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Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the prominence of depression is largely caused by a broken interface with the world at large. The traps created by modern society wherein you struggle for other people's benefit are better designed than ever before. What our social machine procedurally treats as progress is advances in subjugation. Depression may often be an artifact of "efficiency" with respect to extracting value from the population at large. We might need to dial back the exploitation of the currently-exploitable class to have a sustainable society, assuming pills don't work. In different terms, maybe we have too many rich people (exploiters) in a situation where it's clearly very foolish to keep growing in number (and productivity) to support them. Maybe we just need to rebalance our economy to make it work better for those currently exploited and endemically depressed people.

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You must be reading very different history books than the ones I've read.

The idea that we're somehow way more exploited than the people who came before us does not seem compatible with any history book I've ever read.

Before, the body was in chains, but the mind was free.

Now, the mind is in chains.

What evidence do you have for this? Do you think chattel slaves of the USA weren't broken in mind - indoctrinated into Christianity, stripped of their original languages, culture and names? That was not some novel evil created by Southerners - it's the tried-and-true method for enslaving populations throughout history.

But I'm sure the existence of TikTok is an existential threat.

How successfully?

It depends on the timespan and comparative frame you are thinking about. If we limit ourselves to post-WW2 MAD world, there are much different overall trends in quality of life than starting in the middle ages or from colonial times, where many people did not enjoy the rights or luxuries modern people would, not in small part because they couldn't, technologically speaking. It's easy to compare modern poverty to peasantry and say we have it good now, but it doesn't address modern problems in a meaningful way.

> It depends on the timespan and comparative frame you are thinking about

There are few dimensions where pre-industrial life is better before than after. The quality of life for the average human is many standard deviations above what it was just a few centuries prior. It wasn't that long ago cholera was a death sentence.

Turns out it's more efficient to keep the cattle somewhat happy. Doesn't change a thing when it comes time to get steak.

Have you ever wondered why the user is the product in so many internet companies?

You're right: you've gone way out on a limb.

I've heard plenty of people involved in mental health care themselves lament the fact that they're often just trying to happy-talk people who genuinely have harrowing lives. I don't think the notion is absurd.

All sorts of non-absurd-seeming notions turn out to be wrong, which is why people train for many years to conduct medical research.

How would you "medically disprove" the notion that some people are unhappy because the circumstances of their lives are bad rather than biological defects?

Nobody needs to disprove the notion that some people are happy for reasons having nothing to do with clinical depression.

OK. And the notion that psychiatry has been used to simply stamp anyone agitating for political change as insane is also attested (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protest_Psychosis for instance). So what's your objection to this line of inquiry?

I don't know what you're trying to argue here, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the claim at the root of the thread, and I apologize but I'm not interested in the tangent.

Unhappy is dramatically, completely different to depression. I've been both and they don't even feel that similar.

Sadness or distress vs not feeling anything and not having motivation?

Yes, this is roughly in the right area.

I wonder how a week of low dose amphetamine usage, like adderall, might help disrupt no-motivation mood loops. A friend of mine (cycling through many antidepressants) seems like he would respond well to this. As in, he would feel better and be able to “shift gears.” Not to get more work done, but say, enjoy going to an art museum. And feel what it is like to be enthusiastic again.

If we change the word "unhappy" to "despairing" does it make sense?

I don't know - it's your argument.

If it helps, unhappiness/despair seem like different degrees of the same feeling. Depression is a different feeling.

The closest analogy I can think of is that "amused" and "satisfied" are both positive feelings, but they are different and you can't treat the cause the same even if some of the symptoms are similar.

“Exogenous depression” is supposed to be experienced by about a fifth of people at one point or another. What if many persistent cases of depression were actually exogenous? That might be more interesting than parsing the difference between despair, hopelessness, anhedonia, and depression.

Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.

The idea that a terrible life can cause depression is not the limb he's going out on. It's the idea that somehow depression is caused by being way more exploited than our ancestors in the 1700's who were working on someone else's farms and factories as children is the limb he's going out on.

OK, well, that's an easy rhetorical maneuver but one that can be met with equally facile ripostes, such as "how do you determine that people weren't just as if not more depressed in the 18th Century when the concept was less familiar?" or "perhaps having the gulf between themselves and the wealthy rubbed in their faces every day is what causes the distress, since there can be little sense of exploitation if one is surrounded only by those in similar straits."

Didn't people in the olden days also see the castles and mansions of the rich on a daily basis?

Daily I very much doubt because it’s not like most people were commuting to work. Would you sometimes see them, sure, but people also had a belief system that would have done more to justify the social order, and it would probably be limited to provincial elites for most.

Weren't a lot of towns built basically surrounding a castle?

I guess people in towns would see wealthy people often, but people in remote farms and villages wouldn't.

I'm not sure exactly what wealth is being rubbed in my face today. News about rich people? I would assume there would also be news and gossip about rich people back then too.

Fair criticism as usual and maybe I should have been more specific, but I didn't say anything about the 1700s or prior specifically. If we talk about trends in the lifespan of people alive today (which represents a huge number of people) the picture is much different.

My grandma (alive today) grew up with no indoor plumbing in the United States. They had to use an outhouse.

> In 1940 nearly half of houses lacked hot piped water, a bathtub or shower, or a flush toilet. Over a third of houses didn't have a flush toilet.

https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2004/data/papers/SS0...

Is it exploitation that's the problem?

Or social isolation? People are very isolated these days. People can have good jobs, have lots of shallow acquittances but no true friends.

You don't need to go back to the 1700s to find comparatively low levels of depression. The 1980s will do.

Imagine a kid growing up in the US today, they are functionally under house arrest as neighborhoods are built for cars and not people. Everyone is isolated to their family unit almost entirely and all activity gated on parents time and willigness (or control).

'The Weariness of the Self' from Alain Ehrenberg gives a really good account about the history of the depression more or less along these lines.

> In different terms, maybe we have too many rich people (exploiters) in a situation where it's clearly very foolish to keep growing in number (and productivity) to support them. Maybe we just need to rebalance our economy to make it work better for those currently exploited and endemically depressed people.

Don't all those rich people also get depression? I think that rules out a marxist reading here.

If you're going to go this general direction, i'd say a better way would be, we now live in a system where work is never done, stress is pretty constant, and labour is less physical but more mental in the modern world. Perhaps our mind is just not made for continous mental labour. Being a farmer in pre modern times sucked, but at least you could turn your brain off more often.

Marx clearly stated that alienation was a phenomenon that affected all classes. Marxism explains alienation just intervenes in a different manner.

Depression then also happens among rich people. But the source, and expression of it might differ. An anecdotal saying explains that wealth is often a barrier to create true friendships because it insulates you from society and creates antisocial thought processes: the "thinking people just want to be your friend because you're rich" rhetoric.

Rich people aren't automatically immune to exploitation. It's more a finely tuned web of pressures than a strict hierarchy. I'm also aware of differences in genetics and diet and other behavior that predispose people to depression.

I'm not rooting for Marxism exactly. I think it is an extreme overcorrection, but that some correction has been and is still warranted at times, given regulatory capture and other abuses that come from concentration of power. Anti-trust action and semi-effective democracy/representation are needed.

I think we are in a society with solutions to almost every problem except for those that require cooperation on the scale we exist at, which is unprecedented.

I sympathise with the idea of mindless hard labor being more fulfilling. Working food service in the backroom as a teenager worked my body but left me less stressed mentally than anything I've done post-graduation.

People lament their functional redundancy in society. Markus Persson Notch got depression after he became a billionaire. The workers lament their redundancy because they can be replaced and abandoned all the time.

People want to be needed, instead we have become isolated individuals that need no one in particular.

I tend to think that our disconnection from the nature causes depression to humans. We have come so far from our natural living conditions that we fall ill to depression and other diseases. Another aspect is the lack of physical work that is very unnatural for us. We sit in cubicles (or at home office nowadays), use our brains and fingers to do work and at best hit the gym few times a week. After which we eat our stomach full and entertain us with things that were invented during last generation. Life certainly is safer and better for us, but it's making us unhappy. We live like medieval royals and like them we suffer mental illnesses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mentally_ill_monarchs).

Equal and opposite reaction. Right now may literally be the best time to be alive in the world history for those who have direction, purpose, inner strength. Endless possibilities and safety nets.

Gonna attempt to short circuit the "you think WE have it bad? Whatabout 1700s?" argument by adding that the "broken interface" theory may be much more about the patient's perception and confidence of the trap we're in than the actual truth of relative conditions. There also might now be a greater philosophical understanding of the global picture than the average person back in the day. Back then we didn't have an internet to give us rigorous detail on both the widespread extent the human race is trapped in a broken system and the futility of the common man's attempts to change it. Even if this wasn't true (I'm hard pressed to find a more optimistic take, though I'm always searching and fighting for it - technology is the best hope imo), it is an easy perception to fall into, especially for anyone already a few steps into depression. It's a reasonable bet that even if people in the past were just as likely to get beaten down and depressed about their own lives, they still might have been able to look at the world around them and the future of humanity and see optimism and hope that the next day might be better/luckier. The world was also much more malleable at the local level - both politically and individually (i.e. go outside and chop a tree down) and less of a complex leviathan of laws and exploitations which immediately instills a feeling of being trapped in the jaws of something that you can't even explain or understand.

Alternatively - or just, adjacently - with the internet (and big business, and widespread university education) we are culture-shocking vastly more people into a medium that can barely be understood from a detached intellectual and philosophical perspective, and is almost impossible to fathom from historical, traditional, ancestral or biological ways of understanding (the way humans operated for vast majority of our existence). We have little history to compare this new way of life to, and it's unsurprising if it's doomed to breed mental disease by its very nature. We have awakened far more people to an absurd reality, and "what is meaning?" is no longer just a question for a tiny group of overintellectual philosophers. Some of those philosophers say that one must walk through the valley of the shadow of death before we can find that answer for ourselves - but even they're gonna admit that a whole lot of people are gonna get stuck in that valley for a while if you just throw the masses in like we have. Hopefully that's just a temporary growing pain of our society as we gather our strength and do better but - time will tell!

(P.S. rich people are just as trapped in this malaise of meaninglessness. They have more agency, sure, but they're also still part of the systemic trap and unlikely to have much better answer on how to change anything than the common man. Only so long even a rich person can hide in hedonism before the depression catches up - or they just embrace the cold reality and adopt the "I got mine" attitude which said system is naturally inclined to. Depression may very well be due to our moralistic social being nature chafing with a cruel capitalist system which has won by almost every measure possible)

Yes, honestly I regret making the jab at "rich people". It's oversimplifying things.

I appreciate your take on this.

Don't feel too bad about it, you hit the nail on the head.

It might be helpful though to define the term "rich".

A rich person usually isn't your manager, or their boss, or even the owner of the business, because the people supervising you may have never had a raise in life either, and the owner might be in debt.

A rich person is someone who dismisses their dependence on others. They will act impeccably in all situations and often appear to have an untarnished reputation. A rich person will deny help to someone in need, and then justify their lack of empathy with something along the lines of tough love. A rich person will demand that others work and portray an image that they themselves work, while secretly delegating all work to others. A rich person will wear a suit, a lapel pin, all manner of regalia, to preserve their image at all cost. A rich person has an untethered ego that will go to any length to maintain control. A rich person will decide for others. A rich person will never question their own beliefs. A rich person achieves affluence by denying it to others.

Unfortunately the rich are in charge of all facets of our lives in the US and pretty much everywhere else. Their undying devotion to wealth inequality and the status quo is specifically the primary cause of suffering for the rest of us.

Thanks! Yeah you shouldn't feel bad - rich people are a good example, and I would expect them to have a lot more resources to escape depression in general

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