whoa, so according to this dude, I actually have a totally legitimate basis for talking about how the best thing I have ever done for my own mental health is stop giving a shit about classes/achievement/etc, and how the less I care, the better I feel. I sort of suspected I was maybe just being lazy or something, but I like this guy’s explanation way better.CLINICAL depression is a serious ailment, but almost everyone gets mildly depressed from time to time. Randolph Nesse, a psychologist and researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan, likens the relationship between mild and clinical depression to the one between normal and chronic pain. He sees both pain and low mood as warning mechanisms and thinks that, just as understanding chronic pain means first understanding normal pain, so understanding clinical depression means understanding mild depression.
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…
very filled with dreams
The evolutionary origin of depression: Mild and bitter (The Economist)
