Are you going to tell us why?
…catch-22.
When the Dodgers finish at 80-82, of course life will suck for a while!
But remember Kenley Jansen, and John Lindsay? Against the currents, they kept battling, and they had some moments this year…
I suspect baseball is a good metaphor for life in so many ways, but the main lesson I take away is that you suit up and show up every day, and sometimes you’re the ball, but sometimes, maybe just sometimes, you get days where you are the bat…
Hang tough -
Stating “There is no reason. NONE.” doesn’t actually mean there aren’t reasons.
I want out. I’ve wanted out for years but I just keeping droning on through these 24 hour segments of repetitive boredom wondering what the fuck for. Yes there are fleeting moments of joy and happiness dotted here and there, but when you realize how much effort it takes to recognize them it all becomes a fairly transparent ploy. Canned laughter in a sitcom.
I was put on medication (not for the first time) for a few months last year, hated it, felt awful and weaned myself off after a few months, but things haven’t been the same since. Sparks of wonder and hope I used to find and cling to are simply not to be found. I can’t think clearly any more, most of my thoughts feel like they’re tangled in woolly clouds and while I’ve always been a quiet person, making conversation is near impossible for me now… I just can’t think of things that quickly.
Coming to the SDMB used to be good for me, it awakened (and fed) cravings for information, curiousity was settled and there was some satisfaction. But for the last few years, I don’t know why I come. I used to visit religiously every day, now I come by once a week, once every other week, once a month and I skim through posts so quickly that even things that interest(ed) me become a blur forgotten in moments.
Onwards to nothing I go…
Seek professional help, if you aren’t already. If one type of help doesn’t work for you, seek something else.
I completely disagree with this. When a person is depressed, they focus on the negative things in life to confirm their overall negative view of life.
Stop reading/listening to the news. Honestly. These days the news is extremely skewed towards the negative, and that gives you an unbalanced sense of how the world is today.
It might sound silly, but I found when I moved from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, I was really taken aback by the negativity of the news and started getting very stressed out about whether we had made the right decision to move or not. I then realised it was because the news in the UK focusses much more on the negatives than NZ news, and this was skewing my perception of the country. When I stopped paying attention to the news, and started paying attention to how people were treating each other in my own town, I relaxed and enjoyed myself a lot more.
Sometimes , that is not so easy. The other day I was really down, so I thought I should eat something. I went into a fast food place just to get something in my stomach.
I sat down at a table and right in front of me was a huge flat screen tv with CNN on. The sound was down but they had the closed captioning on and that SURREALISTIC Parker-Spitzer show was on. I swear to God they both had these huge fake smiles on their faces as they spoke FOR TEN STRAIGHT MINUTES. They talk/smiled for ten straight minutes It was fucking weird as hell.
They were obviously trained to smile like that by some fucking CNN media consultant genius. (I just read their new show has the lowest ratings of all time and Spitzer was ridiculed for looking like an elf, thank god)
But at the time, it was freaking me out. Everybody should rent the movie IDIOCRACY by Mike Judge. It is really happening in our society. We are being turned into idiots and everything now is for entertainment purposes. If you are murdered, your story will probably be on 48 hours mysteries within 5 years for other people’s entertainment.
I keep hearing over and over that we are on the verge of a total economic collapse yet right now as I listen to the Dennis Miller on the radio, there is yet another “actor” promoting yet another new realistic cop show. In my mind, if you aren’t in some form of entertainment or in politics (which I guess is just another form of entertainment) you are fucked and better be getting ready for soup lines.
My brother, who has been in the construction industry for 40 years, has stopped paying his mortgage and will eventually lose his house because he can’t get bank loans for projects that are already in progress. Shouldn’t the banksters be making loans to this industry which employs millions of people?
I listen to Crazy Alex Jones every day online and although he constantly exaggerates and is obviously another frustrated actor with a talk show, I swear he is on to something when he says that this is all being done by design to bankrupt the US and bring in a world government. Yahoo!
When I try to quit listening to the news completely, I feel like an asshole who should be keeping up with what is going on around me. I understand that you have to know when to turn it off and listen to music, but with the world crumbling around us, I need some information.
Though this is neither mundane nor pointless, I’m moving this from IMHO to MPSIMS, where we usually have these type threads. Best wishes, koufax.
I wasn’t only relying of those words for my argument. There was some logic somewhere in the rest of that large post of mine. Here is what I said before:
Koufax posted that he was seeing things as they really are, but that ignores the point of how he was reacting to those things. Those are two separate questions. While both me and Koufax think that the Parker-Spitzer show is retarded, only one of us feels depressed by that thought. Is Koufax viewing the Parker-Spitzer show more accurately because he reacts differently to the show?
Some people react to something one way and then confuse that reaction with reality. Emotions don’t tell you reality, they’re emotions, they lie to us all the time.
Random Design, I understand there are good reasons life makes you feel horrible (i.e., maybe a chemical imbalance). But what’s the utility in having life make you feel this way?
If you think there is a good reason that watching CNN should make you want to kill yourself, let me know. I’m still waiting for an answer.
Because people don’t live in a vacuum. People exist in a society, and news covers events that have happened in society that supposedly affect it in some meaningful way. A person is part of society. Jobless claims are numbers generated by people, people not very different from any one of us. People are murdered, people not very different from any one of us. People are assaulted, robbed, and fucked over by the companies they work for. And these people are like us. The news, at least the way it’s been done for as long as I’ve cared about the news, is one of the main reasons people should feel depressed.
Admittedly, my thoughts of suicide are due to pretty selfish reasons, not CNN. I just hate my current position in life, and have no one to blame for it but myself. I got myself into grad school, I accepted an offer to join a PhD program, I decided to stick with it. I’m in a hell of my own making. It’s a “better hell” than a lot of people’s, but it’s still my hell. On the way to a conference this summer, I found myself being jealous of the TSA agents and baggage handlers. I wanted their jobs, because they are–or seem to be–guilt-free jobs. When a baggage handler has thrown his last 50-lb. suitcase onto the plane, he’s done. There is no more work for him today. He can’t go home and unload bags. There is a measurable stopping point. In the academic life, the goalposts are constantly moving. If you don’t have pubs (like me) you’re screwed. But even when you get pubs, you’re still screwed because you could always do more. Have 30 papers published? Why not 35? Have 150? Why not a couple of books too? There is never a feeling of “Well, I’m absolutely done.”
So, that’s my hell. The OP has a different one no doubt, as do all of us. The OPs hell is apparently, living in Idiocracy, and CNN seems to support his assertion that that is where we’re going. It’s real to him, just as real as my hell is to me.
There is a difference from feeling depressed and thinking you should feel depressed.
It’s one thing to have no control over your depression at the moment, but it’s another to think you have no other choice but to always feel depressed.
Depression comes from within the person, not society. There are plenty of people in third world countries who have nothing, but aren’t depressed. They all have problems more troubling than “I’m never going to publish enough papers,” and they don’t think about ending it all.
I’m not making fun of you, I’m being serious. Depression makes you think that you have to be depressed. So whatever problems you have become so burdensome that you think there is no way you can deal with them. However, this can’t be true because people with much worse problem have made it through ok, and people with less problems have have chosen to kill themselves.
Now, your response to this might be to think that you’re different, and that the people in third world countries get by only by deluding themselves. But their reality is just as real as the hell you’re living in.
I once read that the highest suicide rates are white men between something like 18-35, then black men (same age), then white women and the least suicides were black women.
My friends and I concluded that black women, who face more discrimination because they are black AND women, don’t have all these “SHOULD” statements in their head. “I SHOULD have a better job, I SHOULD have a husband and family” etc etc
Statsman, from one depressoid to another, just do the best you can. Its ok to be average most of the time. I read this in a book a friend gave me by Dr. David Burns titled (and I hate the title) “Feeling good, the new mood therapy”
Actually, my depression and anxiety at this time are caused by a specific legal problem I will be facing shortly. I usually just laugh at all the sick bullshit in our society, but not now.
But even if I wasn’t in the jam I am now, I really believe we are heading over a cliff and the media (news) keeps shoving garbage down our throats instead of doing their job and going after the corruption in our governments. Perky Couric and Funnyman Brian Williams are more concerned with their guest appearances on 30 Rock than doing their jobs.
And I can’t touch alcohol. Damn.
I am sorry to hear that you’re going through some legal trouble. I wish you the best possible outcome.
I’m not really that surprised that white men 18-35 have the highest suicide rates. I think white men are still dominant (number-wise) in the high-paying, high-stress, white-collar jobs that are an outgrowth of industrialization. Industrialization increases wealth, and makes things that were unusual luxuries now commonplace necessities, and makes people feel poor when they are really far better off than 95% of the world’s population. Relatively speaking, they may be poor. But the baseline of comparison is constantly shifting upward. I know I’m guilty of this relativistic thinking, and that it probably drives most of my depression. Even when I recognize that I don’t really have it that bad (comparatively), I think, “Well, if I ever had it as bad as [insert example of a worse life here], I would most certainly kill myself.”
In my case, yes, I know that even without publishing a lot of papers, I probably won’t be fighting child soldiers for scraps of bread, or wondering every day if I might be killed by a roadside bomb. But to hear the dripping disdain of some fellow doctoral students (and some professors!) when I say that I want to go to a teaching school, one would think that I’m only a hair’s breadth away from pumping chemical toilets. To them, anyone who doesn’t make academics their life is a failure. It’s quite ironic that people who think themselves an open minded bunch are remarkably parochial when it comes to “proper” career choices. It’s quite a poisonous atmosphere, but I think that it’s not too different from other jobs in privileged societies. I mean, how many people bitch about their jobs, when a lot of the country would kill for a job right now.
Ok, so lets say everyone hates your career choice. Assuming that you really want to go to a teaching school, what’s the problem?
Apart from the social isolation, the feeling that you just don’t “fit in” with your colleagues, I guess nothing. But in terms of expressing that desire to my advisor and my committee, I fear that they would find some way to keep me from ever getting the PhD. It sounds crazy and paranoid, but it’s something that I feel in my heart. I keep thinking of them meeting amongst themselves after my defense saying, “Why the fuck did we waste all that time on him. Fail. If he wants to teach so fucking bad, let him go teach with his master’s at a community college.”
One friend of mine, a “perfect PhD student” guy I wrote about in a thread a while back, confided in me the other day. He told me that he kept his love of teaching to himself because he was petrified of what his committee might do to him if they found out.
If people don’t understand your career choice then you don’t have to tell anyone about it.
What white collar professionals lack in tolerance they make up for in respect for privacy. It’s pretty easy to BS these people about your personal life.