People act like Depression is just this freak pathology that can strike you arbitrarily at any time. Like lymphoma or getting hit by the number 9 bus.
When I think about it, though, pretty much everyone who I have known who has been depressed, has had fairly good reasons. Poor social life, bad academics, non-existent love life, unhealthy lifestyles, substance dependencies, shit jobs, and so on. Obviously there is a bit of a cause-and-effect problem here, but the correlation at least is almost perfect.
Meanwhile, all the people who I meet who seem most invulnerable to even the slightest shadow of depression; who find it almost quaint or curious as a concept, as if it's not even clear to them what it would be like to feel that way... are the ones for whom everything has pretty much come up trumps. Fulfilling jobs, good social lives, healthy lifestyles, hot girlfriends, you name it.
As I write this out it seems almost too stupid and obvious to say. Clearly people with depression are more likely to have problems in their lives. Is that really the narrative we see in popular culture though? The media loves the inexplicably depressed person, who just can't shake off the black dog even though they've got everything going for them. When my guess is that 95% of depression cases are tediously and trivially explicable.
Maybe the reason is that if we accepted that people are depressed due to actual and material problems, we would feel obliged to try and help solve them. We'd much rather hide behind a sable canine, as intractable as it is metaphorical.
When I think about it, though, pretty much everyone who I have known who has been depressed, has had fairly good reasons. Poor social life, bad academics, non-existent love life, unhealthy lifestyles, substance dependencies, shit jobs, and so on. Obviously there is a bit of a cause-and-effect problem here, but the correlation at least is almost perfect.
Meanwhile, all the people who I meet who seem most invulnerable to even the slightest shadow of depression; who find it almost quaint or curious as a concept, as if it's not even clear to them what it would be like to feel that way... are the ones for whom everything has pretty much come up trumps. Fulfilling jobs, good social lives, healthy lifestyles, hot girlfriends, you name it.
As I write this out it seems almost too stupid and obvious to say. Clearly people with depression are more likely to have problems in their lives. Is that really the narrative we see in popular culture though? The media loves the inexplicably depressed person, who just can't shake off the black dog even though they've got everything going for them. When my guess is that 95% of depression cases are tediously and trivially explicable.
Maybe the reason is that if we accepted that people are depressed due to actual and material problems, we would feel obliged to try and help solve them. We'd much rather hide behind a sable canine, as intractable as it is metaphorical.