| This comment only confirms the depth of the disconnect... you had one experience, you resolved it without understanding what happened, and now you project it onto others. Your first post was an immediate judgment. You saw something that looked like your experience, which it appears you have grown to despise, and so you've lost empathy towards it. You've addressed your experience a certain way, you derive pride from it, and you think others should address it the same way. That is as far from understanding different perspectives as can be. You're attributing a staggering amount of weight to your experience when you haven't even done any advanced introspection or examination of the available evidence. You did not experience the exact same thing. Why would you assume that? Even the same style of depression is not manifested the same across people, and it's not terribly clear what OP is experiencing. You spend a lot of time listing off a lot of things that should theoretically make someone happy. Work, ability to walk, having some money to give to charity. Yet, when you had all those things, you nonetheless hit something you describe as "rock bottom". The lesson here should have been that your emotional state is perhaps more important than any of those things? You say you are content with what you have, and that you are not trying to get the latest gadget, house, or promotion. Yet previously you list off your job, spouse, house, and promotion as signs of success. Again, was the lesson here not that the emotional state is more important than these things? There are many depressed people who you won't be able to identify from the outside. They never lived in their mothers' basements or lost all their money. They performed fine at work and got all their promotions. And yet, they stayed depressed. Some even killed themselves. It doesn't appear that various states, achievements, or possessions, in and of themselves protect one from unhappiness or depression. They may help, they may hinder. This has been painfully obvious for such a long time that someone bring it up again just comes off so simplistic and clueless. Depression looks like a rather complex amalgamation of causes. It's not relevant that someone has a commute or some spare change. This is the first disconnect. The other one is relating to the desired state. You say the disparity between your reality and your desired state was huge, but I disagree. It was achievable. It was within reach. You may have even believed it was far away, but a white picket fence, a spouse, and a couple children isn't exactly that terribly rare and unusual if you weren't born in a really bad situation. For some, well, it doesn't work that way. They wanted to do more than that. They wanted to build something or help someone. They wanted to do something complicated and new. These people drive our future. Sometimes, they fail. That's a big gap. It quickly goes out of reach. And then, for some, it's worse than that, where the gap is between the world as it is, and the world as it could be, and that gap is truly huge. It is not sufficient for those people to be merely temporarily OK in their particular situation. It doesn't matter that you are doing a lot better than someone who is living in a warzone. What matters is that someone is living in a warzone. |