Keep introspecting. If you find yourself preferring to e.g. play a video game, rather than to lie in bed, there’s a reason you prefer it. Micro-goals count too.
Introspection? I try to avoid that, and I think I have a pretty good reason. I don’t like to do introspection because I don’t like what I find.
When I query my brain for what I ultimately want out of life, the answer that comes back is “I want to die.” And it’s not that I’m particularly unhappy at the moment; “death” seems to feel like a kind of freedom, freedom from all the annoying things that other people insist that I do (and I can’t justify saying “no” to) and all the annoying things that I have to do to maintain this body, such as eat and go to the bathroom, freedom from, as Shakespeare put it, “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to”. The emotion I feel most strongly when I contemplate the state of being dead is not fear, not sadness, but relief—and that scares me. I don’t think I ought to want to die. And if I did die, that would make many people who know me very sad, and I definitely don’t want that. So I haven’t killed myself yet; I’m waiting for my parents to die first. And until then, I just waste time doing nothing in particular.
I want to point out the contraction between you saying introspection says “die” and the fact that you, having reflected on this, deciding not to do “introspection” because doing so leads to the thought that dying would be good and you don’t want to die. If you could change yourself such that doing “introspection” didn’t lead to the thought of death would you? The fact you haven’t killed yourself suggests that you’re not actually introspecting on your true values, just some unhappy subset thereof (or perhaps, introspecting with your true values on an incomplete subset of the data you have about the quality of your life/the universe).
Also, if I promise to spend 5 minutes crying upon notice of your death, will you not kill yourself in order to spare me the unpleasantness?
I want to point out the contraction between you saying introspection says “die” and the fact that you, having reflected on this, deciding not to do “introspection” because doing so leads to the thought that dying would be good and you don’t want to die. If you could change yourself such that doing “introspection” didn’t lead to the thought of death would you?
Probably.
The fact you haven’t killed yourself suggests that you’re not actually introspecting on your true values, just some unhappy subset thereof (or perhaps, introspecting with your true values on an incomplete subset of the data you have about the quality of your life/the universe).
I currently have compelling reasons to refrain from killing myself, regardless of my general lack of personal interest in continued existence. Alas, like so many other things, the peace of the grave is denied to me.
Also, if I promise to spend 5 minutes crying upon notice of your death, will you not kill yourself in order to spare me the unpleasantness?
I don’t expect you to get such notice. You’re just some guy on the internet; if I simply stop posting, you’ll probably never know why. But no, that wouldn’t be enough to dissuade me from implementing Really Extreme Altruism if I ever decided to actually go through with it.
May I recommend an experiment then? Try ignoring force of habit for a few days and see how you feel about all those activities. It may help you to come up with internal reasons to want to do things rather than relying on the external pressures of habit and expectations. If, after a few days, it turns out that lying in bed doing nothing is actually preferable to escapism through computer games and surfing the Internet, I submit that it means your medication isn’t doing everything that it should and that getting that fixed should be your first priority. In all other cases I would expect that it will turn out that you do have reasons to get out of bed that aren’t dependent on habit.
For me, no matter how depressed I am I always get out of bed at the very least, even if it’s just so I can stare at the wall while I try to focus and motivate myself to do something enjoyable or productive. If I inspect my reasons for doing so, “habit” is definitely a large part of it. But a larger part is “boredom”, as in, I can only contemplate my utter worthlessness for so long before my thoughts start feeling repetitive and boring, and I feel the need to distract myself by getting up and doing something that I find at least marginally engaging.
I’ve tried the whole “lying in bed doing nothing” thing. When I wake up, I’m usually groggy and can end up spending an hour or two in bed half-asleep. I’m usually not thinking about much of anything at all during this time, or at least I’m not thinking in words, so I’m not “contemplating my utter worthlessness”. When trying to go to sleep, though, I tend to get frustrated if I don’t fall asleep quickly, so I’ll often turn on a portable game system (leaving the lights in the room off) and play until I basically can’t stay awake any more. I strongly suspect that this is a bad idea, though, as it tends to shift my sleep schedule later and later. I also have a tendency to take naps during the “day” and then get back up. (I do this once or twice a week, I guess.)
Sometimes, I really do play video games because the playing of the game itself is fun. (Persona 3 Portable is the most recent game to have taken over my life.) Some games have both boring parts and more interesting parts, and I play through the boring parts so I can get to the more interesting parts. Once in a while I’m playing one so I can say I’ve finished it before I go on to another one; I’m a bit of a completionist and often get annoyed if I don’t get Hundred Percent Completion. Or sometimes it’s because I’m simply curious about what happens next even though the game itself isn’t really all that good. (I’ll occasionally see a movie I don’t expect to be very good simply to satisfy my curiosity about it.) And I’ve found that carrying around a portable video game system (or a novel) is a great way to avert boredom when doing things like waiting in line. So “habit” and “convenience” aren’t the only reasons I play lots of video games.
There is one specific thing that I’ve noticed about games, though: even a bad game gets a lot more interesting when I have some work to avoid. It’s often exciting for me to have something that I should be doing but don’t want to, and then not do it. (I noticed this phenomenon when I was in college; it hasn’t seemed to apply very much since then.)
Right, so it sounds like you do value engagement over doing nothing. That’s certainly a good start.
Basically, I think it should be possible for you to find some better (as in: likely to help you change your terminal value) goals that you actually want to do, without necessarily having to introspect about your desire to kill yourself. Of course, I could well be generalising from one example.
There is one specific thing that I’ve noticed about games, though: even a bad game >gets a lot more interesting when I have some work to avoid. It’s often exciting for >me to have something that I should be doing but don’t want to, and then not do it. (I >noticed this phenomenon when I was in college; it hasn’t seemed to apply very >much since then.)
Oh boy do I know that feeling. The corollary being that after I finally got the work done or sat the exam or whatever I suddenly realised that I’d wasted 20+ hours on some piece of dreck :)
Sounds more like a biochemical issue to me; that sort of laziness is likely to mean something’s wrong that’s not just psychological. Are you taking a multivitamin regularly?
I predict with p=0.95 that you have at least one micronutrient deficiency which is greatly contributing to your depression, and that starting to take a multivitamin regularly would be enormously to your benefit. I predict with p=0.6 that you are specifically deficient in thiamine, and that a single dose of sulbutiamine (a molecule that crosses the blood-brain barrier and then breaks into two thiamine molecules) would cause a large and sudden reduction in your depression. I am basing this on my own experience with thiamine deficiency (caused by T1 diabetes), which produced in me a specific type of apathy which I recognize in your comments.
Unless you either lied about taking a multivitamin to your current doctor, or ignored their advice to take one, fire him or her and find a new one. Also, thoroughly research every drug you’re currently taking. At a minimum, search for the name of each one on PubMed, skim the first few pages of titles and read some of the abstracts. Don’t adjust anything without consulting a qualified doctor, but do make sure to have that consultation.
Following up on this may be the most important thing you ever do.
EDIT: One other thing—if you’re on antidepressants, you should be getting blood work, of the “large checklist of tests” variety, done on a regular basis. Make sure your TSH has been tested at least once in the past two years (result will be interesting with p=0.1, but very interesting if it is).
I have been getting blood work; everything always comes out just fine. (Yes, thyroid hormone is one of the things that’s been checked.) And none of the many doctors I’ve been dragged to have told me to take vitamins, although my psychiatrist has occasionally asked about my diet. There are multivitamins in my house, but I stopped taking them a long time ago because they’re these really annoying, very large chewable tablets the size of quarters.
In terms of vitamin deficiency, I’m actually most suspicious of vitamin B12. Both my maternal grandmother and my mother have low levels and get B12 injections regularly. (My mom is currently 60.) I once asked my psychiatrist to have my B12 checked, but I don’t think it actually has been.
Also, the basic effect of my antidepressants has been “Well, I am more cheerful now, but my life still sucks every bit as much as it did when I wasn’t taking them.” I’ll quote a doctor’s anecdote:
“I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage,” he says. “I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ”
Perhaps the difference between me on antidepressants and me off antidepressants is that, while on antidepressants, I was willing to go do my homework even though I’d rather touch a hot stove than do another problem set, while when off them, no amount of social pressure from my parents and other authority figures could make me open up my textbook and get to work, because I just couldn’t make myself do it no matter what happened.
Right now, I’m not necessarily depressed because I have screwed up brain chemicals. I’m depressed because I’m a 28-year-old lazy bum who doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to get a job he can stand and keep it for any length of time, is supported by (and lives with) his parents, doesn’t have any close friends, has never been in a romantic relationship, lives in fear of having his parents decide to stop supporting him, is endlessly frustrated by his mother’s (completely justified) demands that he help her with various tasks because she has MS and can barely walk, and doesn’t have any particular goals in life other than “escape it”.
I think I can’t cope with being my mother’s caretaker any more; I need to get an income and get the hell away from my parents, but I don’t think I can do that, so I just stay where I am and put up with the same shit that’s been making me miserable for the past eight or so years. (Before then, I was often miserable, but for different reasons.)
You’re story sounds somewhat similar to mine (but I’m considerably older than you). My mother had Multiple Sklerosis, too; I was her main caretaker until her death. It’s strange that it didn’t dawn on me how much my upbringing and my mother’s illness has shaped my father’s and my life—and furthermore I didn’t really understand until recently how unusually withdrawn my life has been so far. Now, social isolation is a well-known danger when you’re severely ill but I was (at least on a physical level) healthy and still I wasn’t able to break out of the habits that I (to a certain degree) adopted because of my former circumstances and a general inclination towards shyness.
I have a very unoriginal proposition for you: Act as soon as possible and change your situation! Believe me, things don’t get easier once you’re ten years older than you are now. What about a “trial move”? The way you describe your parents I think you could always return if for one reason or another you can’t cope with being “on your own”.
I’m “in the process” (as vaguely as that may sound) to finally get my act together and make some serious, so-long-overdue-you-won’t-believe-it life changes. I know some of the depressive symptoms you’re describing: A general world-weariness, an enmity to my own body, avoidance of “boring” errands up to a point where it got seriously damaging, seeing no sense in dragging this carcass of mine through a pointless world etc pp. But somehow things begin to click for me a bit more. If it’s “meant to be” that I’m going down, then at least I’m putting up a fight (i.e. trying to beat some amount of rationality into my skull which is thick with irrational believes and blocks)!
Then your mom is lucky in more than one regard! Because of medical progress it is very different to be diagnosed with MS today than it was in 1973, when my mother had her first MS episode at the age of 27.
You wrote earlier that a lot of what you don’t like about your life is simply due to habits. Personally, I find the key to change is to persistently chip away at my mountain of bad habits (my main nemesis is procrastination) and to think more from day to day, to try to implement some (any!) positive difference in my life at a daily basis, and be it only to show a friendly face when you’re not really feeling like it, or to do that one more household chore you try to avoid, or to confront another uncomfortable truth about yourself and verbalize it to (well-chosen!) friends and acquaintances.
I know, these strategies are so basic they almost don’t qualify for Self-Help 101 but once you “really want to change” I found they work quite well.
You wrote earlier that a lot of what you don’t like about your life is simply due to habits.
Actually, what I said was that a lot of the activities I do (video games, blog commenting) are generally done because they’re what I’ve gotten used to spending time doing, not that the habits themselves are necessarily causing the problem.
I apologize in advance for the long-shot other-optimizing but, well, here goes.
Something that has repeatedly worked for me to move from a lethargic, somewhat depressed state to an active and happy (if restless) state is to deliberately refrain from sexual release while not refraining from exposure to sexual stimuli. I came upon this independently but I’ve since found the same basic idea in Taoist literature and in femdom literature. It could also easily be pitched as an evo-psych idea.
I’m not aware of any research on this exact question so what literature there is is mostly religious or pseudo-scientific. What I do think is fairly well-established is that lack of sexual release makes men restless. Why ‘restless’ in my case translates to “active and happy” rather than, say, “aggressive and abusive” I don’t exactly know. Some factors that may be relevant (but I had not thought of before now): a) My baseline personality is quite docile and submissive, b) Like many people here, I enjoy toying with self-hacking, c) I have lots of projects to pour extra energy into, projects that are satisfying intellectually and status-wise.
Presumably sublimation. At least, Freud’s sublimation reminds me a heck of a lot of the Tantric Buddhism and Taoist ideas of collecting ch’i from sexual activities (or lack thereof) and using it for other purposes.
Do you have a skill that you are willing to offer potential roommates? I’m currently exchanging my culinary expertise for room and board. It’s a good deal. I can get away with having a really minuscule income to cover discretionary expenses and mostly I do whatever I want all day until it’s time to mix up a batch of muffin batter.
In terms of vitamin deficiency, I’m actually most suspicious of vitamin B12. Both my maternal grandmother and my mother have low levels and get B12 injections regularly. (My mom is currently 60.) I once asked my psychiatrist to have my B12 checked, but I don’t think it actually has been.
I suggest trying emergen-c or your local generic version. It’s mostly marketed for the vitamin C megadose, but 416% of the recommended minimum of B12 isn’t insignificant. The generic I use has an odd taste when prepared according to the directions, but is good when mixed with a sweet drink like kool-aide.
Have you ever tried cognitive therapy? If antidepressants made you more cheerful but haven’t otherwise changed your outlook then maybe some systematic effort at altering your thought patterns would? Maybe combined with antidepressants if they make you more likely to complete homework assignments (I think cognitive therapy involves those).
But you seem to be quite smart. Sigh. I guess you know that you will be happier with a decent-paying and/or intellectually engaging job (even one you “can’t stand”), because you’ll then have a realistic chance for some of the things you want, so if taking antidepressants lets you tolerate finding and performing a job, then it makes sense to keep on using them. Without knowing you well enough, I’ll still guess that it’s unlikely that you “don’t think you can” based on your actual ability and opportunity, but more because of the helplessness of depression (naturally I could be completely wrong).
Well… I’ve had some pretty bad experiences with employment. The last time I was employed, I sat in a cubicle and surfed the Internet all day while feeling guilty about not getting anything done. It was really awful. I once signed up with a temp agency. My first assignment lasted a week. After it was done, the customer complained about me (please don’t ask why) and I was fired from the temp agency. Another time, I worked as a cashier at a supermarket, and I lasted all of three days before being fired for insubordination.
Money’s never been a very big motivator for me. I’ve got over twenty thousand dollars sitting in the bank, so if I want to spend $50 on a video game, or $300 on a video game system, I can. And I have enough unplayed video games sitting on my shelf to last me a long, long time. What would I do with more money? Well, I did decide within the last 24 hours that I definitely can’t cope with being my mom’s caretaker any more, so I’d want to move out of my parents’ house, and I’d want to get a cat, and I once calculated that it would cost me a few thousand dollars a year to play Magic: the Gathering competitively, but that’s about it.
The usual “carrot-and-stick” approach to motivation doesn’t work too well on me; I just give up on getting the carrots and resign myself to enduring the sticks. Is that what they call “learned helplessness”? I’ve had people trying to drum the lesson “you’re going to have to do what you’re told, regardless of what you want to do, and fighting will only make things worse” into me my whole life, and it seems like they were mostly right: as a child, you’re pretty powerless to get what you want, if what you want is “not to go to school”.
What sense of valuable are you using here? I’ve seen very little evidence in my interactions with the education system that being good at teaching is highly valued either in terms of direct financial rewards or career prospects.
Effective tutoring would be very valuable to rich parents. Perhaps passively building your reputation wouldn’t work; self-promotion would be necessary.
Public school teachers are well compensated overall over an entire career (including pension), although I doubt the job is very fun, and you’re right that the rewards are in no way contingent on actually teaching well.
Effective tutoring would be very valuable to rich parents.
Are rich parents able to distinguish effective tutors? In my experience they largely hire based on elite education. Plus, most of their “tutoring” time is really guarding the child to make sure the child actually does homework. But there are also non-rich parents. I don’t think that DAS should have any trouble getting hired and keeping tutoring positions for $20 or maybe $50 hourly, if he can find parents who want a tutor. This is a very different skill and I think the main determinant of people actually tutoring. (ETA: I seem to have missed JG’s second sentence. Sorry.)
I poked around a little earlier today, and found a few sites that do paid online tutoring. This one was the most open about hiring new tutors of the ones I looked at. Their FAQ says that their most active Chemistry tutors earn $800-$1600/month. Even given that that’s an upper bound, it may be worth looking into. (I lived pretty comfortably on $1200/month last year, with about Crono’s expectation of lifestyle, and without having someone to share bills with.)
If you are really capable of playing Magic competitively if only you had the cards, etc., I would be glad to start you up, and you can pay me back whenever. But I would need to know that e.g. you are up-to-date on what decks/strategies work, tournament formalities (so you don’t lose because of using the wrong “done with turn” indicator or tapping rotation angle), etc.
(I made this offer over a year ago, but was strongly criticized for having the proviso that Crono put his karma at stake to indicate seriousness and as a motivator.)
I’m not yet capable of playing professionally. I might be able to reach that level, but I’m not there yet. And by “playing professionally” I don’t mean “play well enough to make a living at it.” There are very few people in the world who have ever made enough money from Magic tournaments to live on, although the number of people who at least manage to make back their expenses is much larger. (The “several thousand dollars a year” figure is an upper bound and doesn’t take into account potential winnings.)
I actually do have a plan to get better, though; if I can put up a good showing in a few tournaments, Zvi Moshowitz will let me join his Magic playing social circle. (I think.) The current plan is to wait for the next Pro Tour Qualifier season to start—it’s Sealed Deck with the soon-to-be-released Scars of Mirrodin set—and just attend as many as I can get to while also getting in plenty of practice by playing on Magic Online.
I once knew a gamer, indeed an MtG player, who made a decent (though certainly not extravagant) living out of playing online poker. Smart guy. I never observed his poker skills first hand but he certainly kicked the shit out of me in MtG.
I don’t know how difficult it is to use poker as an income source but you probably have the basic skill set (math/rationality/gaming) required for good poker playing.
...and I once calculated that it would cost me a few thousand dollars a year to play Magic: the Gathering competitively...
Unless Crono’s disregarding his potential winnings, your question about whether he thinks he’d be able to earn money that way seems to have been answered.
Yes, but from earlier discussions he had suggested he’d be able to play professionally, so that’s what I interpreted him to mean here, and the cost is gross rather than net, so he’d only need the first year’s expenses to be self-sustaining.
So I was indeed sneaking in assumptions from earlier exchanges.
If that is gross, sure. I did mention that he might be disregarding potential winnings. It seems odd to me that he’d word it that way in that case, though.
Learned helplessness applies more to specific stimuli and specific rewards; what you’re describing sounds more like general lack of energy. My advice is to tweak your biochemistry until you feel more energetic, and try the cubicle environment again.
I’m with wnoise, but I have a question to clarify my position.
How many diagnoses do you expect a competent physician to get wrong? I would say that more than 1 in 20 is at least reasonable. However, without meeting CronoDAS, or performing tests of any kind, based purely on the scant evidence in his posts, you have diagnosed him with a micronutrient deficiency, and have a confidence of 95% in your diagnosis. Seriously? What’s your prior? Even for thiamine, a 60% confidence that this near-stranger is deficient in it seems dramatically too high.
How many diagnoses do you expect a competent physician to get wrong?
I expect physicians to be bewildered rather a lot. I spent years severely anemic. My father is an MD, my uncle is an MD, I saw a variety of doctors during this time, I was eating cups and cups and cups of ice every single day and was unremittingly tired and ghostly pale, partway through I became a vegetarian—and it took the Red Cross’s little machine that goes beep to figure out that maybe I wasn’t getting enough iron. I have a vast host of symptoms less serious than that which no doctor, med student, or random interlocutor has been able to offer plausible guesses about.
Agreed. Even if they don’t make things up, the responsible thing to do is to iterate through harmless or nearly-harmless treatments for conditions that the physician thinks are unlikely, but more likely than any other ideas he or she has.
This is exactly the opposite problem; not being at all bewildered or in doubt, despite a paucity of evidence. Doctors do that too.
Both making things up and jumping to conclusions happen because doctors are humans and are wired to see patterns, whether or not they exist. While we’re busy refining the art of human rationality, we ought to try to curb that behavior.
These numbers are uncalibrated estimates (I spent 60s looking for population statistics to use as priors, and didn’t find any), but I don’t think they’re at all unreasonable. Keep in mind that deficiencies come in degrees, and only the most severe ones ever get diagnosed. Anyways, here’s a breakdown (again, just estimates) of that 0.95:
I certainly wouldn’t say it’s the only problem, but it’s very likely a contributing factor.
Anyways, we can find this out directly. CronoDAS, could you take a look at the wikipedia page on thiamine, go through the lists of thiamine-containing and thiaminase-containing foods, and estimate your intake? Or better yet, order sulbutiamine and report its effects here?
I would go as high as 0.3 if you extend to third world countries, but suspect it’s lower among people like ChronoDAS who can afford a variety of food. Either way, it’s good enough.
P(micronutrient deficiency|no multivitamin) = 0.8
The law of conditional probability indicates that you think that a minimum of 75% of the population takes a multivitamin. I think this is way too high, especially for a population that has a 20% micronutrient deficiency rate.
So the rate of depression among those with micronutrient deficiencies (and who don’t take their vitamins) is about 119% that of the general population? I can buy that, but if it’s that low, then why are you so sure that a micronutrient deficiency is “greatly contributing” to his depression?
I agree that there’s no harm in having CronoDAS gather data or experiment a little, since sulbutiamine seems to have very few negative side effects with recommended doses.
My main reason for brining it up is that I see some very high probabilities tossed about on Less Wrong, and it bothers me when I feel like they’re assigning numbers that they can’t justify. I’m still skeptical about your 95% confidence, but it’s nice to see a break down.
Would you be willing to take a bet at a 2/3rds payoff that CronoDAS has no thiamine deficiency? How about a 1/19th payoff that taking a daily multivitamin wouldn’t significantly alter how he feels?
[EDIT: Revised payoffs in bet to reflect professed certainty]
Thiamine is found in a wide variety of foods at low concentrations. Yeast and pork are the most highly concentrated sources of thiamine. In general, cereal grains are the most important dietary sources of thiamine, by virtue of their ubiquity. Of these, whole grains contain more thiamine than refined grains, as thiamine is found mostly in the outer layers of the grain and in the germ (which are removed during the refining process). For example, 100 g of whole-wheat flour contains 0.55 mg of thiamine, while 100 g of white flour contains only 0.06 mg of thiamine. In the US, processed flour must be enriched with thiamine mononitrate (along with niacin, ferrous iron, riboflavin, and folic acid) to replace that lost in processing.
Some other foods rich in thiamine are oatmeal, flax, and sunflower seeds, brown rice, whole grain rye, asparagus, kale, cauliflower, potatoes, oranges, liver (beef, pork and chicken), and eggs.
Hmmm… as it turns out, I’ve been eating quite a lot of thiamine-fortified pasta lately, and it’s also in cold cereal, orange juice, and bread. I don’t think I have an unusually low amount of thiamine in my diet when compared to the average American.
Upvoted for suggesting an easily-tested claim of material relevance. That alone makes the advice worth trying as an aid to the calibration and education of others.
What do you do when the answer to (a) is “Nothing in particular”?
Keep introspecting. If you find yourself preferring to e.g. play a video game, rather than to lie in bed, there’s a reason you prefer it. Micro-goals count too.
Introspection? I try to avoid that, and I think I have a pretty good reason. I don’t like to do introspection because I don’t like what I find.
When I query my brain for what I ultimately want out of life, the answer that comes back is “I want to die.” And it’s not that I’m particularly unhappy at the moment; “death” seems to feel like a kind of freedom, freedom from all the annoying things that other people insist that I do (and I can’t justify saying “no” to) and all the annoying things that I have to do to maintain this body, such as eat and go to the bathroom, freedom from, as Shakespeare put it, “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to”. The emotion I feel most strongly when I contemplate the state of being dead is not fear, not sadness, but relief—and that scares me. I don’t think I ought to want to die. And if I did die, that would make many people who know me very sad, and I definitely don’t want that. So I haven’t killed myself yet; I’m waiting for my parents to die first. And until then, I just waste time doing nothing in particular.
Sorry to be so morbid. :(
Umm...
I want to point out the contraction between you saying introspection says “die” and the fact that you, having reflected on this, deciding not to do “introspection” because doing so leads to the thought that dying would be good and you don’t want to die. If you could change yourself such that doing “introspection” didn’t lead to the thought of death would you? The fact you haven’t killed yourself suggests that you’re not actually introspecting on your true values, just some unhappy subset thereof (or perhaps, introspecting with your true values on an incomplete subset of the data you have about the quality of your life/the universe).
Also, if I promise to spend 5 minutes crying upon notice of your death, will you not kill yourself in order to spare me the unpleasantness?
Probably.
I currently have compelling reasons to refrain from killing myself, regardless of my general lack of personal interest in continued existence. Alas, like so many other things, the peace of the grave is denied to me.
I don’t expect you to get such notice. You’re just some guy on the internet; if I simply stop posting, you’ll probably never know why. But no, that wouldn’t be enough to dissuade me from implementing Really Extreme Altruism if I ever decided to actually go through with it.
Often the main reason that I do anything seems to boil down to “sheer force of habit.”
May I recommend an experiment then? Try ignoring force of habit for a few days and see how you feel about all those activities. It may help you to come up with internal reasons to want to do things rather than relying on the external pressures of habit and expectations. If, after a few days, it turns out that lying in bed doing nothing is actually preferable to escapism through computer games and surfing the Internet, I submit that it means your medication isn’t doing everything that it should and that getting that fixed should be your first priority. In all other cases I would expect that it will turn out that you do have reasons to get out of bed that aren’t dependent on habit.
For me, no matter how depressed I am I always get out of bed at the very least, even if it’s just so I can stare at the wall while I try to focus and motivate myself to do something enjoyable or productive. If I inspect my reasons for doing so, “habit” is definitely a large part of it. But a larger part is “boredom”, as in, I can only contemplate my utter worthlessness for so long before my thoughts start feeling repetitive and boring, and I feel the need to distract myself by getting up and doing something that I find at least marginally engaging.
I’ve tried the whole “lying in bed doing nothing” thing. When I wake up, I’m usually groggy and can end up spending an hour or two in bed half-asleep. I’m usually not thinking about much of anything at all during this time, or at least I’m not thinking in words, so I’m not “contemplating my utter worthlessness”. When trying to go to sleep, though, I tend to get frustrated if I don’t fall asleep quickly, so I’ll often turn on a portable game system (leaving the lights in the room off) and play until I basically can’t stay awake any more. I strongly suspect that this is a bad idea, though, as it tends to shift my sleep schedule later and later. I also have a tendency to take naps during the “day” and then get back up. (I do this once or twice a week, I guess.)
Sometimes, I really do play video games because the playing of the game itself is fun. (Persona 3 Portable is the most recent game to have taken over my life.) Some games have both boring parts and more interesting parts, and I play through the boring parts so I can get to the more interesting parts. Once in a while I’m playing one so I can say I’ve finished it before I go on to another one; I’m a bit of a completionist and often get annoyed if I don’t get Hundred Percent Completion. Or sometimes it’s because I’m simply curious about what happens next even though the game itself isn’t really all that good. (I’ll occasionally see a movie I don’t expect to be very good simply to satisfy my curiosity about it.) And I’ve found that carrying around a portable video game system (or a novel) is a great way to avert boredom when doing things like waiting in line. So “habit” and “convenience” aren’t the only reasons I play lots of video games.
There is one specific thing that I’ve noticed about games, though: even a bad game gets a lot more interesting when I have some work to avoid. It’s often exciting for me to have something that I should be doing but don’t want to, and then not do it. (I noticed this phenomenon when I was in college; it hasn’t seemed to apply very much since then.)
Right, so it sounds like you do value engagement over doing nothing. That’s certainly a good start.
Basically, I think it should be possible for you to find some better (as in: likely to help you change your terminal value) goals that you actually want to do, without necessarily having to introspect about your desire to kill yourself. Of course, I could well be generalising from one example.
Oh boy do I know that feeling. The corollary being that after I finally got the work done or sat the exam or whatever I suddenly realised that I’d wasted 20+ hours on some piece of dreck :)
Sounds more like a biochemical issue to me; that sort of laziness is likely to mean something’s wrong that’s not just psychological. Are you taking a multivitamin regularly?
No, but I do take antidepressants.
I predict with p=0.95 that you have at least one micronutrient deficiency which is greatly contributing to your depression, and that starting to take a multivitamin regularly would be enormously to your benefit. I predict with p=0.6 that you are specifically deficient in thiamine, and that a single dose of sulbutiamine (a molecule that crosses the blood-brain barrier and then breaks into two thiamine molecules) would cause a large and sudden reduction in your depression. I am basing this on my own experience with thiamine deficiency (caused by T1 diabetes), which produced in me a specific type of apathy which I recognize in your comments.
Unless you either lied about taking a multivitamin to your current doctor, or ignored their advice to take one, fire him or her and find a new one. Also, thoroughly research every drug you’re currently taking. At a minimum, search for the name of each one on PubMed, skim the first few pages of titles and read some of the abstracts. Don’t adjust anything without consulting a qualified doctor, but do make sure to have that consultation.
Following up on this may be the most important thing you ever do.
EDIT: One other thing—if you’re on antidepressants, you should be getting blood work, of the “large checklist of tests” variety, done on a regular basis. Make sure your TSH has been tested at least once in the past two years (result will be interesting with p=0.1, but very interesting if it is).
I have been getting blood work; everything always comes out just fine. (Yes, thyroid hormone is one of the things that’s been checked.) And none of the many doctors I’ve been dragged to have told me to take vitamins, although my psychiatrist has occasionally asked about my diet. There are multivitamins in my house, but I stopped taking them a long time ago because they’re these really annoying, very large chewable tablets the size of quarters.
In terms of vitamin deficiency, I’m actually most suspicious of vitamin B12. Both my maternal grandmother and my mother have low levels and get B12 injections regularly. (My mom is currently 60.) I once asked my psychiatrist to have my B12 checked, but I don’t think it actually has been.
Also, the basic effect of my antidepressants has been “Well, I am more cheerful now, but my life still sucks every bit as much as it did when I wasn’t taking them.” I’ll quote a doctor’s anecdote:
Perhaps the difference between me on antidepressants and me off antidepressants is that, while on antidepressants, I was willing to go do my homework even though I’d rather touch a hot stove than do another problem set, while when off them, no amount of social pressure from my parents and other authority figures could make me open up my textbook and get to work, because I just couldn’t make myself do it no matter what happened.
Right now, I’m not necessarily depressed because I have screwed up brain chemicals. I’m depressed because I’m a 28-year-old lazy bum who doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to get a job he can stand and keep it for any length of time, is supported by (and lives with) his parents, doesn’t have any close friends, has never been in a romantic relationship, lives in fear of having his parents decide to stop supporting him, is endlessly frustrated by his mother’s (completely justified) demands that he help her with various tasks because she has MS and can barely walk, and doesn’t have any particular goals in life other than “escape it”.
I think I can’t cope with being my mother’s caretaker any more; I need to get an income and get the hell away from my parents, but I don’t think I can do that, so I just stay where I am and put up with the same shit that’s been making me miserable for the past eight or so years. (Before then, I was often miserable, but for different reasons.)
Hello CronoDAS,
You’re story sounds somewhat similar to mine (but I’m considerably older than you). My mother had Multiple Sklerosis, too; I was her main caretaker until her death. It’s strange that it didn’t dawn on me how much my upbringing and my mother’s illness has shaped my father’s and my life—and furthermore I didn’t really understand until recently how unusually withdrawn my life has been so far. Now, social isolation is a well-known danger when you’re severely ill but I was (at least on a physical level) healthy and still I wasn’t able to break out of the habits that I (to a certain degree) adopted because of my former circumstances and a general inclination towards shyness.
I have a very unoriginal proposition for you: Act as soon as possible and change your situation! Believe me, things don’t get easier once you’re ten years older than you are now. What about a “trial move”? The way you describe your parents I think you could always return if for one reason or another you can’t cope with being “on your own”.
I’m “in the process” (as vaguely as that may sound) to finally get my act together and make some serious, so-long-overdue-you-won’t-believe-it life changes. I know some of the depressive symptoms you’re describing: A general world-weariness, an enmity to my own body, avoidance of “boring” errands up to a point where it got seriously damaging, seeing no sense in dragging this carcass of mine through a pointless world etc pp. But somehow things begin to click for me a bit more. If it’s “meant to be” that I’m going down, then at least I’m putting up a fight (i.e. trying to beat some amount of rationality into my skull which is thick with irrational believes and blocks)!
Take care!
The most immediate change I probably need to make is “get an income”. It’s a prerequisite for most other changes I’d want to make.
(My mom’s MS is unusual, because she started showing symptoms late in life, only a few years ago.)
Then your mom is lucky in more than one regard! Because of medical progress it is very different to be diagnosed with MS today than it was in 1973, when my mother had her first MS episode at the age of 27.
You wrote earlier that a lot of what you don’t like about your life is simply due to habits. Personally, I find the key to change is to persistently chip away at my mountain of bad habits (my main nemesis is procrastination) and to think more from day to day, to try to implement some (any!) positive difference in my life at a daily basis, and be it only to show a friendly face when you’re not really feeling like it, or to do that one more household chore you try to avoid, or to confront another uncomfortable truth about yourself and verbalize it to (well-chosen!) friends and acquaintances.
I know, these strategies are so basic they almost don’t qualify for Self-Help 101 but once you “really want to change” I found they work quite well.
Actually, what I said was that a lot of the activities I do (video games, blog commenting) are generally done because they’re what I’ve gotten used to spending time doing, not that the habits themselves are necessarily causing the problem.
I apologize in advance for the long-shot other-optimizing but, well, here goes.
Something that has repeatedly worked for me to move from a lethargic, somewhat depressed state to an active and happy (if restless) state is to deliberately refrain from sexual release while not refraining from exposure to sexual stimuli. I came upon this independently but I’ve since found the same basic idea in Taoist literature and in femdom literature. It could also easily be pitched as an evo-psych idea.
Uh, what’s the mechanism there?
I’m not aware of any research on this exact question so what literature there is is mostly religious or pseudo-scientific. What I do think is fairly well-established is that lack of sexual release makes men restless. Why ‘restless’ in my case translates to “active and happy” rather than, say, “aggressive and abusive” I don’t exactly know. Some factors that may be relevant (but I had not thought of before now): a) My baseline personality is quite docile and submissive, b) Like many people here, I enjoy toying with self-hacking, c) I have lots of projects to pour extra energy into, projects that are satisfying intellectually and status-wise.
Presumably sublimation. At least, Freud’s sublimation reminds me a heck of a lot of the Tantric Buddhism and Taoist ideas of collecting ch’i from sexual activities (or lack thereof) and using it for other purposes.
Do you have a skill that you are willing to offer potential roommates? I’m currently exchanging my culinary expertise for room and board. It’s a good deal. I can get away with having a really minuscule income to cover discretionary expenses and mostly I do whatever I want all day until it’s time to mix up a batch of muffin batter.
I suggest trying emergen-c or your local generic version. It’s mostly marketed for the vitamin C megadose, but 416% of the recommended minimum of B12 isn’t insignificant. The generic I use has an odd taste when prepared according to the directions, but is good when mixed with a sweet drink like kool-aide.
B-12 deficiency is usually caused by problems with absorption, not by a lack of B12 in the diet.
Yes, but sometimes (often?) it can be cured by increasing dietary sources. Acute doses might not be ideal, though.
Have you ever tried cognitive therapy? If antidepressants made you more cheerful but haven’t otherwise changed your outlook then maybe some systematic effort at altering your thought patterns would? Maybe combined with antidepressants if they make you more likely to complete homework assignments (I think cognitive therapy involves those).
But you seem to be quite smart. Sigh. I guess you know that you will be happier with a decent-paying and/or intellectually engaging job (even one you “can’t stand”), because you’ll then have a realistic chance for some of the things you want, so if taking antidepressants lets you tolerate finding and performing a job, then it makes sense to keep on using them. Without knowing you well enough, I’ll still guess that it’s unlikely that you “don’t think you can” based on your actual ability and opportunity, but more because of the helplessness of depression (naturally I could be completely wrong).
Well… I’ve had some pretty bad experiences with employment. The last time I was employed, I sat in a cubicle and surfed the Internet all day while feeling guilty about not getting anything done. It was really awful. I once signed up with a temp agency. My first assignment lasted a week. After it was done, the customer complained about me (please don’t ask why) and I was fired from the temp agency. Another time, I worked as a cashier at a supermarket, and I lasted all of three days before being fired for insubordination.
Money’s never been a very big motivator for me. I’ve got over twenty thousand dollars sitting in the bank, so if I want to spend $50 on a video game, or $300 on a video game system, I can. And I have enough unplayed video games sitting on my shelf to last me a long, long time. What would I do with more money? Well, I did decide within the last 24 hours that I definitely can’t cope with being my mom’s caretaker any more, so I’d want to move out of my parents’ house, and I’d want to get a cat, and I once calculated that it would cost me a few thousand dollars a year to play Magic: the Gathering competitively, but that’s about it.
The usual “carrot-and-stick” approach to motivation doesn’t work too well on me; I just give up on getting the carrots and resign myself to enduring the sticks. Is that what they call “learned helplessness”? I’ve had people trying to drum the lesson “you’re going to have to do what you’re told, regardless of what you want to do, and fighting will only make things worse” into me my whole life, and it seems like they were mostly right: as a child, you’re pretty powerless to get what you want, if what you want is “not to go to school”.
On the plus side, I think I could probably teach or tutor math without going crazy.
Most people find teaching (well) to be difficult. If you’re good at it, then that’s quite valuable.
What sense of valuable are you using here? I’ve seen very little evidence in my interactions with the education system that being good at teaching is highly valued either in terms of direct financial rewards or career prospects.
Effective tutoring would be very valuable to rich parents. Perhaps passively building your reputation wouldn’t work; self-promotion would be necessary.
Public school teachers are well compensated overall over an entire career (including pension), although I doubt the job is very fun, and you’re right that the rewards are in no way contingent on actually teaching well.
Are rich parents able to distinguish effective tutors? In my experience they largely hire based on elite education. Plus, most of their “tutoring” time is really guarding the child to make sure the child actually does homework. But there are also non-rich parents. I don’t think that DAS should have any trouble getting hired and keeping tutoring positions for $20 or maybe $50 hourly, if he can find parents who want a tutor. This is a very different skill and I think the main determinant of people actually tutoring. (ETA: I seem to have missed JG’s second sentence. Sorry.)
I poked around a little earlier today, and found a few sites that do paid online tutoring. This one was the most open about hiring new tutors of the ones I looked at. Their FAQ says that their most active Chemistry tutors earn $800-$1600/month. Even given that that’s an upper bound, it may be worth looking into. (I lived pretty comfortably on $1200/month last year, with about Crono’s expectation of lifestyle, and without having someone to share bills with.)
If you are really capable of playing Magic competitively if only you had the cards, etc., I would be glad to start you up, and you can pay me back whenever. But I would need to know that e.g. you are up-to-date on what decks/strategies work, tournament formalities (so you don’t lose because of using the wrong “done with turn” indicator or tapping rotation angle), etc.
(I made this offer over a year ago, but was strongly criticized for having the proviso that Crono put his karma at stake to indicate seriousness and as a motivator.)
I’m not yet capable of playing professionally. I might be able to reach that level, but I’m not there yet. And by “playing professionally” I don’t mean “play well enough to make a living at it.” There are very few people in the world who have ever made enough money from Magic tournaments to live on, although the number of people who at least manage to make back their expenses is much larger. (The “several thousand dollars a year” figure is an upper bound and doesn’t take into account potential winnings.)
I actually do have a plan to get better, though; if I can put up a good showing in a few tournaments, Zvi Moshowitz will let me join his Magic playing social circle. (I think.) The current plan is to wait for the next Pro Tour Qualifier season to start—it’s Sealed Deck with the soon-to-be-released Scars of Mirrodin set—and just attend as many as I can get to while also getting in plenty of practice by playing on Magic Online.
I once knew a gamer, indeed an MtG player, who made a decent (though certainly not extravagant) living out of playing online poker. Smart guy. I never observed his poker skills first hand but he certainly kicked the shit out of me in MtG.
I don’t know how difficult it is to use poker as an income source but you probably have the basic skill set (math/rationality/gaming) required for good poker playing.
Right now, I’m pretty bad at poker, and I never found it to be all that fun when I played it with my brother and his friends.
Just curious, do you name Zvi Mowshowitz because he comments here? :)
Sort of. I see him at the NYC LessWrong meetups.
Erm...
Unless Crono’s disregarding his potential winnings, your question about whether he thinks he’d be able to earn money that way seems to have been answered.
Yes, but from earlier discussions he had suggested he’d be able to play professionally, so that’s what I interpreted him to mean here, and the cost is gross rather than net, so he’d only need the first year’s expenses to be self-sustaining.
So I was indeed sneaking in assumptions from earlier exchanges.
If that is gross, sure. I did mention that he might be disregarding potential winnings. It seems odd to me that he’d word it that way in that case, though.
Learned helplessness applies more to specific stimuli and specific rewards; what you’re describing sounds more like general lack of energy. My advice is to tweak your biochemistry until you feel more energetic, and try the cubicle environment again.
Interesting. For sure you will need to save more money than that in the long run (when you are older and really not able to do much work).
It sounds good that you’ve decided that you need to move out, provided you actually do so.
I’m with wnoise, but I have a question to clarify my position.
How many diagnoses do you expect a competent physician to get wrong? I would say that more than 1 in 20 is at least reasonable. However, without meeting CronoDAS, or performing tests of any kind, based purely on the scant evidence in his posts, you have diagnosed him with a micronutrient deficiency, and have a confidence of 95% in your diagnosis. Seriously? What’s your prior? Even for thiamine, a 60% confidence that this near-stranger is deficient in it seems dramatically too high.
I expect physicians to be bewildered rather a lot. I spent years severely anemic. My father is an MD, my uncle is an MD, I saw a variety of doctors during this time, I was eating cups and cups and cups of ice every single day and was unremittingly tired and ghostly pale, partway through I became a vegetarian—and it took the Red Cross’s little machine that goes beep to figure out that maybe I wasn’t getting enough iron. I have a vast host of symptoms less serious than that which no doctor, med student, or random interlocutor has been able to offer plausible guesses about.
I expect bewildered people to make things up.
Agreed. Even if they don’t make things up, the responsible thing to do is to iterate through harmless or nearly-harmless treatments for conditions that the physician thinks are unlikely, but more likely than any other ideas he or she has.
This is exactly the opposite problem; not being at all bewildered or in doubt, despite a paucity of evidence. Doctors do that too.
Both making things up and jumping to conclusions happen because doctors are humans and are wired to see patterns, whether or not they exist. While we’re busy refining the art of human rationality, we ought to try to curb that behavior.
These numbers are uncalibrated estimates (I spent 60s looking for population statistics to use as priors, and didn’t find any), but I don’t think they’re at all unreasonable. Keep in mind that deficiencies come in degrees, and only the most severe ones ever get diagnosed. Anyways, here’s a breakdown (again, just estimates) of that 0.95:
I certainly wouldn’t say it’s the only problem, but it’s very likely a contributing factor.
Anyways, we can find this out directly. CronoDAS, could you take a look at the wikipedia page on thiamine, go through the lists of thiamine-containing and thiaminase-containing foods, and estimate your intake? Or better yet, order sulbutiamine and report its effects here?
I would go as high as 0.3 if you extend to third world countries, but suspect it’s lower among people like ChronoDAS who can afford a variety of food. Either way, it’s good enough.
The law of conditional probability indicates that you think that a minimum of 75% of the population takes a multivitamin. I think this is way too high, especially for a population that has a 20% micronutrient deficiency rate.
So the rate of depression among those with micronutrient deficiencies (and who don’t take their vitamins) is about 119% that of the general population? I can buy that, but if it’s that low, then why are you so sure that a micronutrient deficiency is “greatly contributing” to his depression?
I agree that there’s no harm in having CronoDAS gather data or experiment a little, since sulbutiamine seems to have very few negative side effects with recommended doses.
My main reason for brining it up is that I see some very high probabilities tossed about on Less Wrong, and it bothers me when I feel like they’re assigning numbers that they can’t justify. I’m still skeptical about your 95% confidence, but it’s nice to see a break down.
Would you be willing to take a bet at a 2/3rds payoff that CronoDAS has no thiamine deficiency? How about a 1/19th payoff that taking a daily multivitamin wouldn’t significantly alter how he feels?
[EDIT: Revised payoffs in bet to reflect professed certainty]
From Wikipedia:
Hmmm… as it turns out, I’ve been eating quite a lot of thiamine-fortified pasta lately, and it’s also in cold cereal, orange juice, and bread. I don’t think I have an unusually low amount of thiamine in my diet when compared to the average American.
What Robin said. Good for making easily testable predictions. But it really sounds like you’re generalizing from one example here.
Upvoted for suggesting an easily-tested claim of material relevance. That alone makes the advice worth trying as an aid to the calibration and education of others.