Posts Tagged ‘depression’

Exit Funk, Stage Left

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You might have noticed that I was in a bit of a funk last week.  Thank you to every­one who made lovely com­ments on my last post.  I was feel­ing a lit­tle ashamed about my whin­ing there, so I haven’t thanked or replied to any­one indi­vid­u­ally.  I appre­ci­ate you all being there for me when I get like this. Thank you for putting up with it.

I’m see­ing things  more clearly this week, and I feel some energy return­ing. Part of the prob­lem I sus­pect was that I had a really nasty cold, com­bined with com­ing down from all the excite­ment of being back home to see folks.

I’m focus­ing all my energy right now on becom­ing the best web designer I can.  I think the time for explor­ing other poten­tial careers is not when you’re scrap­ing by as a free­lancer.  I’ve been slow to com­mit to life as a free­lancer, wor­ried about any num­ber of things asso­ci­ated with it, but I’m slowly con­quer­ing those fears and start­ing to treat my busi­ness like, well, a busi­ness, instead of just a guy work­ing out of his office all day.

I have plans to rebuild this site from the ground up, as well as build a photo store to sell prints of my land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy.  Stay tuned for more about all that in the future.

Thanks for hang­ing in there with me.  I will hope­fully start to have cool things to show and share again soon.

The Evolutionary Basis for Creative Depression

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Last week, The Economist ran a really fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on recent research into the evo­lu­tion­ary ben­e­fits of depres­sion.  Why do we get depressed?  Why did such a trait come to be, and if it’s so detri­men­tal to our health, why hasn’t it been selected against in the population?

Dr Nesse’s hypoth­e­sis is that, as pain stops you doing dam­ag­ing phys­i­cal things, so low mood stops you doing dam­ag­ing men­tal ones—in par­tic­u­lar, pur­su­ing unreach­able goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mech­a­nism that iden­ti­fies cer­tain goals as unat­tain­able and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.

Unobtainable or unre­al­is­tic goals?   Like, say, beat­ing the odds and sell­ing a story to the New Yorker?  Or sell­ing a screen­play to Hollywood for 6 fig­ures?  Or how about win­ning a Hugo award before you turn 30?  Could this explain why an unusu­ally high num­ber of artists and cre­ative types suf­fer from depression?

Creativity is often all about unre­al­is­tic goals.  The prob­lem is, with­out them, we would not strive to achieve the things we do finally achieve.  Aim for the stars, shoot for the moon, as they say.  So, depres­sion is tied directly to our ambi­tion and stick-​​to-​​it-​​iveness?  From the article:

Dr Nesse believes that per­sis­tence is a rea­son for the excep­tional level of clin­i­cal depres­sion in America—the coun­try that has the high­est depres­sion rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often dri­ven to pur­sue overly ambi­tious goals, which then can lead to depres­sion.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypoth­e­sis, but it is one worth con­sid­er­ing. Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of liv­ing in a dynamic society.

Depression, an inevitabil­ity of a dynamic soci­ety and a cre­ative lifestyle?  What do you think?  Is it pos­si­ble that those of us who suf­fer so much “cre­ative” anguish would be much hap­pier with our lives if we aimed lower?  But would that just be giv­ing up, and just as bad as being depressed?  Which is worse, a lack of ambi­tion or being depressed?