About depression

[matrixmann]

Man kann deprimiert sein und deswegen alles negativ wahrnehmen,
man kann aber auch von der Realität deprimiert werden.

One can be depressed and therefore perceive everything in the negative way,
but - one can also be depressed by the events that take place in the reality.

Comments

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

It is true i sometimes feel kind of desperate.

[matrixmann]

That's why I wrote it down.
Because there is so much the myth of "you perceive it all the wrong way, your brain is broken" going round.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Its true, but psychologists treat depression in people that have good reason to be depressed too.

I'd say you need goals even if it is just a goal to have more sex.

You are very intelligent and can learn other languages, have goals to travel and write about it, write stories and novels, plan to make a documentary film etc...

If you don't have goals, it is just a lot of nonsense over and over.

[matrixmann]

Give you a goal as a example: The goal is survival.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Sure, for a lot of people, but some people do that and more too.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

It seems to me you would want to have a goal to help the cause of Marxism even in some small way. If not, what did it really mean to you? Maybe it was just an excuse to not do more because the society as it exists isn't good enough for you.

[matrixmann]

I do my part to help the issues that I think I can help and that I think that need help.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I don't want to end up badgering you. It's just that you did say you seemed stuck.

I'd hate it too if I had to do forty hours of work every week and then played video games all the time until I had to sleep and that's what happened in my life.

I think you are getting a lot of interpersonal communication through the video games too and through here and other places you go online which allows the pattern to continue without your breaking down entirely. It seems to me though that since you can't do that for fifty more years, and who would want to?, that you should take some steps to move away from it.

I don't know. I agree that the economic situation in the world puts people in awful positions.

[matrixmann]

I "said" I seemed stuck? Interesting.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

There's a shit ton you can read instead of playing video games. I only am into books as much as I am because I chose it and kept choosing to be interested in it. I think part of the reason why too is that at some point, while studying Buddhism and notions of self, I figured out that people are what they do and that the problem with nearly everyone is that they think that it works PERSON and then OUTSIDE WORLD meaning a person is like someone looking out a window of a car manuevering around the outside world, but a person IS! what they are doing with their time.

This means you are severely limiting what you are by just playing video games or whatever you are doing over an over.

I know it is very difficult, but a person has a right- hard won freedom from like the Magna Carta/French Revolution, et al and duty to do something with their freedom even if it seems like very little.

Who says what is a lot and what is very little? I am a lowly substitute teacher, but I have helped a crying teenager once who told me he was hearing voices, I have reported to Child Protective Services students who said their father slapped them, and who knows what else. You shouldn't just go by what society tells you your status is. Your status is the goals you have.

[matrixmann]

Don't underestimate games. It deeply depends on what you pick.
A Suikoden saga, for example, always is a different pick than only checking the newest shit out that hits the market.

And another thing: Magna Carta makes freedoms possible to you, but what you gonna do, if your body is the greater limitation of what you can do?
Right, Magna Carta prevents you from being killed from being lamer, blinder or deafer than others, as it more likely was the case in former centuries if you weren't rich and could afford yourself servants to make up for the functions you couldn't perform. But still - what use do personal freedoms give to you if you're, like, tired all the time? Can't grab a possibility physically?

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

It's just that a ton of young men are obsessed with video games to the extent that they do little else but play video games.

I don't know what physical exhaustion has to do with the Magna Carta. Yeah, it would be better if we weren't exhausted when we came home from work, but people that come home from work exhausted and end up never exercising their freedom of thought, deed, etc are still wasting opportunities.

I have a strong feeling that people during Medieval times were exhausted by their work far more than we are.

[matrixmann]

You didn't get what I mean...
And for one time I doubt you will. 'Cause often enough I can witness how you're still a hard believer of the motto "Man forges his own destiny.".

One more time: Which use make personal freedoms for you if you already have trouble grabbing them? If your body is the limit of what you can do? For example: You get granted the right to go wherever you want, but what is it worth if your legs don't work? What use is it if you already have trouble getting to the bathroom in your own apartment? Or getting your groceries into the flat to put them in the fridge?
If you already need another person to help you only getting out of your bed?
Where is "forging your own destiny" if already most of your powers need to be spend on only existing - every day?

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Well, if you are severely disabled like that, I guess you can't really do a lot of things others can do.

I do believe that people should be held responsible for their actions and choices. I think I am not a great person, in that I make tons of goals that I don't follow through with and wanted to be a regular teacher but am stuck as a substitute, but I equally feel that I need to be very careful and not turn into a drug addict and potential child abuser.

I'm very sorry if you have all those disabilities that prevent you from doing things by yourself.

It isn't a good analogy though if you are saying that tons of people are just like people that have that level of disability. It really isn't. Most people can do a lot more than they choose to do including me, to my great embarrassment and shame.

[matrixmann]

Responsibility for your own actions and being a bird in a cage are two different things, in my opinion.

Nearly all people do have anything that limits their possibilities, be it caused from the outside (economic, class) or be it something from their own materia they're made of (like sickness, energy levels, breaking points, stress resistence).
Disabilities you can't ignore are just an extreme example to demonstrate how it affects your ability to sustain to that credo of "Everyone forges his own fortune." - but so even are the little disabilities and weaknesses that people have. This is not a world where everyone is born healthy and it's solely his own will that determines how much comes out of his personal resources. That's a lie. A fucking bold-faced lie. And the more you try to keep that up for yourself, believing in the hamster wheel while you already fall victim to the negative effects of your disability / weakness, the more it turns into self-destruction.
So it is to all people you still tell about the fortunes of the hamster wheel and the invalidity of weaknesses on your performance in the hamster wheel. It's fucking destruction.

Responsibility, compared to that, is doing things and be behind them, regardless if they turn out good or bad, and bearing the consequences of your actions.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I think if you had that level of disability, people more into Buddhism than I am, would say you still could train your mind.

You could train your mind to read and write a lot. I'm thinking of it from the perspective of the disabled person too, not just as someone trying to get the most out of employees or something. A person in that situation would be happier if they trained their mind to read and write as much as possible. They'd enjoy their life more.

I guess I do believe in human action. I don't know about destiny that makes it sound like everyone can achieve anything they want to and I agree that's rubbish. I am trying more to come from how Schopenhauer and Camus would come at the argument. We have a responsibility in our freedom even if the world is absurd and we can't achieve much. Buddhists don't even really care about achievement and just want people to work on practicing more and more, practicing meditation.

When you look at how people break down and go crazy- they abuse and kill others- it is preferable to have some sort of philosophy of being responsible for yourself.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Learn to meditate meaning try to clear your thoughts completely or if you have thoughts just have them and go on sitting there doing deep breathing. See if you can eventually meditate for hours at a time. The point is that your self is not really there. You are just a free flowing interaction with your environment. Then you have to choose different environments to interact with- like reading a lot.

[matrixmann]

How about putting a record on and attentively listenening to a piece of music? Getting carried away from that stuff?

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Right, so someone that kept doing that would choose different records and have a great interest in all classical music.

I was just saying that people seem to pretend there is a "real self" that we all have that is independent of what we do with our time, but we choose mostly dumb things to do with our time.

This is especially a problem because people have terribly boring jobs, but if someone has a terribly boring job doing nothing over and over and then comes home and does more dozens of hours of nothing over over it seems regrettable.

[matrixmann]

Here's something I can tell you from own experience: Humans are animals of routine.
There have already been many others before complaining about people doing such stupid mindless shit every day and caring about stupid shit every day.
Tell you something, complaining about it won't help it 'cause it's part of human nature.
You'll even find yourself ending up doing mindless stuff every day and not knowing what you can do against it, what you can do to help it getting different with your own free time.
It's a circle that exists and can't be broken - and judging other people for being so is just an error, even already almost an insult. "Almost" because there is mindless stuff you can do and mindless stuff you can do - some stuff being more mindless than other repetitive work.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

You could set a goal that you are going to make a documentary film even if it takes twenty years for you to finally have the money and free time to make it. You can think of the steps it would take to make the documentary film: study the history of documentary film making, get great at writing, read a shit ton of stuff to figure out what you will do the documentary about. Think about the components of what is involved in getting from where you are to someplace else.

There's other things besides film, art, and books, like furniture making, wood working, traveling etc... I'm thinking about eventually making a documentary film though.

[matrixmann]

Why only filming something that you can be?

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

Agree. Idealism again. The reality affects how you perceive the world not the other way around.

[matrixmann]

It's not only idealism.
Physical sickness also puts a limit to the things you can do.
And not all sicknesses are like "you get them, lose them" - some sicknesses are forever, as long as you live.
So are the limits that it forces upon you...

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

Well, you are right there are some conditions that are from how your brain is functioning and they need to be adressed from the point view of physiology.

[matrixmann]

Not just the brain, but also the whole body.
You can't walk miles if you already have trouble standing on two feet for five minutes, for example.

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

That's why i said from physiological point of view. The whole body functioning. Still has a mateialistic basis.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

It's obviously a combination of both. You're just not opened to seeing it.

Think about incredibly religious people: they see the same thing as other people as being extremely different from how someone else sees it.

For someone that is supposedly the opposite of an idealist, you seem like you avoid reading or studying or learning anything new. If everything is empirical, and not effected by ideas, then you should studying what is empirically there fastidiously and with great passion, but you just preach and have no practice.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I apologize if your posts in Russian are about how you are doing things. My impression though is that you just pontificate about how thing SHOULD BE but it is just lots of preaching and scolding about utopianism that obviously didn't work and doesn't work in the real world.

You have a talent for finding great images though. I compliment you on that. You could probably be a film director because you know what images look the best.

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

I wish you could read my posts. Iam not preaching and i never denied ideas. I am just talking about what came fitst and the base of the other. You agree that if you put a newborn in an isolated environment and it has no contact with the world and never learn language, it will have zero ideas. Example proving it is when babies are brought up by wolves.

Anyway, idealism is very important in understanding world, many ancient pbilosophers based their view on it and Hegel gave a profound dialectical explanation of the world but then materialism continued and explained further. So i do not deny idealism, it is just based of materialistic things not the other way around.
BTW, you saw that i publicly apologize to you, didn't you? Didn't mean to be mean, you know. Thanks for complimenting my pictures, i do find nice ones if you could only see how they relate to my text, i think i do a good job illustrating my texts, if i can say so my myself. And people say i write good texts too, i should start writing in English sometimes. Have no time though. Tnanks anyway.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

If you read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's work, which you'd have the advantage in doing because the original is in German, it would put anything I have tried to say better than I could, except that they speak like 19th century professors and I'm a layperson from 2016.

You can skip around the Nietzsche books. Most of them he writes in epigrams and I don't think you need to read them in order. I think you'd think they are fascinating just on their own. Schopenhauer did the same thing, writing in epigrams, in a short book he wrote called Parerga and Paralipomena.

There are a lot of easy to read books from around this decade that go over the history of philosophy which is the only background someone needs. Nietzsche refers to Hegel and Spinoza sometimes for instance.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Besides, people that just blame the whole social economic system and don't try hard to be better than they might be end up being extremely boring.

Maybe they need to act like they need to do things as if they are choosing for what they feel everyone in that situation should do because if everyone did that the social economic situation would be much better. If everyone of the working class were not mindless consumers and only valued education, reading, writing, and art, the huge corporations couldn't make huge profits by selling them worthless items they sell at huge stores like Walmart

[matrixmann]

You gonna laugh - somewhere else I got accused again of preaching the mantra of the system "those who do lots earn the most, those who do the least earn the least". It's funny, isn't it?

My mind concept is taking both things into account. Your own ability to perform efforts as well as limitations that are forced upon your (from the outside as well as from your own inside that you can't overcome).
As I get to experience it with education: It doesn't prevent you from being a fan of mindless stuff, but what it changes in you is the niveau of the things you start to be content with.
No need to talk about high arts or so, I'd think it's only an issue for people who just put an interest into it by nature.
What higher intellectual education rather changed was they wouldn't be content with every shit you'd throw before them as "entertainment" or "means of relaxation". They'd sort out more critically which things they used for this - and this would make them buy less of the lowbrow shit.