The Red Pill and Depression

The topic of depression rears its ugly head on this subreddit occasionally. I see a lot of understandable confusion about the nature of depression, and a fair share of arrogant and misguided “advice” gets thrown around whenever the topic arises. This is not surprising and is actually quite forgivable. On a self-improvement subreddit that focuses on taking personal responsibility for the outcomes in your life, depression can appear to be an excuse to not take in hand the reins of your future. I would like to examine when this criticism is justified and when it is not. Especially for someone suffering from the mental illness, it can be difficult to recognize how Red Pill and Depression are compatible. Happily though, I am here to tell you that they very much are, but not in the simplistic ways often emphasized by subscribers to this subreddit.

What is Depression?

Many people think they know the answer to this question. The truth is, even those of us suffering from Depression do not fully understand it. Our doctors primarily concern themselves with alleviating symptoms while the root cause remains, at best, only theoretical in the world of medicine. The consequence is an uneven life in which your medications and therapy can suddenly cease to be effective, the only response to which is throwing different chemicals—with radical side-effects—at the problem until it subsides. However, there are a few key truths that can be outlined with reasonable confidence.

First, what Major Depression—the diagnosable illness as outlined in the DSMIV—is not. Major Depression is not a bad mood. It is not a bad day, or a string of bad days. It is not a case of the blues. It is not being bummed out or feeling run down or having a rough patch. In fact, Major Depression has little to do with the association most of society has with the word “depression” or, to quote, “I am so depressed today”. All of this is important to understand because Major Depression cannot be approached like the above outlined issues.

Major Depression is not fixed by hitting the bar with the boys or going out to a social event. Granted, these things can, sometimes, be effective at alleviating symptoms temporarily; they are also important parts of managing your depression. However, confusing the two concepts—helping your bro get over a bad break up by drinking while hitting on new girls versus helping your friend deal with a day when his Major Depression is flaring up—will lead to pain and confusion.

Major Depression is actually an ugly, petty and horribly insidious illness. Though we do not know for certain the physiopathology of the illness, it is clear that Depression partially manifests through an imbalance in the neurotransmitters of the brain. There may be many different forms of Depression with different sources and causes. Studies have begun to demonstrate visible effects in the form of shrinkage and withering in different organs of the mind, leading to the horrifying—for those of us with the illness—realization that Depression may begin as or take the form of true brain-damage.

The symptoms of Depression, the expression of the illness by which we as human beings can know it, are terrible and cruel. It penetrates into every aspect of your life. It is a poison that seeps through the veins of your social, work, and personal life as easily as real venom would through the human body, and with much the same effect. To pursue the analogy, as Depression touches the different aspects of your life, it causes them to seize and malfunction. It gradually renders each part of your life an ugly and grayed growth barely reminiscent of its original form. For some people, it finally reaches the heart and clasps its dark hand around it, leading these poor souls to death by suicide. In the real world, depression takes the form of self-enforced seclusion and/or inappropriate anger and emotional outbursts, alienating people and strangling your social ties.

I have had some luck explaining the experience with a different analogy in the past. We all experience both positive and negative thoughts in our every-day life. Few, if any people, are blessed with a vision of the world in unadulterated positivity. However, as absurd as a perfectly positive life experience seems, Depression truly causes the opposite. Depression eliminates the ability to feel good. It locks away positive thoughts. For instance, I am literally unable to “count my blessings” when depressed. I write them down when I feel positive—because I won’t even be able to list them when I’m already depressed—and even when examining a list of positive aspects of my life all I can feel is a “logical” recognition that I should be uplifted by the list. But I’m not. Depression puts a filter which blocks positive notions and allows negative thoughts alone to cross into your perception. I can’t feel pride in myself or my accomplishments, I can’t feel love, I can’t feel joy or excitement or interest.

The long-term effects of depression are particularly ugly. To compare a life with and without depression, consider two men climbing a mountain. They both begin at the same time, and the mountains are identical. But our climber with Depression, unfortunately, has faulty gear. The healthy man climbs up the mountain relentlessly, and though hard at first, each day he grows a little stronger and more capable and he moves a little faster and conquers more difficult terrain with greater ease. On the other mountain, our climber with depression is trying to do the same thing. However, every few days or weeks or months, as he is struggling up the mountain, his rope breaks and he plunges back down to the latest “base camp” (bear with me here).

The fall is terrible: his body is mangled, bones are broken. He crawls to his tent and begins the healing process. As his injuries heal over the weeks, the muscles he built up climbing fade away. When he finally goes to climb the mountain again (if he does; if he does not merely stay huddled at the camp, afraid to trust his equipment ever again; if he doesn’t throw himself from the mountain) he finds he is as weak as when he first started the climb. That he will have to rebuild all his muscles, and that he will have to re-master his once practiced footing and techniques. He begins to climb again, now almost as slowly as when he first began. He reaches where he was when he fell and climbs beyond it, who knows how many days, before another rope snaps and the entire process begins again.

Our healthy mountaineer has long ago raced up the face of the mountain (for sake of analogy let us say this mountain has no peak but the view gets much more beautiful the higher up you go) and is only getting faster and stronger. Good for him—he is a strong man, I believe the type of man Redpill encourages you to be—but he is also lucky. And do you know what? That is perfectly fine. I want to emphasize that the idea of “recognizing privilege”, at least as it has come to be defined, is ridiculous. That man should feel incredibly proud of himself. But he can also sympathize with our other climber, without—as Feminists and SJWs would be loathe to discover—hating himself for being capable and resultantly doing something foolish like weakening his own ropes to make his trip more difficult. He can learn to, perhaps, help his friends with faulty climbing gear, or, at least not hurt them further

Depression and The Red Pill

Where Depression and The Red Pill only appear to butt heads is habits. In my opinion, The Red Pill—just like Aristotle argued in his Nichomachean Ethics—believes you are the sum total of your habits. Change your habits and change yourself. It is so simple and powerful an idea, and TRP provides discussion and analysis of what those habits should be. The first step, of course, is swallowing the pill and learning to be honest with yourself about how the world really is; the second, to take that understanding and apply it by changing yourself. Overarching those two steps is the acceptance of the empowering and terrifying truth that we are responsible for whatever happens to us, no matter how unfair or cruel, and though we may not be mighty enough to predict and save ourselves from all possible disaster, we must try, because reality does not care about your excuses.

To return to the mountaineers, habits can be thought of us as the muscles and climbing skills of our two climbers. Now we could convolute the analogy to discuss how there are 7 billion mountains and everyone climbs a different way and practices different skills (as well as starting at different heights of the mountain). But, to avoid over-complication, let us say that both climbers have “swallowed the red pill” about “the mountain”. They try to see it honestly, and they try to approach climbing it with the appropriate techniques. In the analogy above, depression is understood as weak and faulty ropes snapping. The fall back down the mountain is crippling. As a result, instead of being able to spend each and every day building his muscles and practicing his skills, the Depressed climber is forced to let these things atrophy as he heals. Worse yet, he must work with the ropes he is given and, so far anyway, there is no way to reinforce them.

So, in my opinion, Depression’s truly virulent effect is to attack the ability to build good habits. Of course, being horribly miserable when in the throes of the beast is a serious punishment, but I would argue that the worst part (for any man who wants to set his mind to climbing that mountain) is how it makes habit building so difficult.

Habit building is about consistency. Do something every time it needs to be done and, eventually, your body begins to reward your efforts by not whining so much about doing it. For instance, as anyone here knows, getting started at hitting the gym is incredibly challenging. However, if you do it every day (or at least every day that you need to do it), after a few weeks, it will begin to be natural. Oh sure, you might sigh that you really don’t want to hit the gym today, but it is nothing to the once overwhelming difficulty that was building the habit.

So, my fellow TRPers with depression, what about us? We try to build the daily habits, but then we end up spending days or weeks or (god help you) months in a state of misery in which anything but “survival” seems damn near pointless and impossible to do. Our ropes broke, and we slid back down the mountain. As the days rushed by, our muscles atrophied, our skills declined.

What non-depressed people understandably fail to get is that Depression destroys will power. On the mountain, those ropes can be thought of as “willpower”. Believe me, when I’m not depressed, I can have an almost obnoxious will. Seriously, it gets me in trouble sometimes. But, when depression strikes, it is like being in an entirely different brain and body. It is not that I can’t exercise will power: it is that the will-power does not exist. For instance, I have gone to sleep pumping myself up to hit the gym the next day, writing myself messages of inspiration, having my last conscious thought be “spring into action tomorrow morning!”, only to awaken to depression and an almost laughable contempt for that drive from just the previous evening.

I like the rope analogy because it captures the essence of the issue: it is not that the rope is slack or installed badly; no, the rope breaks and it is gone, it is not there anymore, and no amount of wishing it was can bring it back. I wake up depressed and there is no willpower or motivation at all. I know this is hard for people to imagine—the old adage “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” seems appropriate—but you cannot make a monumental effort and overcome an episode of Depression because Depression has broken the engine inside you that powers your ability to make an effort!

So, what’s my point? It may be all good and well to offer an explanation of Depression, but it is starting to sound like I’m making excuses. I am not, however. Because Depressed or not, the exact same burden of self-reliance remains on your shoulders. If you don’t fix your life, no one and nothing ever will. It is the harsh truth I must remind myself of almost daily—that no matter how hard it may seem, I must find a way to make this work or else I am fucked. There is no lucky happenstance or deus ex machina coming my way. I can whine and bitch about how unfair it all is, but that won’t make a god-damn bit of difference except to make me more numbly comfortable as my life dies around me.

Managing Depression and The Red Pill

I wrote all of this up for two reasons.

The first is to reach out to fellow depressed Red Pillers—you mighty men who have taken on this great challenge and seek daily to rise to its standard. Perhaps what I wrote can help you feel recognized and even offer some insight into how to move forward: for instance, for me, recognizing that depression was attacking my habit building has allowed me to try to compensate for that, whereas before I was too passive.

The second, and directly related, is as a persuasive thesis for why a new TRP subreddit should be instituted called TRP Depression or TRP Mental Illness. I believe that the depressed, anxious, bi-polar, schizophrenic, and everything in-between, have a unique and extremely valuable perspective on a peculiar form of The Red Pill lifestyle. For instance, what insights can you offer to how the illness undermines your efforts, and how do you handle the problem? Or, maybe you are feeling like making excuses today because you are depressed, and you need to read a post or set of comments which remind you that your god-damn life is in your hands and will thrive or die solely on your decisions.

I am not proposing I be a mod, though I would take on the responsibility if needed. Rather, I’d like to see someone else take it on, and instead I would be allowed to help to contribute. In either case, I’d like the concept to be considered, and if not a subreddit, perhaps a category within The Red Pill. Some way to distinguish and quickly find material on managing mental illness while living a Red Pill life. At the very least, I’d hope this post would raise awareness about depression and encourage others with mental illnesses to post about how they deal with their illness and maintain a Red Pill life. I myself plan on making more posts outlining how I deal with my mental illness, and I would love to be able to gather up the wisdom of others for what, I think, would be the good of us all.