[Icare dixit]

I spend the morning experiencing what must be the most beautiful of things: a city slowly coming to life. What's more beautiful than that?

Ok, maybe nature. I've heard it's very green and beautiful. But cities are a bit like nature, I guess.

But I can't help wondering: what is it all for?

You see a lot of people doing useful things for people that mostly to useless things, when they finally get to the office.

People in the bus all calling the office, because the bus is stuck in traffic (as usual).

If they did anything useful at the office you'd expect them to sound alarmed, anxious. But it's nothing like that.

They just sit there, relaxed, reading a newspaper someone gave them at the station or something. Or looking at their smartphones.

So many people. Day in, day out.

That's insane.

So I felt pretty sane today.

And it's depressing. Not so much because of what I write, but because what I write is true. And I don't have to write it for it to be depressing.

That's our gift and our curse.

It's us that go insane because it is insane. Because we feel it. Things don't have to be useful, as long as most think it's useful and don't feel. That's not delusional.

Those whose feelings, their intuition, guide their thinking, feel how what most think is wrong, and might think others either know that or want to know that. That's delusional.

It's depressing.

Do I make any sense?

It would be why most that work with SZ have low-paid jobs and most with BP are manic or depressed.

[violetgreen]

So is usefulness and being useful your highest standard? The post started with a lovely reverie evoking something beautiful, a city slowly coming to life. That felt expansive, and compelling to me. Then some worry about usefulness. Are you bothered by notions of productivity and being worthy? I was when I was younger. Now, fun is higher on my list. Sure, you are making sense.

[Icare dixit]

I'd say anything fun would be useful for you, right?

Fun is very functional. So anything that makes something fun or that is fun is useful.

Fun isn't exactly how I would describe what I find useful. Freedom or absence of pain maybe. A experience of lasting beauty maybe. Pretty much the same thing.

At any rate, something that depresses isn't fun, whether it was meant to be or not. Being useful is fun or pleasant, any which way.

[raspberrytorte]

This was really beautiful to read, icare.

If you're saying that everything is pointless and we feel that and that's why we're insane, I agree.

It is all pointless.

Take an atronomy class, learn how really small and insignificant we are in the universe, and you realize how truly pointless everything is. The planet could explode and any trace of any of us even being here would be gone, and in the end our planet is going to get fried, so really, what's the point? There isn't one.

[raspberrytorte]

And what's really useful anyway? We're all going to die in the end and no one is going to remember us or what we've done.

[raspberrytorte]

Wow. That was really depressing. Sorry!

If I'm not getting what you're saying, please elaborate.

[Icare dixit]

I just think we feel that much of what we all do is pointless. But definitely not everything, hence mania. Not that mania is much better, but we try.

[Icare dixit]

Thinking that mania is (completely) pointless is definitely depressing, but those are not our thoughts, we just adopt them when we feel and sense that others think them.

[raspberrytorte]

I think mania is the most pointless. It's not real. It's a fantasy. That's not the way the world is.

[violetgreen]

Depression stinks! Hate that feeling, that state of being, though when I'm depressed, I don't rouse myself to anything energetic enough to get pissed off at! Interpreting my situation gives me the power to laugh, cry, despair, or hope. Like the thought that anything I do is pointless, I can turn the table on that and take a calculated risk to do something different, like getting to work on time, instead of driving, I could bike, walk, take a bus or taxi. Very mundane, and that's where I live.

I don't believe that everything is pointless, even though I sometimes I feel that way. I don't think being remembered long after my death by anyone other than my granddaughters is a useful standard for living my life now. When I was a kid, I used to ride my bike through a nearby cemetery and liked to look at the faded photographs embedded in some gravestones. I imagined their lives, but they weren't remembered by me. And I think their lives were good enough and useful, without my remembering them.

You must have struck a cord, Icare, because my thoughts are all over the place.

[raspberrytorte]

At least when you're normal mood or depressed you can see how depressing and messed up the world really is.

(This is just my experience.)

[raspberrytorte]

Well... my point isn't really that each individual person won't be remembered, but that the entire human race is eventually going to get wiped out and nothing about us is going to be remembered or rather known at all.

[violetgreen]

raspberrytorte, I think you're taking the big picture approach, entire human race, and I'm looking at this from an individual position, measured by who I know and love. At night, in the dark, when I think about dying, it's relationships with people like my husband, daughters and granddaughters that I don't want to get wiped out. Somehow the big picture isn't as compelling, or useful?, to me.

[raspberrytorte]

Originally Posted by violetgreen

raspberrytorte, I think you're taking the big picture approach, entire human race, and I'm looking at this from an individual position, measured by who I know and love. At night, in the dark, when I think about dying, it's relationships with people like my husband, daughters and granddaughters that I don't want to get wiped out. Somehow the big picture isn't as compelling, or useful?, to me.

No. I agree with you. In our small bubbles of existence things aren't necesarily pointless. The things we do are useful, to those in our lives and our relationships with them.

But, when taking things in big picture stand point, I stand by everything being completely pointless.

[Icare dixit]

It's all interesting perspectives.

I'm afraid mine is too much influenced by delusions, thoughts following feelings, from a young age. Depression has influenced me very severely. That's probably also why I'm pretty well equipped to not let it influence my thinking too much. It's not by choice, belief me, but it causes me to have rather short periods of severe depression and more mania.

I fear mania so much it makes it almost impossible to do anything. But I've come to appreciate it as well. Also not really by choice: it only makes mania more likely to occur.

I sometimes have avolition, which is an actual (or stronger) belief in everything being pointless, which doesn't happen during depression: if everything is pointless, there is no reason to be depressed.

But depression is so rational it becomes far more delusional than mania will ever be because it's less rational, more intuitive, based on feelings, irrational. It's pure. Not a maze but an open space. But that's a very big picture, but very much about relationships.

It only becomes a (very likely) deluding, damaging and more rational delusion when anxiety sets in. Anxiety, certainly when manic, is just depression waiting to happen. If you don't give in easily or the anxiety makes you fear loss of control, you might get incongruent delusions (and hallucinations), first likely with and then possibly without mania.

Mania before too much anxiety is the truth. Depression just the most damaging of deluding delusions.

The word delusion is of course badly chosen, but what do I know: I'm not a doctor.

Thank you for sharing. I'm really feeling this right now. Being miserable in my skin is making me a very irritated and a sad person. What is the point when it's one misery after another with so little point in between. I just want to exsist without terrible pain and sickness. Mania seems urgent, like there is a big plan I'm involved in and can help figure out. Then I crash into reality where no big plan exsists, just pain to endure day on end.

[raspberrytorte]

Crashing into reality feels pretty bad. That happened to me yesterday morning.

[Icare dixit]

I don't know. I went from knowing exactly the relationships between and dynamics of everything to doubting everything, today (probably/likely because I took my antipsychotic).

It's just a model of reality like everyone has and mine isn't necessarily worse than that of others.

There's just a point in time where you trust the model of reality more than reality itself. We don't doubt it or we'll get extremely confused and so we get anxiety and we're gonna ignore more of reality to relieve the anxiety and it gets worse quickly.

But that doesn't mean that it isn't useful to make such a model of reality, right? Those who don't can't function, stuck in doubt or constant reappraisal of reality. You are too slow or to much in doubt for that to work in practice.

It's useful self-deception. Everyone does it. We are just very good at it but we consequently think we are better at it than we are because of that self-deception.

Does that make sense?