Depression and Accepting or Resisting Futility

[loostudent]

Thanks for your input loostudent. When I say "Futility" I'm talking about some things you can never change. Maybe it's not futile to have my romantic and social needs met, but I'm having to accept the futility of ever getting my friend back. Call it black and white, but what shade of gray is there? There doesn't seem to be any hope she'll ever come around in the future, and that's painful, but maybe I won't be so depressed if I can come to terms with it and learn to accept it, rather than telling myself "I have to be able to convince my friend! I need reconciliation! I need to believe there's still hope!" you know what I mean?

Still, comparing myself to myself yesterday and not people doing better than me is probably really good advice.

I see what you mean. A loss is a loss. It takes time to heal. But it seems to me you are open for moving forward. Step by step - less black and more white. And find gratitude for what you already have.

You are asking what little things can you do today to make your life better? It's up to you. Its different for each person. The self is a big unknown. JBP said you don't have to know it right away. Knowing the self is a process. Try something and learn. An excerpt from JBP's book:

Imagine that you are thinking, enviously, “I should have my boss’s job.” If your boss sticks to his post, stubbornly and competently, thoughts like that will lead you into in a state of irritation, unhappiness and disgust. You might realize this. You think, “I am unhappy. However, I could be cured of this unhappiness if I could just fulfill my ambition.” But then you might think further. “Wait,” you think. “Maybe I’m not unhappy because I don’t have my boss’s job. Maybe I’m unhappy because I can’t stop wanting that job.” That doesn’t mean you can just simply and magically tell yourself to stop wanting that job, and then listen and transform. You won’t—can’t, in fact—just change yourself that easily. You have to dig deeper. You must change what you are after more profoundly.

So, you might think, “I don’t know what to do about this stupid suffering. I can’t just abandon my ambitions. That would leave me nowhere to go. But my longing for a job that I can’t have isn’t working.” You might decide to take a different tack. You might ask, instead, for the revelation of a different plan: one that would fulfill your desires and gratify your ambitions in a real sense, but that would remove from your life the bitterness and resentment with which you are currently affected. You might think, “I will make a different plan. I will try to want whatever it is that would make my life better —whatever that might be—and I will start working on it now. If that turns out to mean something other than chasing my boss’s job, I will accept that and I will move forward.”

Now you’re on a whole different kind of trajectory. Before, what was right, desirable, and worthy of pursuit was something narrow and concrete. But you became stuck there, tightly jammed and unhappy. So you let go. You make the necessary sacrifice, and allow a whole new world of possibility, hidden from you because of your previous ambition, to reveal itself. And there’s a lot there. What would your life look like, if it were better? What would Life Itself look like? What does “better” even mean? You don’t know. And it doesn’t matter that you don’t know, exactly, right away, because you will start to slowly see what is “better,” once you have truly decided to want it. You will start to perceive what remained hidden from you by your presuppositions and preconceptions—by the previous mechanisms of your vision. You will begin to learn.

This will only work, however, if you genuinely want your life to improve. You can’t fool your implicit perceptual structures. Not even a bit. They aim where you point them. To retool, to take stock, to aim somewhere better, you have to think it through, bottom to top. You have to scour your psyche. You have to clean the damned thing up. And you must be cautious, because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.