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[Frumple]

Venting rarely helps all that much in the longer run, either*. It almost always takes, y'know, lifestyle changes and/or medication to break out of major depression, and from what I recall J can't/won't go the therapy/potentially medication route for whatever reason and is having trouble with the former due to the whole major depression thing. Talking helps, though, for most, so long as it's not the sort of talk that just makes things worse.

*Though it can help in the short term, sometimes (when it's not self-reinforcing, which can happen), which can keep things going until the long run comes around. But it's basically a symptom cure instead of a causal one, at best -- and if you don't fix the cause, all the symptom suppression in the world isn't really going to help all that much.

---

As for what to do JFH -- step one is stop thinking like you're thinking. You're pulling a pretty bog standard self-reinforcing depression loop whatsit. It's the hardest step, but the one you have to get to and get through to really manage anything else. Y'gotta' find a way to love yourself before you can love the world. Or it helps a lot, anyway. Ultimately you have to learn to do both, to some degree, to really get by.

If you were working with a decent therapist, they'd probably recommend (well, medication, but before or after that) positive thinking. More specifically, just stop using negative words in reference to yourself. Confusion is an opportunity to learn. Hate is an opportunity to understand, to learn to empathize. Anger is an opportunity to find peace, and to understand the self and how things make you react. The negative is something beyond your control. The positive is something that can lead to greater control. Embrace the positive.

It's literally almost entirely a matter of wording and framing the problem, but it's one that -- once you actually internalize it, and make it a consistent habit (something that's very much difficult, especially when you're experiencing major depression! That's what a therapist and/or understanding friends/family/etc [if the latter exists]. are for. It's incredibly rare that a person in your situation gets out of it alone.) -- can very much pay dividends for your mental health.

[kaijyuu]

Life is building sandcastles on the beach and watching the tide wash them away.

* kaijyuu happily goes back to building sandcastles.

[AlleeCat]

Does anyone else get dizzy if a game has motion blur? People always talk about how a small FOV makes them motion sick, but motion blur always seems to do it for me, and it doesn't really seem to be as much of a concern with other people. I know I've played a couple games where motion blur was on by default with no option to turn it off.

[Frumple]

I've known people that do, yeah. Personally don't have a problem with it (Though I usually turn it off because I just don't like how it looks + resource consumption reduction), but it's a thing.

[Sinlessmoon]

Does anyone else get dizzy if a game has motion blur? People always talk about how a small FOV makes them motion sick, but motion blur always seems to do it for me, and it doesn't really seem to be as much of a concern with other people. I know I've played a couple games where motion blur was on by default with no option to turn it off.

Yes, so much so. I get so dizzy whenever I play a game with motion blur.

ARMA for example, I can't play DayZ unless Postproccessing is completely turned off, and even then It still hurts to play.

[JoshuaFH]

Venting rarely helps all that much in the longer run, either*. It almost always takes, y'know, lifestyle changes and/or medication to break out of major depression, and from what I recall J can't/won't go the therapy/potentially medication route for whatever reason and is having trouble with the former due to the whole major depression thing. Talking helps, though, for most, so long as it's not the sort of talk that just makes things worse.

*Though it can help in the short term, sometimes (when it's not self-reinforcing, which can happen), which can keep things going until the long run comes around. But it's basically a symptom cure instead of a causal one, at best -- and if you don't fix the cause, all the symptom suppression in the world isn't really going to help all that much.

---

As for what to do JFH -- step one is stop thinking like you're thinking. You're pulling a pretty bog standard self-reinforcing depression loop whatsit. It's the hardest step, but the one you have to get to and get through to really manage anything else. Y'gotta' find a way to love yourself before you can love the world. Or it helps a lot, anyway. Ultimately you have to learn to do both, to some degree, to really get by.

If you were working with a decent therapist, they'd probably recommend (well, medication, but before or after that) positive thinking. More specifically, just stop using negative words in reference to yourself. Confusion is an opportunity to learn. Hate is an opportunity to understand, to learn to empathize. Anger is an opportunity to find peace, and to understand the self and how things make you react. The negative is something beyond your control. The positive is something that can lead to greater control. Embrace the positive.

It's literally almost entirely a matter of wording and framing the problem, but it's one that -- once you actually internalize it, and make it a consistent habit (something that's very much difficult, especially when you're experiencing major depression! That's what a therapist and/or understanding friends/family/etc [if the latter exists]. are for. It's incredibly rare that a person in your situation gets out of it alone.) -- can very much pay dividends for your mental health.

I actually have started to see a therapist, but he's on vacation for all of March, so I'll be resuming seeing him on April 1st.

One thing I didn't like was that through some kind of bubble sheet questionnaire, he determined I'm 'very extremely depressed' and immediately recommended medication, but I simply despise, just abhor the idea of medication too much to even consider it.

My birthday is coming up on the 21st. These days it's just another hallmark of personal failure, a memorial to imminent death.

It's just that the structure of my life is so meaningless and solitary. But still, society is so wholly prickly, insincere, distasteful, disdainful, just neurotic and wanton and shallow. What's even the point of ingratiating myself into it. I still feel I have this fake but pleasant idea of the world in my head, that I've held in myself for a very long time now, and going out into the world destroys this image, and at the end of the day I'm not only still lonely, but any comfort I had in my delusions is diminished, and the image is replaced with the pall of a disgusting world both inside my head and outside in reality.

Nowadays, it's just so hard to care about anything.

[Bauglir]

Is there a particular problem you have with medication? I know it takes a lot of work to get meds that actually work for you and in the meanwhile you're getting side effects with little to no benefit, but getting to the right mix can do a lot.

I really don't know how to help you, and I don't know if I've ever felt what you're feeling. My adventures in depression have never lasted very long. So, what I'm saying might be functionally equivalent to, "Just stop being depressed and you won't be depressed anymore!" I know that it's a shitty feeling to be constantly hearing advice like that. "All you've got to do is quit drowning and you'll be fine! Just swim!" is not exactly good advice on how to survive a shipwreck. The point is, I might completely miss the mark by talking about things that have helped me, because you aren't me. If my words are unhelpful, it's not because I think your problems can be easily solved by the advice of Internet Guy #4241133, but because the insights that helped me aren't meaningful for you, and unfortunately there's nothing else I can offer. Basically, if I'm useless to you, that's my fault, not yours.

All that said, a thing that's helped me when I get locked into feeling like everything is shit forever is to decontextualize things that I think about. Avoiding thinking about what's happening to me or what it means for my life or the world in general. When I start doing that, and I'm stuck in one of those spirals, I can't help but assign negative value to everything, and that only convinces me that continuing to feel like shit is the reasonable thing to do. I didn't have a shitty day - a bunch of shitty things happened, sure, but I don't want to draw conclusions about the entire day. In fact, I don't even want to think of those things as "shitty", just as "things". One of the biggest themes I'm seeing in your posts is that you're devoting way more effort to describing how awful everything is than to describing what everything is. That's not really unreasonable - after all, how you feel is a lot more important than the exact events, when what you feel is a crushing sense of life's worthlessness and the exact events are you had a bowl of cereal*. It just cements that feeling as the "right" way for you to feel, and that's ultimately a big part of the problem. It's not just that you feel like shit, it's that you also feel like you're perpetually surrounded by evidence that shit is how you ought to feel.

If you can find a way to wrench your thoughts away from looking for that evidence, it can be very helpful. Instead of thinking about how your birthday is a hallmark of anything at all, just note that you're going to have to add a 1 to your age on forms you fill out, and move on. It's just a day, like any other, after all. If your mind is going to insist on telling you that nothing matters, try and make your brain accept that nothing matters and stop trying to make you feel like that matters. Once you get there, you can start moving toward defining your own metrics of value and so on or whatever it is that people do to stay sane.

*This is a real thing that's really happened so hopefully I'm not coming across as just being flippant. I mean, I am also being flippant, but the fact is that some days you realize this you've been eating the same breakfast cereal every day for a month and what started as a one-off whim has become just one more pointless ritual that serves no purpose but to carry you on toward the next such ritual and that's how you get from "Whoever decided that chocolate cereal should leave chocolate milk is amazing" to "My life is a complete waste of energy and effort" in less than a minute. I... don't eat cereal much these days.

[MaximumZero]

Also, meds are not always bad. I used prozac to pull me out of a serious depression spiral, and haven't touched it since I got myself mostly back together. All it did was help me feel like I was a little bit more in control, and help keep the piddly things from weighing me down.

[Helgoland]

I had/am having a great experience with lithium - it killed all the mania, and after increasing the dosage it killed the depressive phases as well. And the side effects are close to non-existant!

It could happen that I'll need replacement kidneys when I'm older, but... meh, at least I can live normally until then.

[nomoetoe]

I had a dream that I was octodad and had the the power of Thermokinesis, then I woke up so sadness :'c

[Dutchling]

I had a dream where me and some friends kidnapped CIA agents in order to infiltrate their HQ. I was chosen to do the infiltration, and although everyone looked at me like I was out of place (everyone was wearing a suit, while I was wearing a shirt + jeans) I managed to gather some vital documents. Those documents were actually Pringles chips, and I had to eat a few because they didn't all fit in my pockets. I then found out there was a brothel in the CIA HQ.

Obviously that was when I woke up ;_;

[Frumple]

Which is a damn shame. The on-site CIA brothels are among the highest class whorehouses on earth.

... interesting y'all had dreams you probably didn't really want to wake up from, today, too. Mine had soul-rending pyrokinetics, harem antics, and the most amazing (and amazingly comfortable) beds. Among other things. It was one of those "Pretty great, wish this was reality, goddamnit I woke up" ones.

[Anvilfolk]

But still, society is so wholly prickly, insincere, distasteful, disdainful, just neurotic and wanton and shallow. What's even the point of ingratiating myself into it. I still feel I have this fake but pleasant idea of the world in my head, that I've held in myself for a very long time now, and going out into the world destroys this image, and at the end of the day I'm not only still lonely, but any comfort I had in my delusions is diminished, and the image is replaced with the pall of a disgusting world both inside my head and outside in reality.

I used to feel like this all the time... fast forward a few years, where I got myself out there, found and shared interests with other people, and looking back I see how easy it is to generalise "society". I'll still agree that the vast majority of people out there are fickle and uninteresting, but there are nice people. They're hard to find, though.

I'd try to find something that you think you'd be proud of doing, or at the very least that you'd enjoy. Then find a group that does it in your area, and stick with that for a while. That's how I met most of my close friends, and how I've managed to mostly deal with the fact that my standard state of mind is feeling like shit.

Best of luck!

[Descan]

Wait, these all happened last night? I thought we were just discussing particularly memorable dreams.

If this all just happened to everyone last night, then maybe someone spiked the global neurosphere?

* Descan stayed up all night, did not get mind-drugged by the aliens apparently.

[GiglameshDespair]

I've got an awesome idea for a game, but I don't think I have enough time to run a third forum game, and I still don't know enough to code my own yet, nevermind making any graphics.