[syntheweave]

Moment to moment, everything in society is at equilibrium and therefore looks "normal". Even wartorn countries experience a strong impulse to normalize themselves and return to day to day living, despite compromise and sacrifice. Likewise people can't become depressed and suddenly cease to have any interest in anything at all. It's more a case of something becoming top-of-mind more often and coloring whether they see "a future". Like throwing the match before it's over, depression makes you relax your grip on striving for things, and on enjoying that struggle.

And, to speak to the quandary of the article, it can be relentless if your engagement with everyday life is constantly mediated by commercial elements, which it is, today. Poverty strikes harder in that instance because you don't seem to be able to "do" anything that matters to other people without engaging your financial brain(which you equate to survival, since you have to constantly calculate rent and groceries). So you're going to just be in survival mode all the time which is likely to give you a mix of anxiety and depression - all routes closed off except the worst and riskiest ones. But then flip the situation into a non-commercial one and suddenly a whole segment of the discouraged-depressed can be creative and engaged, and I think that's really telling. So long as you have the strength, it's worth it to try to move forward in your life, because you can't really help the people around you by holding yourself back and staying still.