant drugs can treat those symptoms.
- Robert Sapolsky points out the cingulate cortex connects abstract thought (the cortex) to emotion (the limbic system). One way to view depression is that the problem is that we have a strong emotional response to abstract thoughts about how things are bad. Those abstract thoughts aren't wrong---but the emotional response to them is counterproductive. (Stanford's Sapolsky On Depression in U.S. (Full Lecture) - YouTube)
- Symptoms of depression:
- memory loss. Someone mentioned this on Twitter and it feels very real to me even though I don't think I would have expected this a priori. I just don't remember a lot of events that happened in my twenties very well. I don't remember things that I learned or insights that I gained.
- This would make sense as a correction to negative results: if you learn some principles to help you choose actions, but you don't achieve your goals, then maybe the way you were thinking about choosing actions was wrong and you should forget those principles and try to learn new ones.
- If depression is a loss of identity, which is largely defined by goals, then there is a sense in which I am now actually a 'different person' than the person I was in my twenties. Those memories belong to someone else, not to me. That person had different conceptual scaffolding and maybe my current mind can't even represent his thoughts well.
- Many memories are just painful. Trips that I enjoyed at the time, experiences that ExBoyfriend and I shared, felt like they were helping me grow, and us grow. Shared experience in a relationship brings you together. And you see that experience partly through each other's eyes. When I was in Montreal with ExBoyfriend, I liked the things that he liked---long walks, NDG, pastries and breweries. When ExBoyfriend and I traveled, I liked the things we did together---the show we saw in Genoa, or the museums we went to in Berlin. I saw what ExBoyfriend liked about those cultural experiences and absorbed it; part of the fun was that those experiences brought me closer to ExBoyfriend. It felt like they were building towards something. Now that I know that they weren't, a lot of those associations are painful instead and it's easier to not think about those events.
- memory loss. Someone mentioned this on Twitter and it feels very real to me even though I don't think I would have expected this a priori. I just don't remember a lot of events that happened in my twenties very well. I don't remember things that I learned or insights that I gained.