Maybe this just isn't a problem like doctors make it out to be. Maybe life isn't worth living. It seems like if you try to take up this position, you get shouted out of the room because no one wants to accept the fact that life is utterly meaningless and futile for a subset of people, and it's not a condition -- it's just an objective analysis of the situation.
Slaving away for 60 years and having to spend the vast majority of your healthy, waking hours making someone else rich isn't rewarding. It's pointless.
The good things in life -- family, friends, hobbies -- are sidelined and you're only allowed to focus on them 2/7 days of the week. Yeah, life really doesn't seem like it's worth living.
And that, my friend, is exactly how this mental sickness is diagnosed as a sickness: because for the majority of human beings, life is worth in and for itself, despite its suffering, nonsense and stupidity.
A healthy person wants to live. Not wanting to is one of the ways of "being ill".
And I am not shouting you out of the room: at all. Being objective requires acknowledging that most people want to go on living despite the difficulties. The inability of understanding that outlook is exactly why depression is defined as a sickness.
And being depressed has nothing to do with "slaving it" and "sidelining the good things". It has to do with BEING INFINITELY TIRED and UNABLE to COPE with ANYTHING (even those "good things" feel bad, unworthy and unappealing when you are depressed).
> because for the majority of human beings, life is worth in and for itself
Do we really know this is true? What percentage of people are just going through the motions because they don't want to cause pain to their family/friends, and what percentage of people actually just don't see the point? If suicide was culturally acceptable, or even normal, how many people would participate? Can you say with certainty that number is less than 10%? Because if 1/10 people don't see the point in living, then it doesn't sound like a disease to me.
We live in a culture that promotes "positivity" and despises "negativity," so naturally we classify the lack of will to live as a disease, but I'm not so sure that it's that far outside of the norm.
> It has to do with BEING INFINITELY TIRED and UNABLE to COPE with ANYTHING
I'm no expert, but I'd imagine at some point you just get sick of putting on the act that stocking shelves at Walmart for 60 years is your life's true calling, or that writing code to track people around the internet to sell them more useless shit is really a valuable use of your life.
Eventually you realize you're going to spend more of your life doing pointless shit than actually doing the stuff you enjoy, and that there's no escape from the system, that you're just a nameless, faceless cog in the machine, and that you actually have no real agency. So the only difference between being depressed and being healthy is how much energy you have to put up with that bullshit.
Treating depression as a disease, and not as a rational reaction to the world we live in really feels like it serves only to benefit rich corporations, VCs, private equity, etc. because if the cogs stop turning, they stop making money. Then they would have to work a dayjob, and they would understand why depression is totally fucking normal.
I have known some very intelligent homeless people who have made the same argument as you. Abandoning social expectations was their attempt at a solution. I think it mostly worked for those who dedicated their lives to chess, reading, casual volunteerism. It did not work out for those who took to drugs.
Something should be done, but trying to fix it on an individual level won't work -- you have to fix the way the system operates so agency isn't something that's reserved for a small subset of the wealthiest individuals in society. UBI would go a long way towards this, I think.
I just want to be in charge of my own life, but as long as I have to show up at the same place from 9-5, five days a week, I really don't have that ability. My life exists solely to serve my masters. Yes, I can choose which master to serve, but ultimately I am not free to do with my life what I please.
We have no agency against death, nor ability to ignore the survival needs of the body. We have little agency against many forms of suffering intrinsic to being human.
The economic requirements you mention seem small, to me, compared to the larger tragedies of life, the real limitations to our agency.
If the time sucking effect of economic needs are your primary focus, you are lucky not to be born in a prior era. I've worked minimum wage, rented the smallest room I could find, counted every penny when buying my needs. The agency granting economic power I had was objectively superior to most humans throughout history.
What have we done with this power? For the most part, we trade it for safety, comfort, security, not freedom. We trade it for entertainment, sometimes addiction. We give up our agency for more. Which is fine, my point is that the problem is not economic power, the problem is what we, both individually and collectively, choose to do with it.
You say we have the more agency than the people who preceded us, but you fail to realize the only reason that is the case is because those people reached out and took it for us. You're a bit of a hypocrite if you lavish in benefit from their actions, but fail to pick up their torch.
> We have no agency against death, nor ability to ignore the survival needs of the body.
When death becomes escapable, I can guarantee you that the escape won't be affordable for us. There are 2,000 billionaires on this planet, and every single one of them will have access to it decades before you or I can dream of it.
Their achievements don't warrant the power or privileges they enjoy as a result of their wealth, and everyone deserves a shot at that kind of success. If the game is rigged from the beginning, the winners get to run the world, and they want you to work 48+ weeks every healthy year of your life for them, what's the point of playing?
I'm not even asking for their power or wealth, I'm just asking for the same ability to pursue my own ideas with my time instead of being forced to trade my time for money through employment. We live in an era where the vast majority of "essential" jobs are beginning to be automated, and this is achievable within our lifetimes.
> What have we done with this power? For the most part, we trade it for safety, comfort, security, not freedom.
This wasn't ever our choice. As long as fields need to be plowed, and factory lines staffed, you weren't allowed freedom. The people who are in charge want you to work, so they can be rich, so they made sure you had to do something for them in order to feed yourself. Now? With automation the need for human laborers is dropping, so we can feed and house ourselves with less effort than ever before. Let's use this to free everyone from the shackles of wage-labor, and allow them to pursue their own desires with their lives, like the billionaires get to do.
> A healthy person wants to live. Not wanting to is one of the ways of "being ill".
This is the medical model of disability fallacy: someone can't function in society so there must be something wrong with them that we should try to fix--but society itself is just the same neutral backdrop for everyone. The alternative is to acknowledge that society/environment plays a big role in mental health and that because society isn't primarily structured to keep people healthy, some people will expectedly have poor mental health.
Maybe this just isn't a problem like doctors make it out to be. Maybe life isn't worth living. It seems like if you try to take up this position, you get shouted out of the room because no one wants to accept the fact that life is utterly meaningless and futile for a subset of people, and it's not a condition -- it's just an objective analysis of the situation.
Slaving away for 60 years and having to spend the vast majority of your healthy, waking hours making someone else rich isn't rewarding. It's pointless.
The good things in life -- family, friends, hobbies -- are sidelined and you're only allowed to focus on them 2/7 days of the week. Yeah, life really doesn't seem like it's worth living.