[layer8]

If he indeed committed suicide out of depression, I would imagine that maybe he realized after years of relative successes that nothing, no achievement, no appreciation/gratitude by others, will cure his depression. At least that wouldn’t be an uncommon pattern for high-intellect people with severe depression.

[theGnuMe]

This is very common actually. Phil Stutz (a famous psychiatrist) calls it the Snapshot. Basically the Snapshot is the misbelief that if we achieve certain things we will be happy. It's a form of wishful thinking. Instead you have to focus on and enjoy the journey because basic reality is pain, uncertainty and constant work.

There's a Netflix documentary on Stutz (called "Stutz") with Jonah Hill that is quite good although abbreviated on its coverage of "the tools".

[entropicdrifter]

As someone who suffers dysthymia and occasional major depression on top of it, I'll never stop being grateful that I figured this out early on in life.

When I was 11, I got my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. A couple years after that point I grew disillusioned with continuing to practice martial arts altogether because I realized that the achievement didn't make me happy. In some ways, it made my depression worse at the time and it just took me a few years to figure that out.

Music has consistently sustained me since then. It's both an endless journey of self improvement and an activity that's possible to purely enjoy in the moment. It takes so much of your brain at once to perform music that you literally cannot be stuck in your head with your own thoughts, instead you reach a state of mind where there is no ego whatsoever, just total flow-state focus and the experience of the present.

[mattgreenrocks]

Music is pretty much my primary hobby at this point for the exact reason: it has a near-infinite skill ceiling, highly creative, improvisational, and it can be both a private and public pursuit. It is the ultimate grounding to the present moment, and it provides very good feedback when you start drifting out of it. It demands a very high degree of awareness and rewards you accordingly. Truly magical.

[theGnuMe]

That's awesome and you've motivated me to restart piano!

[mattgreenrocks]

> maybe he realized after years of relative successes that nothing, no achievement, no appreciation/gratitude by others, will cure his depression.

The real kicker is that the cure for this is not free either.

I'd say the cure is to starve the broken part of yourself that needs achievement to justify itself. To do that, you must consciously break the cycle of over-achievement and focus on well-being as a higher value over achievement. This is a lot of work, as you're patching up the hole that achievement was trying to fill, and it is slow going.

Eventually you can have a better relationship with achievement, but there's a cost: you no longer see it the same way, and other people can sometimes detect that about you. You'd choose your own well-being over achievement most times. Because it broke you once, it is harder to have the same hunger for it you once did. And that's good: it means you learned and you changed. (Sometimes I think the fact we can make these big changes at all is a profound miracle.) But, people can see that as aloofness, detachment, or disengaged. It is none of those things. It is kept at arms length the same way a former alcoholic might deal with a drink: extremely cautiously and deliberately.

It will forever be complicated.