Have been playing lots more Divinity : Original Sin 2 (DOS2), of course.
It’s exactly the sort of game I like : one with an open world and tons of quests.
Open world so that I have plenty of space and don’t feel stuck in a tiny space or forced to walk a certain linear track, and tons of quests because I am a very goal oriented person and thrive when there is someone (or something) to give me tasks to complete, for which I am rewarded on a per task basis.
I just wish the real world worked that way. I would be so productive!
I suppose freelancing on UpWork was kind of like that. You have to compete with others in order to get the “quest”, but then I got paid on completion, which rocked.
I keep telling myself I will get back into doing that some day. And I probably will. It just has ot wait until I get one of my waves of enthusiasm and self-confidence and can surf that into a new era.
Or at least some extra money.
Sad to say, UpWork is the only place where I have earned income since I was in my early 20’s and working for my uncle Sonny.
It’s also the only place where I have gotten work by applying for it. Every other job I sort of lucked into in one way or another.
Became a paperboy when the editor of the local paper, the Journal Pioneer, when the editor of the paper pulled up to me in his car when I was walking home from school and asked me if I lived in the neighborhood.
Hashtag only in a small town, hashtag simpler and more innocent times.
Got the job with my uncle via nepotism, obviously, though I was pretty darn good at it.
Even the “job” selling Dickie Dee frozen confections from a bicycle cart I got pretty much just for showing up.
The hours were long, but at least the pay was terrible.
So really, UpWork was the best place for someone like me until I bit off more than I could chew with some jobs that were not just “do this get paid” type jobs and required me to stay focused and motivated for what turned out to be far longer than I could.
Lesson learned. Don’t go for that kind of job again. Stick with the one and done kind of thing, with no long gaps with nothing to do but wait for depression to set in.
That said, there is still a large hunk of my craziness to overcome before I go back to UpWorking again. Specifically, the feeling that I crashed and burned the last time and that I did so in the worst way, by just ghosting on people, and so that will be a black mark against me forever and nobody will ever hire me again.
That, of course, comes with a massive dose of shame. Sigh.
But of all the possible paths out of my current quagmire (giggity), that one seems like it has the least to overcome.
I will think it over.
More after the break.
Anhedonia and Motivation in Depression
Right, I was going to get into this today.
To recap : somehow, I had not thought to connect anhedonia and motivation in depression before now.
Anhedonia is one of the symptoms of depression and it refers to depression’s signature lack of the ability to experience pleasure.
Depression sufferers often find it hard to take pleasure in anything, even things they once enjoyed. This fits in rather neatly with my theory that everything in depression stems from a kind of numbness.
This numbness, in turn, comes from a psychological injury that the mind cannot heal. Normally, the numbing would be a short term solution that is only there to keep the mind calm while it heals, like a topical anesthetic applied to a physical wound.
But if the wound never heals, the anesthetic never wears off, and if further injuries occur, the problem only gets worse.
And the cruelest truth is that it is often the problems created by the first injury that leads to further injury.
This has been my theory of depression for a very long time. But somehow, until now, it had not occurred to me that this was the source of another symptom : depression’s telltale lack of motivation.
Obviously, if things are very unrewarding due to anhedonia, they are not going to be very motivating. Why take up arms against a sea of troubles when the psychological rewards are so paltry?
On a deep level, every person with depression knows this. That’s why it is so hard for us to find the motivation to do things which seem quite easy and normal to those who have never suffered from depression.
Those people get sufficient psychological reward – as in, activation of the reward centers of their brains – to make doing these things “worth it”.
But the depressive’s mind does not. The numbness prevents it. And it is this numbness which must be treated if the depression is to be treated.
This numbness is also the root cause of the person with depression’s tendency to self-medicate with one addiction or another.
In order to experience any pleasure at all, the person with depression has to concentrate on the most rewarding things with the least investment of effort possible.
Only such a high effort to reward ratio can pierce the numbness enough to provide enough motivation to keep doing the thing.
Viewed like this, depression can be seen as a perfectly logical reaction to a vastly changed table of costs and rewards.
To put it crudely, if you have depression, everything costs more and pays less.
No wonder we people with depression end up fixating on whatever pays the most and costs the least. It’s the only way we can turn a “profit”.
Ironically, our number one treatment for depression consists of drugs that make us even more numb. This is necessary so that the person can function well enough to get treatment, but in the long term it may be the wrong approach.
I think I am going to talk with my therapist about lowering my Paxil dose this week.
It’s high time I started feeling more things.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.