TOPIC: The good life is good for mental health, says leading charity

Fat lazy and depressed, good move
Artist do you want to fit in?
You’re fat, lazy and depressed. So you should be! It is not you who are sick it is society. You’re fat because you’re building up reserves ready for a fight. You’re lazy because what is the point of producing art for some oligarch to put on his wall so he can flaunt possessions to his minions. Why would that motivate you to produce art? You’re depressed because this society is rotting and smells of corruption. You’re depression is a natural response to the state you find yourself in. The leaders of this society use their media to try to convince you, the individual that everything wrong is your fault, but if you were to act as they want, you wouldn’t be depressed. However when you have squeezed yourself into a round hole, you have come out in an even worse state. If someone’s not depressed they haven’t even realized there is a problem. To not realise there is a problem means that person is not observant. To not be observant is to not be an artist.
Depression is not an aliment to be cured; it is a way of seeing.
Even the sciences are now starting to understand this.The article is written from the point of view that the depressed person is ill, but what if that is a wrong assumption?
Think about it; would it not be far more likely that depression is an evolved mode of thinking that we need if we are to tackle adverse circumstances. Imagine an animal that is in an environment where the amount of available food is there, but the environment is degrading. For instance a pond which is shrinking, it would concentrate enough fish in to an area that an animal could get its food relatively easily, but at some point the animal would have to move on. The animal might well be more than able to recognize the signs of the food which is present, but if it is to survive long term it is going to have to find a better environment rather than individual plants. So it would make sense that the animal adapts itself to viewing the big picture rather than fret about small details. Once the animal has understood its environment is becoming depleted wouldn’t it be the right course for it to indulge itself in overeating so that it has reserves ready for a trek to find a new environment. The animal would be foolish to leave an area which is sustaining it directly because there is no guarantee it will find new pasture, at the same time it should take some precautions. Given these circumstances the animal will naturally become lethargic, while it waits for the changes that will encourage it to act.
If the above is the case, you cannot put forward the view the individual animal is wrong in that it is showing it is well adapted to its environment. Your depression is not your fault you have done nothing wrong, you are adapting to your environment.
Think of someone like yourself working in a call centre, selling stuff to people who don’t want or need it. They would have to make empathetic connections with the buyers, so that the buyers would trust them enough to buy the items. In this arrangement, the seller has to deny its humanity with every sale, as the seller has to pretend it is sympathetic to the buyer, and yet cut its empathy if it is to pass of the merchandise. If the worker in the call centre is to retain it’s humanity it will either disconnect from the normal socialization, and see the buyer as prey to be fed upon, or will find it increasingly difficult to make calls.
A call centre which does not make calls will not make a profit. Management will use a number of techniques to make its workforce make the calls.
Normalization
Management will present to its workforce that it is normal to see the buyer as prey, as inferior. We are different from them, we are powerful they are weak. We have better minds. We are winners. Management will present to its workforce that the most sociopathic tendencies are good. Look after yourself only and you will get the rewards, the rewards are all that matters. Workers in these centers are often told to ‘focus on what you could have’, and discouraged from having personal relationships. The winner is the one with an expensive car, not the one with friends. You can buy the good life, you need money for the good life, you are a predator, and you have to take before someone else does. The prey will only waste the money; you need it to good things for yourself. The management show targets which any normal person could complete. The worker now sees the targets gradually rise, and is told to meet them, or become a looser. Is the worker a predator or a herd animal like the buyers? Are you one of them or one of us?
The choice is can the worker give up the job, and retain some humanity, or accept some people are to be treated as fodder for others? To reject the job would cause hardship, to keep the job means developing a hard skin.
There are those who are so enrapt in this process they won’t even recognize this is a problem. This is not like an old market where each store holder wants the customers to come to them rather than the other traders, the trader wants the goods to be good, so the customers will come again. No the system you are in deliberately produces items which are not useful, or don’t last, and forces people to buy and sell them even when it is against these peoples own best interests.
You may be able to sell the stuff, but you are intelligent enough to see this system you are in is degraded. It is therefore natural for you to act in the way you have evolved to act. You eat and slow down to put on fats, so you are ready for the oncoming journey, and you change your perception, to looking at the wider environment.
However, we live in a society that blames the individual for not fitting in, so because of the culture you come from, when it becomes obvious that you do not like the society you are in and you can feel physically it is time to act, you blame yourself,
‘I feel alienated, as though I don’t belong. I don’t want to be here any more. It’s as though I’m separated.’ You tell your doctor and he blames you for no longer fitting in and just as he has been trained, and if the therapist cannot talk you out of it they will medicate you until you don’t feel anymore.
Sweetness from the death of power.

I will have a good look at that later. I'm in a bit of a funk at the mo and I'm trying everything I possibly can to lift myself out of it.

Coming on here helps.

pheony wrote:


I'll call you tomorrow evening, if that's okay?

I will have a good look at that later. I'm in a bit of a funk at the mo and I'm trying everything I possibly can to lift myself out of it.

Coming on here helps.

Cantata, Yes you are right, I too have that propensity, i have fallen far. However In my enforced inactivity through Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that my other problems depression and dyslexia are not just a hindrance that the vulnerability for instance I have with my depression also has advantages. Yes down in the depths alone with the black dog there is no light, but sometimes I have been able to use it. I wonder if my ability to see outside of myself is wrapped up in my vulnerability to deep depression, that if one was to be lost the other would also go. I know it is not just about environment I have a weakness, but I have to say I have also got strength from it which I know seems a perverse thing to write, but there is a relationship between creativity and depression that I do not think has been explored.
One cannot be hurt if one does not feel, and I choose to be hurt because my need to feel is so much more important.

But there is something different about a horse. Try it one day.

"Events can be seen to be a trigger for depression, but depression is not caused by what happens to us in life (although every one needs a break sometimes). It's about how we respond and make sense of events.

Depression relies how we explain things to ourselves

Much of clinical depression is about how we interpret reality. And when we start to develop depression symptoms, a depressive thinking style can seem impossible to break.

By understanding depressive thinking styles, we can begin to see how they form a pattern of thinking, a cycle of depression, that creates a downward spin and so continues to fuel the depression."

cantata wrote: