Tonjight, we are starting out with the quiestion of depression versus investment.

Emotional investment, that is. And in particular, the kindc of emotional investment we often refer to as “energy” or “effort”.

Energy as in,. “I was going to do that, but I just didn’t have the energy. ”

Effort as in, “I know that would make me happy but it’s way too much effort. ”

And it’s that latter case I want to talk about tonight.

I often talk of depression in terms of effort and reward, in the sense that I talk about how depression restricts your ability to feel pleasure and happiness to such an extent that we depressives become extremely dependent on extremely high reward activities in order to feel any kind of reward and approval at all.

Included in that, however,. is the idea that it has to me an extremely high reward relative to the effort involves.  That’s how how human beings are wired as a fundamental part of how we decide whether a potential action is “worth it”.

Enter depresiion,. and that definition of “worth it” gets bottlenecked down so hard that almost nothing qualifies as worthwhile.

So far so good. I have said these thing before. But what I have only just recently realized is that it is not quite that simpler.

Depression also sets a hard limit on expenditures of effort no matter what the expected reward might be. There is only so much effort we can ever expend on anything, or so our lying predictor would have us think, and that’s it.

I like to use the lottery as a way to illustrate this phenomenon ad absurdeum.  Say I won the lottery. We will say it’s ten million bucks just to put a number to it.

And all I had to do to collect my prize was go to the award ceremony. Easy, right?

But that would involve a long trip by bus with three tricky transfers, all in neighborhoods I have never been to, and two of them in rich neighborhoods. And they all involve waiting around at the stop for at least 30 minutes, all alone. Watching strangers walk past me, knowing they “see” me, trying hard to fight the feeling that they all hate me for even daring to let myself be seen let alone breathe the same air as them while anxiety about making my connection eats away at me from another direction.

There’s also a lot of walking involved, and finding the rright bus stop in neighborhoods filled with twisty interlocking decidedly non-gridlike neighborhoods, and the Google Map of the places only left me more confused.

And then when I get there. I will not know who I am supposed to talk to, where I am supposed to go,  what I am supposed to be doing, and there will be nobody there I know but plenty of people who will be looking at me an judging me and hating me.

Oh, and to top it all off. there is no time for me to borrow some money so I can buy decent clothing so I will have to show up looking, as usual, like a sloppy hobo. ^[1]

That would be a trip I would find extremely hard to make. I would have to overcome an enormous amount of resistance just to walk out that door. My anxiety level would go through the roof. A very loud voice in my head would be telling me not to go, that I will inevitably fuck things up  so bad I wouldn’t get the money ^[2]and humiliate myself in front of the whoile world and it just won’t be worth it.

Ten million dollars. Not worth it.

Now don’t get distracted with problem-solving my scenario. There’s a ton of ways to circumvent the parameterts. Take a cab, take a friend, borrow clothers, blah blah blah.

What I want to you focus on is that the ten million bucks would not be enough reward to make all my anxieties and depression evaporate and let the joy and happiness that a lotto win normally generates in.

In fact. part of me would resent winning for making me leave my tiny broom closet of a life and deal with all kinds of unknowns and complications and other scary things.

And that would. making staying home in my nice warm nest seem very tempting.

As you can see from the example (assuming you’ve stayed focused),. no level of reward is big enough to unconditionally override aoo my mental damage.

That’s why I feel an enormous and deep sympathy for the people who pursue all the usual tokens os success in out society (money, status, family. high standard of living, repsect of one’s peers, etc. ) and find that none of it solved their basic problem of being unhappy all the time.

The real problem was depression, of course, but they didn’t know that. They believed society’s bullshit about what makes people happy and now they feel like they wasted their lives in pursuit of things that not only didn’t make them happy but don’t even mean anything to them any more.

Hmmm. I could write something downright literary about someoe like that.

Anyhow, back to my own situation. Facing this dire and desperate aspect of my depression is a sobering experience. The urge to ask what the fuck is wrong with me is strong, but I know that is a very unhelpful question.

I know what’s wrong with me. Depression. It doesn’t help.

But the question within that question is valid. That question is, “what do I have to do to make myself happen now that I know the normal things don’t work for me?”.

We’re all struggling to find that door that leads to happiness.

But society doesn’t know what to do with you if the normal things do not work. So people like me end up addicts. The form of the addiction vairies – might be food, or booze, or risk-taking, or acquisition, or drugs, or sex,. or whatever.- btu the nature of the beast is always exactly the same.

Normal life doesn’t do it for you.

You find something that does work – that lets you feel good or at least lets you feel normal and sane for a while – and it becomes your God. Absolutely everything your life becomes optimized to maximize contact with this new God.

And it hollows you out in the process. It takes larger and larger doses of the thing to get the same effect, and everything else has to go – career, familly, social esteem, even basic self-care and grooming.

And one day,. you wake up and don’t even know who or what you are any more and feel such an enormous void within you that suicide seems like the only solution. At least that way, you will escape the guilt for good.

Makes me glad that my addictions are food and video games.

They might keep me from having a life, but they won’t take mine either.

At least, not directly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.