Understanding your depression is the key to outgrowing it. Requires introspection and time. Society doesn't really allow this, they prescribe band-aids and to keep chugging along. Manual labor; be indigenous. Go go go, don't get left behind.

How about: one condition makes people kill themselves, it must be a lot worse than most others. Let's take off the kiddy gloves and use some sense.

Thinking of the less fortunate people lasts about a millisecond.

Which is unfortunate.

We are consumed where we are at and looking at what others have that we don’t.

kjmr - go get the dishwashing (or similar) job. If you're right and it makes you feel worse, you can easily quit. If you're wrong and it works out, great. If you don't try, you'll never know. At least give it a try.

Tx for links. Spent few hours watching various vids of the guy. Pretty interesting especially for someone attempting to understand basic concepts of psyche in various models.

an earlier clip of peterson on depression:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c9Uu5eILZ8

the man is an absolute genius. he was a clinical psychologist for many years. if you really dive into his work you'll see he's got the key to life.

The brain is a software program. You have to rig it to happiness.

Now the ultimate rigging is to become religious. Religious people are happier. It is smart to become religious. Even if that entails "fooling yourself".

But not if you spend lots of time wondering why god had forsaken you, like I did in the time I was religious.

Tough one. I have gotten more religious as I have gotten older. But there are a lot of time I wonder if I just want to believe. I have moved from atheist to agnostic to religious. Which is probably normal when you age and death ain't as far away as it once was.

Your progression is the exact opposite of what I feel it should be as one ages.

No hate. Just my own personal opinion.

Why is that?

Last day alive it would seem prudent to accept everything.

Although I doubt a God really has to be worshipped or “else”.

Religion may be a trick. But a good one. Individually.

Not sure if srs as you clearly know the answer to your own question.

I've known plenty of people who have found God at the end of their lives. Quite often it's a full circle where they were brought up religious then became agnostic/atheist and then at the end became religious again. It makes sense as I think death could be a scary prospect.

According to Socrates, “Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.”

Death is bizarre. A subject that we should probably put on blinders.

What does this even mean? If you think a particular proposition is true then there are presumably reasons why you decided it's likely to be true. If you don't have access in your mind to those reasons then what does it even mean to say you believe it?

As you are aware "I personally want it to be true" isn't a reason that moves the needle for any whole universe-based proposition.

Logically it shouldn't be, but for most people it is.

Because I question my own faith. Logically, it can be strange to believe in an invisible being. That we project has incredible powers.

Given the small chance the God wants to be worshipped and thanked, I will worship and thank him.

I have no clue. Given all the choices, I will choose to believe what I want to be true. All a guess.

Gratitude exercises have been shown in scientific studied to induce dopamine, serotonin and nor epinephrine. The same neurotransmitters that all anti-depressants work on. In short if you understand the science of the brain you would be a fool to take anti-depressants when you can stimulate the same neurochemicals with a simple exercise.

You can go ahead and take the drugs tho, have fun with the side effect lol. I didn't have fun. Not being able to ****, not being able to sleep, feeling dead inside. Either way it's your choice, you can be smart about it or you can pay some hack to drug you up with medicine that they like to re-brand everytime their patent runs out.

While religion on the macro level is super awful, corrupt, a way for the powerful to control the poor, etc., the spirit of religion on the micro level is pretty fantastic.

A serenity prayer + chanting every night what you're thankful for and hopeful for will do wonders for your psyche.

Concur.

It is a pretty crazy existence we live. Overthinking it can drive one mad. And sad.

From what I understand science has shown that the option of giving up your stress, results of life, ect. can reduce stress by a huge factor and is super beneficial to mental and physical health. I'm not a big advocate for religion but having a higher power/god/whatever outside of religion seems like a huge plus. It's analogous to riding waves. You give in to the fact that the waves are the higher power and you wait for the right wave to ride and you don't worry about surfing here and there without the proper wave. You just accept that the universe is the one calling the shots. It takes a lot of the pressure off of you. I find that mentality is best for poker, women, jokes, driving fast in a fun but safe way, beating video games ect.

You just let the universe be as it is and ride the wave that benefits you the most and stop worrying about your own impact.

That exact line of thinking had me afraid of roller coasters, flying with my grandfather in a single engine plane, this that and the other. Eventually I was like **** it, I wanna die anyway cuz of my social anxiety lets get nuts with it lol. Life got fun after that but also really out of control in some ways.


Alcohol can be very dangerous, that's all I will say. Be safe if you wanna use that as your medicine for depression. Not directed at you Tuma but just a warning for others.

This sounds just like me. Went from Christian as a child, to atheist as a teenager, to agnostic in late teens early 20s, to seeing the universe as God later on. Only difference is, I see death as the only real liberation from all the stress, bad habits, karma or hangups of past deeds ect. ect. It's like I love life and all the thrills it provides and I want to live to keep learning and experiencing new things but at the same time death seems like the ultimate freedom from being just a limited hominid. It's a weird dichotomy where i wanna live and keep on doing new things, having sex, chilling with friends, hopefully having kids but I want the freedom that's beyond being stuck in a mortal body.

I've always thought of killing myself and lived a bit more of life that would result in death earlier from this and that. Death and life seem so intriguing that I can't seem to make up my mind. Living wild is rather fun tho, there is nothing like an adrenaline rush from this and that.

We are a messed up species. A well taken care of dog is much happier then a well taken care of a human. We are richer and more technological advanced than at any other time in world history, yet we are more anxious and depressed then ever.

I think it moves the needle therefore it does "for me" is also nonsense if said about a whole-universe proposition.

But if you mean most people think it does then, sure, that's why there are more people playing pit games than poker.

"I want it to come up red this time, I feel it's going to come up red this time."
is the same argument as
"I want there to be a god, I feel there is a god."

If you want to leave the tradition of logic started by the Greeks and which the modern world around you has been built upon then you're basically driving with your eyes closed and from then on you no longer control whether the particular tree into which you're going to crash is going to be a soft one like titheing to the church, wasting time praying, or a hard one trying to cure cancer with alternative medicine, problem gambling or, relevant to this thread, accepting that an overly pessimistic view of the world and one's options within it is true "for me".

(btw I'm not trying to start an argument about whether god exists, just saying that you have to follow logical argument where it leads. If that leads to god existing then that's great, I'm just arguing against choosing a version of reality the same way as one picks a flavour of ice cream)