You need to reduce friction for good habits and increase friction for bad ones. At the minute, our societies do the exact opposite. Unhealthy food and Netflix and cheap. Healthy food and education are expensive.
It doesn’t matter how it happened, once someone is in the hole, the negative feedback loop makes it very hard for them to escape. If you are worked to the bone on minimum wage to keep an overpriced roof over your head you will likely fall into the trap of eating shit food and binging on Netflix because summoning the energy to cook, teach yourself skills and exercise is going to be difficult. And the more you give in to doing that the deeper into the hole you fall. People at the bottom need breathing space. Reduce the amount of money they have to spend to survive which means they don’t have to work themselves to the bone to survive and they can actually focus on improving themselves. I’ve literally seen it happen with my own eyes.
And yes, for some people life can be too easy and that can also cause depression. Which is why I believe we need finer grained categories to narrows down the root causes and provide more tailored solutions than just handing out happy pills willy nilly to everyone.
>You need to reduce friction for good habits and increase friction for bad ones. At the minute, our societies do the exact opposite. Unhealthy food and Netflix and cheap. Healthy food and education are expensive
I would argue the opposite. healthy food is already dirt cheap, and education is free.
One hour at minimum wage can buy enough clean healthy food to last an adult most of a week.[1]
Free education as available at online and at libraries, ranging all the way from simple tasks to Phd courses from Stanford.
My point isn't to minimize the hardship of the depressed, but point out that friction isn't the issue. If 5 minutes of cooking, picking up a book, or typing an educational topic into youtube is too much effort, there is a different problem.
Why does reading a book, cooking, or learning seem like work, and not fun? It certainly isn't because it is too hard in reality, especially when the same depressed person found pleasure and relaxation in doing these things before they were depressed.
[1] I was at the store yesterday and pork was 88 cents/lb, frozen vegetables ~ $1/lb, and rice and beans ~$1/lb.
I agree with some of your points but not all of it. Healthy food can be affordable if you know what to buy and how to cook it. But I disagree that it is cheaper than junk food and it is certainly less convenient to cook and purchase. In the UK at least, there are also 'food deserts'[1] which means it is difficult to access healthy food.
I also agree that you can teach yourself stuff online for free. However it doesn't change the fact that you don't have the piece of paper saying you've got a degree which is one of the societal structures that holds a lot of people back. If you want the certification for an online program, you have to pay a similar amount of money to what you would have if you'd attended in person. There are lots of immigrants working in Western countries as taxi drivers who are scientists, doctors and the like back in their home countries but can't practice here for whatever reason, normally to do with the paperwork. IT/Dev is an outlier in that they will hire people without degrees in ways that don't happen in other industries. Something like 'Good Will Hunting' where a self taught janitor makes it into a white collar career is pretty rare.
> My point isn't to minimize the hardship of the depressed, but point out that friction isn't the issue. If 5 minutes of cooking, picking up a book, or typing an educational topic into youtube is too much effort, there is a different problem.
I still believe friction is a key component. Say you're on the minimum wage and you have to work as many hours as you possibly can to keep a roof over your head. Plus you have a lengthy commute. When you return home you are physically and mentally depleted, particularly if you are an ill fit for whatever job you've had to take on to survive. You want to turn your life around, but you've only got limited time available outside of work to do it. So you start looking for ways to save time. Maybe you'll cut back on exercise, or start eating more junk food so you don't have to cook as much and you can study. Or maybe you'll cut back on sleep. You keep this up for a while but eventually the physical and mental effects start to become overwhelming and you become more and more ill and eventually you burn out. You've worked hard, you've studied and you've still gotten nowhere. And your body and mind are a mess. Maybe you end up losing your job as a result. You lose faith that anything will ever pay off and you stop studying. You fall into depression and the cycle gets even worse. Maybe you even turn to alcohol and drugs to numb the pain. What that person needs is less friction in their life and a bit of help. Maybe it's work from home, maybe it's cheap and healthy takeaway food and probably a higher wage.
> Why does reading a book, cooking, or learning seem like work, and not fun? It certainly isn't because it is too hard in reality, especially when the same depressed person found pleasure and relaxation in doing these things before they were depressed.
Because the person is engaged in a fight for survival. They are not necessarily studying a topic because they want to but because it's the only thing that will help them get a job in their current location. They can't move away because they have no savings. Whatever they have to learn becomes high stakes. You can't afford to mess up or fail because if you do then you're toast. And learning requires failure so it's a stressful experience on top of your already stressful life. You've got society telling you you're worthless due to paying you barely enough to survive and now you've got a compiler error or a textbook you can't decipher saying the same thing. It takes a large amount of strength to hold fast and have faith that you will eventually come out the other side victorious, especially if this kind of thing goes on for years.
When I talk about access to learning, I am not talking about obtaining a piece of paper increasing economic mobility. I am talking about learning for the sake of personal enjoyment.
Most poor people are not depressed, so you have to ask what sets the depressed apart from the rest. Why can one person find joy in learning, and not another?
I think this points to something greater than money= happiness. Im not saying it doesnt matter, just that I don't think is accurate simplification.
You constructed an elaborate and plausible narrative why someone is depressed because of their economic situation. However, it ignores the person in identical situation who is happy. What is different between them?
> You constructed an elaborate and plausible narrative why someone is depressed because of their economic situation. However, it ignores the person in identical situation who is happy. What is different between them?
From my viewpoint, there are four components:
- Personality
- Expectation
- Perception
- Resilience
Starting with the first, imagine you’re really, really into the arts. Maybe you’re really into musical theatre or something like that because you saw them on TV. Now imagine you’re stuck living in an isolated town in Alaska.
Now we can move on to expectation. Maybe you grew up as kid and thought one day I’ll make it out of this town and move to a city where I can work in musical theatre. Or maybe you don’t even have that high expectations, you just want to live in a city where you can watch musical theatre. You think you’ll grow up and earn the money and get out of the town. But it doesn’t go to plan. Maybe you struggle to find a job because you don’t have the skills needed in the area. You’re working as a bartender and don’t seem to have any money left over at the end of the week to put towards your new life. Years go by and you’ve not made any progress. Your dream is fading further and further into the distance.
Which moves on to perception. So many years have gone by that you no longer see any possible way of achieving your expectations and living somewhere that matches your personality. You know what you’re doing isn’t working but you can’t think of anything that will. You fall into a depression. You let your body and mind go to shit.
A year or two goes by and maybe your perception changes and you think “maybe if I train as a lumberjack then I can earn more money and then I’ll be able to save and get out of here.” So you go to college to train as a lumberjack. But you’ve been out of school for a while and you’ve forgotten how long it takes to learn a new skill. You fuck up a lot. You’re not really a lumberjack type so the other students take the piss out of you and you become the butt of the jokes. You try and start running for your mental health but you’re that out of shape that you can’t even run a mile. You give up on both because you haven’t built up enough resilience through previous challenges to make it through.
That last part is absolute key. When you’re exercising, the total stress the body endures needs to be appropriate for it to have the intended effect. If you push someone too hard who is out of shape you risk injuring them.
Even if you’re a seasoned athlete and overtrain, your fitness decreases. Similarly if you don’t work hard enough to trigger growth, your fitness won’t increase.
It is the exact same thing with depression and why some people on here are saying depression is caused because life is too hard and others are saying it’s caused because life is too easy. The stress stimulus needs to be tailored for the individual. For a lot of people the stress is either too high or too low and it is causing major, major problems.
We’re calling both of these polar opposite cause and effects “depression” and it means everyone is shouting at each other rather than coming together and helping each other.
Going back to our original scenario, you might have another poor person who lives in that small Alaska town. Maybe he loved musical theatre too. But maybe his personality extended to other interests so he was happy. Or maybe he never expected much out of life so he was happy. Or maybe he could perceive different opportunities to escape. Or maybe he took the same lumberjack and running route but he knew that it was going to take a long, long time to get good at either and he was going to have suffer and persevere for a long long time.
It doesn’t matter how someone got in the hole, when they decide that they’re ready to get out, society needs to rally around them to offer support. That doesn’t mean to completely molly coddle them but it means that, just like a good coach or physio, you’ve got to realistically evaluate how much stress and damages they’ve endured and how much they can currently tolerate and then gradually increase their ability to handle more over time until they’re back on their feet again. At the minute, in my opinion, society is far too much Led Tasso and not enough Ted Lasso.
You need to reduce friction for good habits and increase friction for bad ones. At the minute, our societies do the exact opposite. Unhealthy food and Netflix and cheap. Healthy food and education are expensive.
It doesn’t matter how it happened, once someone is in the hole, the negative feedback loop makes it very hard for them to escape. If you are worked to the bone on minimum wage to keep an overpriced roof over your head you will likely fall into the trap of eating shit food and binging on Netflix because summoning the energy to cook, teach yourself skills and exercise is going to be difficult. And the more you give in to doing that the deeper into the hole you fall. People at the bottom need breathing space. Reduce the amount of money they have to spend to survive which means they don’t have to work themselves to the bone to survive and they can actually focus on improving themselves. I’ve literally seen it happen with my own eyes.
And yes, for some people life can be too easy and that can also cause depression. Which is why I believe we need finer grained categories to narrows down the root causes and provide more tailored solutions than just handing out happy pills willy nilly to everyone.