Tragique and triviale; weight and lightness
On the previous thread on COVID hope and fear, David Foster offered this quote from Arthur Koestler, as related by Koestler’s friend Richard Hillary:
K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.
Then David Foster adds:
I think much Woke behavior is an effort by people to get more Vie Tragique in their lives, and this also describes those who seem to somehow *like* being afraid of Covid.
This all relates to something Sebastian Haffner noted in his memoir of life in Germany between the wars, which we’ve discussed here a few times. He said there were people who actually *did not welcome* the stabilization of politics and the economy that seemed to be happening at one point…
I think all of this is absolutely true for some people. Every now and then it happens to war veterans, as well. It’s not that they like war. It’s just that during wartime they are living on a different plane, where actions matter intensely, and the bonds forged among fellow “brothers in arms” can be much deeper. I think that perhaps firefighters, police, EMTs and emergency room workers, and in the psychology realm crisis counselors, all have some of that feeling as well.
I’m also reminded of the work of one of my favorite writers Milan Kundera. In the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and if you’ve only seen the movie it does not do the book justice at all) he divides the world and people into two realms, that of lightness and weight. It’s not the same as what Koestler is talking about, but I believe it’s related:
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
In another passage in his earlier work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera deals with something resembling Koestler’s tragique/triviale “intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…” that Koestler thinks occurs if a person lives through “a long stretch of personal danger.” Kundera seems to think that it – or something resembling it – is far more common than that, in fact nearly universal:
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border; where everything – love, conviction, faith, history – no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.
But I think that both Koestler and Kundera are wrong about how common this is. I don’t think it’s as rare as Koestler seems to think, or to require living through a long stretch of personal danger. But unlike Kundera, I certainly don’t think that everyone lives so close to that border, or that it takes so very little to cross it. In this, as in almost everything, I think there is great variation, and that some people are so grounded that no matter what happens to them they remain far from that border, while for others – for unknown reasons – something in their psyche obliges them to balance on that tightrope described by Koestler, even if the outward events of their lives don’t seem remarkable or especially dangerous at all.
I certainly don’t think that everyone lives so close to that border, or that it takes so very little to cross it.
I guess it depends on what you think of as “little”. For example: A person goes in for their yearly routine medical checkup, something is found, tests are run, and they’re diagnosed with terminal cancer. They had no notion but in a moment their life has completely changed. A moment could be considered “little”, or certainly it’s scary how one’s life can change in a moment.
But I think in this context you’re referring to how certain people seem to move from “vie triviale” to “vie tragique” not for something as dire as a sudden cancer diagnosis, but simply because they felt triggered by something that most other people consider of no great import. Or they impute intentions to others that don’t in fact exist. They imagine themselves to be persecuted or conspired against by others. I’m sure that social media has a malignant effect on such individuals, enforcing their neurosis and delusions of persecution.
…one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes…
–David Foster
This is an instance of Koestler’s theme in “The Act of Creation,” a highly regarded book on creativity in the 60s/70s, though largely forgotten today.
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Koestler’s fundamental idea is that any creative act is a bisociation (not mere association) of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought. Employing a spatial metaphor, Koestler calls such frames of thought matrices: “any ability, habit, or skill, any pattern of ordered behaviour governed by a ‘code’ of fixed rules.” Koestler argues that the diverse forms of human creativity all correspond to variations of his model of bisociation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Creation
better and more fun covered in
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
In an increasingly secular society more and more people drift through life with no meaning but that doesn’t mean they stop searching they just find more and more secular religions like the climate or the mask.
In Remarque’s great but neglected novel ‘The Road Back’…which is kind of a sequel to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’…one of the returned soldiers finds peacetime life not to his liking at all. All of the members of the narrator’s group are having difficulties, but for this guy, George Rahe, the feelings are particularly acute.
For him, the longing to recapture the excitement and especially the feelings of comradeship and meaning that existed during the war is particularly strong. Rahe now sees idealism perishing in a civilian existence that is “this pig’s wash of order, duty, women, routine, punctuality and the rest of it that they call life here”…he sees an ordinary city street as “All one long fire trench” and the houses as “Dugouts, every one–the war still goes on–but a dirty, low-down war–every man against his fellow–” These feelings drive him to join up again–whether the small regular army or one of the Freikorps units is not specified.
“And though you tell me a thousand times that you hate war, yet I still say, we lived then. We lived, because we were together, and because something burned in us that was more than this whole muck-heap here…I’m going where comradeship is still to be found.”
But still, he is the only one who chooses this course.
“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.” Milan Kundara
Does not the blue collar worker bear a heavier burder than the ruling elite? Are not their lives closer to the earth? And thus, their lives more real and truthful? We know this to be so.
Whereas, the ruling elite’s lives consist, absent disastrous health of a comparitive near absence of burden.
Their thoughts free to soar into heights of what might be. Taking leave of any harsh reality or even pragmatic concerns. Becoming at best half real, their movements free of any tiresome objections, having been deemed as insignificant.
I have some experience with going through long periods of fear. As a Navy pilot deployed to the Vietnam War, I saw the way my fellow aviators and I dealt with the fear. When we were briefing for a mission, everyone was paying close attention, asking smart questions. Details mattered. Waiting in the ready room for launch time, the mood was mostly one of checking gear, and making sure everyone in your flight knew the details. Some grim joking around about not being a magnet ass, who was going to get bagged, and other testosterone driven joking were pretty standard. But the mood was all business.
After launch and join up, the feeling was that there was nowhere else you would rather be. The sense of comradeship and shared danger was never stronger.
As the coast and the feet-dry point loomed up, the adrenaline kicked in. Your mind concentrated and time slowed down. You were in max alert mode and ready for the worst. On target, with black triple A bursts blossoming around you, you concentrated on the job. Fly the airplane and put the pipper on the target. Pull off the target jinking and hoping to not get hit as you high tailed it for the beach and feet wet. Rejoining over water and heading back to the boat, the serotonin kicked in and you felt elation. Ha, cheated once again.
Back on the carrier you debriefed, got some chow, took a shower, and went to the ready room to find out about the assessments of damage to the targe and any losses we may have suffered.
Do this for several months and it changes you. Some small number become addicted to it. They love the adrenalin shots and the heightened sense of being alive. Most tolerate it but don’t become addicted. A small few are broken and will avoids flying as much as possible (a lot of physical ailments) and maybe even turn in their wings.
After coming home, the addicts do anything to return for another tour at Yankee Station. The middle of the roaders, if they have lost friends to enemy fire, are often plagued with survivor’s guilt when they return stateside. The small few leave the service and have to live with their memories.
I lost friends and didn’t come to terms with my grief. I had survivor’s guilt but ignored it. (Who me, feel guilty? Never!) Fourteen years later, when our son died in a climbing accident, the losses I had experienced during my Navy service came crashing down. For six years I avoided dealing with the grief. Instead, I frantically filled my non-working days with rock climbing trying to recapture the joy that I had experienced when climbing with my son and avoid the grief. A life crisis eventually ensued.
Over a period of four years, with some helpful therapists, I came to terms with the grief, anger, and survivor’s guilt. Eventually, things came back into a better balance.
Flying off a carrier is a dual experience. Most of the time you are living a life with hot food, showers, clean clothes, and movies. For a few hours a week you go into the dragon’s mouth with the possibility of getting bagged. Not the experience of the infantrymen living in dirt, mud, cold, heat, and often cold chow with danger always just over the ridge. A much more grinding, soul-changing sort of service. More difficult to deal with I suspect. I knew a few WWII vet who were infantry. Mostly they seemed to be thankful to be alive and able to sleep in a warm bed. Simple pleasures meant a lot.
Not much lofty philosophy, just my observations.
Wow, J.J.! Thank you for posting on your experience. Extremely relevant to neo’s post.
I am so sorry for the loss of your son and am glad you found help from therapy.
J.J.:
I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m very glad you were able to get the help that got you through it. You sound like a strong person.
Yes, J.J. Great stuff!
You’ve lived a life.
The 60s were saturated with the vie tragique. It was mandatory.
Some of it was true. After participating in two horrific world wars, we were looking at the real possibility of full-out nuclear war. And no one would have been surprised had such a war occurred.
Lately my Every Day Carry paperback is “The Politics of Experience” (1967) by Scottish psychiatrist, R.D. Laing. It’s old and battered and now held together by swathes of “Scotch Moving and Storage Tape.” I bought “Politics” in 1969 and it blew the top off my 17 year-old head with its oracular pronouncements typical of the time.
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Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
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Many of those who got hooked on the 60s were hooked on that tragic-romantic sense we might be the Last Generation in History, that we were playing for the Highest Stakes. It was All on the Line.
That’ll get you high.
Laing ended his book on exactly that note of apocalyptic desperation:
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If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.
JJ: ditto, thanks for your service and in overcoming your personal trials.
GB @ 5.34pm: Maybe further clarification is in order, but I find myself resisting the correlation and dichotomy of heavy vs. light and blue collar vs. elite. I can envision either group being or experiencing heavy or light circumstances. But perhaps we do agree that the definition of “elite” has changed; and previously the elite were expected to be people obligated to support “heavy” life situations even if they also had privileges and opportunities to explore the “lighter” side of their professional or personal lives. Now we have so many “college educated” with flawed expectations of how their lives should be progressing, that we have an “excess of elites” and the normal distribution of vapidity is now on full display for a great many of them.
Thank you for sharing, J.J.
Your friend,
M J R
My paternal grandparents were farmers. I spent a month or two every summer with them from the age of four until age ten. Then I spent a month every summer with my father (my parents divorced when I was ten.) until I was fifteen. My recollections of my grandparents and my father, who was an electrician, was that they were such hard workers. It was people like them who made the world work – food on the table and electricity to our homes and businesses. I’ve never forgotten those roots.
I wish I could talk with them today and tell them how appreciative I am of what they did, what they taught me. Our lives today are such a wonder of comfort and ease compared to theirs. Unfortunately, too many of us don’t know that truth. Don’t understand how easy it is for it to slip away.
We’re now seeing it all around us. The economy stutters, the supply chain is fractured, the government has become too much like a Banana Republic, some people claim men can get pregnant, and that Communism is a positive thing. And some Slav with delusions of Russian grandeur is flexing his muscles in hopes of facing down his Western adversaries. The pnademania rolls on. Etc.
Much to fear or worry about. What to do? Get up and go to work and do your best everyday isn’t a bad plan. Oh, and a bit of prayer to the Almighty can’t hurt either. And vote, dadgummit, vote. We had a 30% turnout for the elections last November. Pathetic!
Thanks to all who liked my earlier comment.
Some people are drama junkies. They have to have it to feel alive. This is especially true of people who live by feelings.
}}} What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
Balance. Humans can’t live in terror all the time. Nor can they fail to take anything seriously at all. The real trick, here, is to find yourself moving smoothly between both states as the situation calls for.
NOW I’ll bring up another highly recommended philosophy tract, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
The Author, Robert Persig, defines two mental states which people are prone to:
Zen — being in the now.
Motorcycle Maintenance — trying to analyze and understand things
His terms come from an example he uses … you’re enjoying yourself on a motorcycle ride through the mountains… you’re just enjoying yourself — zen — not really thinking of anything, just taking in the air, the wind, the feel of the cycle, the smells, the view, everything, just sucking it all in and enjoying it. Suddenly, the motorcycle starts to sputter (probably due to an imbalance in the fuel-air mixture at the higher altitude)… NOW it’s time to drop out of that zen state and start analyzing why the cycle is sputtering — otherwise, it may stall out and refuse to restart… leaving you stranded at the side of the road.
BOTH states are important and called for, depending on the circumstance.
BUT — as Persig notes, People seem to like/favor one state over the other, with an almost deep inertia keeping them in that state, and they resent like hell if they are forced out of it. This is part of the “back to nature” ideology that says all tech is bad, because… hey, “sometimes you have to figure out what is wrong, and that makes me so madddddd!!” 😀
Then there is the engineering mind, that cannot drop into the zen state — it wants to analyze everything to death… Dancing, for example — it just makes no sense, so, it’s foolish and silly and no one should waste time on it…
BOTH states are important, and which one is applicable depends on what you are doing and why. As a professional dancer, there are times you want that zen state — when you are dancing, in particular — but others, when you are working on choreography, or trying to figure out why your routine is messed up. THEN, for the former, you’re analyzing what steps you want to make (and recording them, perhaps), or you’re analyzing exactly what steps you are making, to figure out which one is tripping you up.
And then Persig notes, to be truly functional is when you meld those two together, when your mind is constantly flowing back and forth between them on a subject you are well-conversant with… when your thinking is no longer a separate function from your being, as you analyze a problem with an engine, running through different ideas and thinking of how to test them, but it’s not the “kthunk kthunk kthunk” of analytical thought, but a smooth flow of ideas that aren’t independent of action. Choreography, again, as it will… you run through the different steps so smoothly that there is no longer a thinking about them, just a doing, even as you run through different queries, options, and ideas…
And THEN, you tend to get annoyed if something takes you OUT of that zen/analysis state, such as when you encounter a stuck bolt that becomes an independent problem that puts a halt to that smooth flow of analytical thought.
I think this flows back into the initial point — you can neither spend all your time being terrified of bad events, nor feeling great about good ones — you have to routinely swap between them and the other state where you’re not really worried or elated at all, you’re just in a smooth cycle of being.
Huxley:
Interesting comment when examining the definition of “bisociation” —
I found it in an article taken from the Internet, the article’s title is “The Four Humor Mechanisms” by K.A. Neuendorf. In it, he refers to Arthur Koestler’s research (1964)
https://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/humor/humpo10/FourHumorMechnisms.pdf
JJ, they are lying about the turnout numbers.
“We’re now seeing it all around us. The economy stutters, the supply chain is fractured, the government has become too much like a Banana Republic, some people claim men can get pregnant, and that Communism is a positive thing. And some Slav with delusions of Russian grandeur is flexing his muscles in hopes of facing down his Western adversaries. The pnademania rolls on. Etc.”
The Almighty is allowing all of this to wake people up.
Ymar, we agree on something. It’s a good day. 🙂
Neo quotes:
This all relates to something Sebastian Haffner noted in his memoir of life in Germany between the wars, which we’ve discussed here a few times. He said there were people who actually *did not welcome* the stabilization of politics and the economy that seemed to be happening at one point…
That also reminds me of a characteristic of lefties- there’s always SOMETHING to get into an uproar about. “Solve” one thing, and ten minutes latter they will be screaming about something else.
After all, their main mission is to SAVE THE WORLD, and that is a LONG list. In addition, they can always think of something else to add to the list, that they hadn’t thought of before.
Which also reminds me that I need to finish Haffner’s Defying HItler- better said start it again. Coincidentally, I looked at it several days ago. IIRC, Haffner mentions that his retired father had to take a loyalty oath to the Nazis to keep his pension.
Huxley, I read Laing before I worked a year as an aide in a private psychiatric hospital. My respect for Lang didn’t survive the year. Ditto, Freud.
Gringo,
Saving the world is easy.
But improving ourselves?
Everyone wants to start with the world, no matter how messy their own, personal lives are.
Huxley, I read Laing before I worked a year as an aide in a private psychiatric hospital. My respect for Lang didn’t survive the year. Ditto, Freud.
Gringo:
I’m still fond of R.D. Laing to some extent, but I have seen madness up close — my mother was committed to a locked ward for some months — so long ago I discarded Laing’s unrealistic view of crazy.
Mark Vonnegut, son of Kurt, wrote about his own madness and recovery persuasively. His first article on this was titled, “Why I Want to Bite R.D. Laing’s Leg.” Which is not freely available, but here’s some background:
–“Mark Vonnegut’s Sane Response to Psychosis”
https://thetyee.ca/Books/2010/10/06/MarkVonnegut/
Mark Vonnegut was inspired by his experience to become a doctor, managed to get accepted into Harvard Medical School and had a successful career as a pediatrician in Mass.
He wrote two excellent memoirs: “The Eden Express” and “Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So.” Well worth reading.
I freely grant that Laing was a mixed bag. However, he did have a large impact on me. I’m reading him now to understand that impact and to see what might be salvaged and what ought to be discarded.
Here’s a good doco on Laing:
–“Did You Used to be R D Laing?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86t5GWB5qRY
Somewhat OT. Today I watched an excellent Stanford lecture on depression. There has been some progress in putting the big picture and some important details together.
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Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky, posits that depression is the most damaging disease that you can experience. Right now it is the number four cause of disability in the US and it is becoming more common. Sapolsky states that depression is as real of a biological disease as is diabetes.
–“Stanford’s Sapolsky On Depression in U.S. (Full Lecture)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
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As to the topic discussion, I think there are a fair number of people, certainly on the left and some on the right, who are attempting to solve or alleviate personal problems by acting on the political plane.
“..Sapolsky, posits that depression is the most damaging disease that you can experience.”
In other news, Prominent Intellectual decides that common problem experienced by intellectuals and wannabe intellectuals is the most important problem.
Mind you, I like Sapolsky and his series of lectures is brilliant.
@OBloodyHell, @Huxley:
Was reading an audio-related post the other day which alluded to Robert Pirsig and the Episode of the Handlebar Shim (strip cut from a Coke or Pepsi can). Got me thinking about Hipsters and their vaunted ‘Authenticity’. The Hipster obsession with Back Story and Provenance advertises their own shallowness and authenticity.
What works, works.
Zaphod:
Tons of people experience debilitating depression. Not just intellectuals. Frankly I question whether you know what you’re talking about.
It’s a real problem. That’s Sapolsky’s point.
@Huxley:
Without wishing to beat my own drum, I think I can claim to know as much (lived experience-wise) about the Black Dog as anyone. It’s a shitty business for sure.
It’s also not naso-pharyngeal cancer, multiple sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
The elephant in the room with severe depression is that there seems to be solid evolutionary survival selection pressures for it at the individual and group levels: depression puts a damper on the likelihood of any given individual fully acting out the implications of comorbid psychopathologies. It’s a feature, not a bug. Evolving consciousness wasn’t our smartest move as a species.
Depression isn’t a disease.
Zaphod:
If you understand, then why the snarky dig about intellectuals?
I’ve got my personal stories too. My parents committed suicide (separately) out of long-standing depressions.
When I hit a depression that wouldn’t budge in my 40s and I started thinking Bad Thoughts, I got scared and did everything I could think of and then some. I managed to scramble out of the hole. Sapolsky’s lecture covered my experience of depression well.
I’m not quick to find an Evo explanation for depression. Perhaps. However, it could be a weakness in how our brain evolved. I don’t believe our knees crap out on us because there’s an evolutionary advantage to individual lameness. It’s just a weakness leftover from our shift to fully upright gait.
Depression isn’t a disease.
Ah. Pope Deco pronounces. Clearly His Word is all we need to know.
A Stanford professor disagrees in great detail. But I’m sticking with the know-nothing Pope.
Zaphod:
Your “lived experience” is hardly the sum total of what depression is for people. It’s many things and takes many forms, some rather mild (although sometimes lifelong) and some acutely painful and so debilitating as to be almost literally unendurable.
neo:
Sapolsky wove together a multi-model theory of depression. Not just trauma. Not just genetics. Not just this neurotransmitter or that neurotransmitter. Not just these symptoms or those symptoms. Not just this psychological theory or that. Not just this part of the brain or that.
I was quite impressed. I haven’t followed current thought on depression, but this was deeper and more satisfying than what I was reading 10-20 years ago.
Anyone interested might check Sapolsky out.
@Huxley:
On the evolutionary front, Gnon has no vested interest in our survival past the age of reproduction and basic child-rearing.
No evolutionary pressure for knees to last past (say) 35 years. Similarly why expect strong evolutionary pressure in favor of staying happy or sane past ~35. I wonder what the statistics for age of onset of truly debilitating / fatal clinical depression look like. Perhaps a more parsimonious explanation than the Damping Factor hypothesis I mentioned earlier.
Ever heard of a clinically depressed African or Filipino (picked at random)? Me neither.
Zaphod:
I find your thought far more speculative and less persuasive than Sapolsky’s.
One doesn’t have to be 35+ to hit serious depression. Is it not possible that modern civilization stresses people in ways different than the less modern world?
And so on.
Take a listen to Sapolsky, if you’re interested, and see what you think.
Zaphod:
Sometimes I think you say these silly things just to get other people to disagree with you.
People’s bodies are designed to go on for quite some time after they reproduce, barring infectious diseases or accidents. There are theories about this, but one is that there are benefits to families and child-rearing to have older people around to help raise kids and to impart some of their hard-earned wisdom. To do this, a person couldn’t be particularly depressed.
As for Africans who are depressed, just because Zaphod hasn’t met one doesn’t mean they don’t exist (or perhaps you’re a solipsism devotee?). See this, for example. One thing about Africa, though, is that they have so many other problems there that depression isn’t studied very often. When they talk to people, they find that it certainly exists, however (See this:
Jean Paul Sartre: “Never were we freer than under the German occupation. At every instant we lived up to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: ‘Man is mortal!’ And the choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death …”
A Stanford professor disagrees in great detail.
He’s talking book.
Our academics amuse themselves by gaslighting others. The whole ‘transgender’ craze is a manifestation of this, as is much of what passes for ‘constitutional law’. The notion that your moods are a disease (except in a metaphorical sense) is another. You wanna be a sucker, your problem, not mine.
“Never were we freer…”
…as he sipped his coffee and nibbled on croissants and brioches in the best cafes in Paris….
Art Deco:
The origins of clinical depression and how much contribution is made by the strictly organic is still an open question. Good to hear that you have somehow come up with the definitive answer, all by your lonesome.
It is a mystery how two so different individuals; Art Deco and Z, can say two profoundly different but equally silly things about depression, IMO.
The origins of clinical depression and how much contribution is made by the strictly organic is still an open question. Good to hear that you have somehow come up with the definitive answer, all by your lonesome.
Neo, you’ve elected to define your moods as a disease. That there are chemical processes going on in your head at the same time is immaterial. There are chemical processes going on as a matter of course in your head, in your abdomen, and in every other part of your body. If you have an actual ailment (1) you die or (2) you are not functioning normally. The thing is, a variety of emotional states and temperaments are simply part of the human repertoire.
There’s a whole industry devoted to ‘treating’ these problems. I’ve not noticed they’re having much success with palpable manifestations of misery (e.g. the frequency of suicide), but I suppose the counter-factual is we’d be in even worse shape without their presence.
I should mention that we have among our kith and kin several examples of the mental health and social work industry. As far as their general wisdom, I’d say they’re all perfectly meh. I cannot help but note as well as we’ve had in our social circle several heavy users of their services. It’s a way of life.
Art Deco:
Excuse me – MY moods? What are you talking about?
I said nothing whatsoever about myself and my moods or lack thereof. I haven’t even said what side I come down on in this discussion – whether I believe that depression is a disease or not. I have merely indicated that I think it’s a valid question on which reasonable and knowledgeable people differ. Nor have I even said whether I think therapy usually helps major depression.
You’re not using much logic here and not paying attention. Perhaps it is you with the emotional investment in your point of view, going by what you state in the last paragraph of your most recent comment.
In addition, profound depression (as opposed to ordinary depression) is not a simple matter of moodiness. It is something quite different. As such, it does not ordinarily respond well to talk therapy.
om:
It’s like Tolstoy’s unhappy families – all different.