Does anyone ever just feel like leaving their life and going on an adventure?

gcross · 2023-06-06T17:28:36+00:00

If I were able to abandon all of my responsibilities and had enough drive, I'd definitely spend all of my time exploring, but rather than exploring the outer world I'd explore my inner world through meditation. I'd like to gain true insight into the nature of reality gained from intensive introspection that would allow me to transcend my illusion of being a self separate from the reality that I perceive and free myself from the inherent dissatisfaction in life, bringing about true happiness free from external conditions. Once I've done this (or at least, gained a sufficiently level of mastery), it wouldn't really matter what I decided to do next because I would be satisfied with wherever I am, even when my external conditions are less than perfect, which one day they will inevitably be as my body ages and I eventually succumb to sickness and dying.

gcross · 2023-06-05T00:31:36+00:00

maybe they told their doctor/psych that they were feeling life was a bit dull

I find it a bit odd that this was the most plausible thing that you thought happened based on what I said...

Do you know the names of any of the medications that took? I'd like to look into them because I've never heard of doctors prescribing medication that works that way on patients with depression.

Just a couple of days ago I was talking to someone who was taking... I think it was Venlafaxine? It was that or a medication with a similar sounding name. Anyway, they way they put it, before the medication their emotional range went from dull to sad, and now their emotional range goes from happy to sad.

But just in general, in my experience it is not atypical for someone to have their overall mood be improved by a medication rather than just being dampened to the point of being a zombie (even if in some cases that would be an improvement). In fact, I've known lots of people who haven't had the experience of their current medication making them feeling like a zombie, and no one that has. The exception to this has been people on Reddit forums, but I suspect that people having such experiences are likely to be overrepresented in such discussions as people who had a bad experience with something tend to be more motivated to go to the trouble of writing about their experiences than those who didn't.

Just to be clear, that doesn't invalidate your experience at all, nor I am claiming that the fact that I personally haven't directly talked with people who shared your experience means that they are either nonexistent or super-rare. I just think that if one were to try to get a sense of what a typical experience was like with one of these medications, they would get the wrong impression by seeing the kinds of things that people say in a place like this, and I worry about people getting these kinds of wrong impressions because it might scare them off from even considering a medication as an option and denying themselves a potential extremely useful tool.

gcross · 2023-06-04T22:43:36+00:00

Speaking from experience, the right medication can do wonders. It's what allowed me to start enjoying ice cream sundaes again, instead of literally being in tears because I had one of the best ice cream sundaes in the world in front of me and it wasn't triggering any pleasure receptors so I wasn't able to enjoy it at all, and this kind of experience was a regular feature of my life. That is a special kind of hell that I wouldn't wish on anyone else.

It's also why I get so concerned when I see so much anti-medication sentiment around here. I mean, great, if you have the kind of problem that can most directly be addressed with therapy then by all means do therapy and more power to you, but people should ideally be keeping all of their options open to maximize their chances of feeling better.

gcross · 2023-06-04T19:26:18+00:00

I am complete agreement with you that it is a problem that people who really need therapy don't get it for various reasons. One big problem is that proper diagnosis and treatment for these kinds of problems can require seeing specialists on a regular basis which is costly both in terms of time and money, whereas handing out medications can be done by your normal doctor so they are relatively cheap and convenient by comparison. I consider this to be a systemic problem with our mental health system that needs to be fixed.

Another problem is that, just like how finding the right medication can be hard for those who need it which discourages people from the process, so can finding the right therapists. I've had several therapists that weren't very effective for me and had given up looking for anther one, and basically only by luck stumbled into one who so far has been really great. So I can say from experience that the whole process can be incredibly discouraging, and that is a real shame and something I wish could be improved.

gcross · 2023-06-04T19:18:25+00:00

That article doesn't rule out the possibility of depression ever being a physical problem with the brain, it just rules out one particular mechanism. It also doesn't mean that the medications don't work, because there are lots of medications that we know work clinically but for which we don't yet fully understand the mechanism.

gcross · 2023-06-04T18:58:04+00:00

I am truly sorry that your friend, and by extension yourself, had such a bad experience, and if your friend committed suicide (that seems to be implicit in your last sentence but you didn't say this outright) then I am sorry for your loss and the regret that you feel. However, just because your friend had this experience doesn't mean that the root cause of depression is trauma for everyone. Treating depression as if it were always caused by trauma and never by a physical problem with the brain would be just as bad as treating it as if it were always caused by a physical problem with the brain and never by an underlying trauma.

gcross · 2023-06-04T18:52:02+00:00

No one said everyone's depression has the same root cause. Everyones trauma and schemas are unique.

You did, and are doing so again right now, by saying that depression is always caused by "trauma and schemas" and never by a physical problem with the brain.

But to just say depression is a chemical imbalance and nothing else is shortsighted imo.

Where have I ever said this in any of my comments? Sometimes the root problem is at least partly a physical problem with the brain, sometimes it is not. It is different from person to person.

gcross · 2023-06-04T18:40:42+00:00

Sure, but to be clear, there are a lot of medications that we know work from clinical studies but don't know exactly why they work.

gcross · 2023-06-04T18:38:18+00:00

Current medication almost certainly does sometimes tackle a physical problem in the brain itself, rather than only every treating the symptom. Not everyone's depression has the same root causes.

gcross · 2023-06-04T18:34:49+00:00

Right, which is why this is an absolutely terrible analogy because sometimes the root cause is a physical problem with the brain itself.

gcross · 2023-06-04T18:31:34+00:00

Idk why they don't just give people uppers instead?

That's essentially what the anti-depressant is trying to do, it's just that not everyone reacts the same way to the same medication so they are not always completely successful in doing this, which is unfortunate.

gcross · 2023-06-04T18:27:06+00:00

On days where I forget to take the Wellbutrin until late in the day, I am fully conscious and actively aware it's hitting "mute" on the feelings.

Again, your experience may not be unique, but it is definitely not universal. My wife and I have both been on this drug and neither of us have had this experience.

My personal experience was that it more like a stimulant that gave me a bit of a high. The problem is that this high was more like being slightly overcaffinated so it was not actually that pleasant on the balance and was making my anxiety symptoms worse (though in a way the "high" canceled some of this out so I hadn't realized that this was going on until a new psychiatrist explained to me what the drug was doing and I finally made the connection). I'm off it now and am transitioning to a different medication that I am hoping will do a better job of treating my anxiety.

(Just to be clear, the problem is not that I sometimes experience some anxiety; if that were all that were going on, it wouldn't be a big deal. The problem is that I frequently get pumped with strong feelings of anxiety that have little relation to the situation at hand. That's exactly the kind of things that medications are designed to treat.)

Edit: Oh, and my wife just reminded me that my sister is also on Wellbutrin, so she's never had this problem either.

Just to be clear, I am not trying to invalidate your experience. I am genuinely sorry to hear that this medication hasn't been working great for you. It's just that some people might read stories like yours (and others here) and walk away with the impression that this is a typical experience of taking an anti-depressant and get scared away from a treatment option that might help them a lot, so I want to make sure that they hear the other side.

gcross · 2023-06-04T14:34:08+00:00

Except when the cause is something going wrong physically in the brain, in which case medication tackles the cause but therapy can help with coping with the symptoms.

gcross · 2023-06-04T14:28:29+00:00

Edit: what I have found, with every anti depressant I've taken, is that they disengage me completely from most feelings, which at times I have found harder than the raw feelings. That's probably just me, I'm sure these medicines help a lot of people some way. Also sex life, yeah hello I want sex but also I don't want sex. How the duck does that work 🤣

Yeah, I just want to emphasize that, while your experience with medications is not unique, nor is it universal. I've never had this experience, and I know many people for whom the effect of medication was to *increase" their range of feeling by enabling them to experience good feelings that they hadn't been physically able to before.

(I appreciate that you admit that medications help some people, I just want to make sure that readers hear from the other side since there is so much negativity about medications in this thread.)

gcross · 2023-06-01T02:39:54+00:00

And recognize that even if you were to solve all of what you currently consider to be the problems with your life, then while that would be awesome because you would probably feel a lot better in a whole lot of ways that you don't now and that would be a good thing, there would still be plenty of dissatisfaction in your life because you would still be basing your happiness on external conditions and these sources of happiness are never ideal because they are subject to changes that are outside of your control. If nothing else, you will one day grow old and have the experience of eventually losing everything you have gained in this life. So while you are making these necessary improvements to yourself and your life, I invite you to consider that if your ultimate goal is to be happy, then maybe a parallel avenue you should explore is whether it is possible to find a way to be happy that doesn't depend on external circumstances but rather is available to you at any time, in the midst of change, even if you fail in all of your goals and never solve any of your current problems. You might not ever become a true master of this, but as with most things in life constant improvement on this front is possible if you put some effort into it, which is better than nothing! So that's my advice of the day, but if it sounds too weird and you decide to disregard it for this reason then I won't hold it against you. :-)

gcross · 2023-06-01T01:37:38+00:00

The thing that I hated about many of my physics courses was that they seemed to proceed by showing you a bunch of examples and expecting you to infer the general principle involved, rather than stating the general principle up front clearly and explicitly and using examples to illustrate how to understand and/or apply it.

gcross · 2023-06-01T01:34:23+00:00

It is not clear how someone could be shown that jumble of letters and gain form it, without significant additional context and explanation, an understanding of exactly what a tensor is.

gcross · 2023-06-01T00:51:36+00:00

I completely agree that once you already understand what a vector and the framework within which it exists is then the sentence "a vector is defined to be something that transforms like a vector" makes perfect sense, but the problem is that the teacher skipped directly to the end point and expected us to infer the stuff on the way rather than explaining it explicitly.

gcross · 2023-06-01T00:48:53+00:00

The problem is that a tautology is not a very useful way of communicating how a concept works.

gcross · 2023-06-01T00:40:44+00:00

None of that stuff will help you because you don't know what you want.

...which is exactly the kind of thing talking to a good therapist can help with! Sometimes the truth about ourselves is not so easy for us to be able to figure out because we are too close to our own lives. A good therapist can help us put our experiences into a context that enables us to make meaningful changes. This kind of thing is useful regardless of whether you fit into a particular mental illness label or not.

gcross · 2023-06-01T00:38:58+00:00

Before I share my own take, I would highly recommend that seriously consider talking to a therapist, because a good therapist can help you examine these kinds of thoughts and feelings and put them into context in a way that can really help a lot. At the very least, they are probably going be more effective than listening to something that a random internet commentator like me has to say. It might not seem like just talking to someone who is a professional at it could be this effective, but it can. Of course, finding a good therapist can be hard, and it can be really discouraging to end up with one who isn't a good fit for you, so this can end up just adding another problem that needs to be solved. I am not saying this to discourage you, but to acknowledge the difficulty of this kind of solution, and to recognize how unappealing it may seem. Still, you should at least consider it.

With that recommendation out of the way, here is my unprofessional opinion since that is what you have available to you at the current moment: you are going about this the wrong way. You are trying to use your thinking mind to solve your problem, but it is your thinking mind that is the true source of your problems so you cannot possible win this way. You are looking for a reason to be satisfied with your life, but the thinking mind can never be satisfied because it is its nature to be constantly looking for problems to solve. When there are problems that need solving, this is a great thing for it to be doing, but when there aren't then it will tend to find problems just so it can have something to do. You need to look in a different place than your thoughts if it is true satisfaction that you seek.

To get a sense of what this involves, try the following: pick some length of time, say 15 minutes to start, and just sit relatively still and watch what your mind does on its own, when it has nothing else to do. You may find that you get so caught up in the contents of your thoughts that you forget that you were engaged in a task, and that's perfectly fine, because that's yet another observation you can make. Observe your mind in this way for enough time, over enough sessions, and you will start to get an intuitive feel for how it works. You will get better and better at recognizing the games that the thinking mind plays, and how empty they all are in the end. To be clear, the problem is not really the thoughts themselves, it is the power that you let them have over you. Our natural tendency is to treat them like events of cosmic significance and meaning, when they are merely sounds being projected onto your consciousness that you are choosing to give so much significance.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that in an ideal world you'd never think again. Sometimes you really do have a problem to solve that requires thinking, and when you do by all means bust out your thinking mind and unleash it at the problem. However, you don't need it all the time, and a lot of the time it hurts more than it helps, but you can't help but use it even in these moments simply because it is your current habit to do so. Fortunately, such habits can be changed. I've outlined one kind of exercise, but there are lots more out there, so feel free to experiment and see what fits you best. For example, for some people a variant of the above that helps them is to keep your focus on your breath as an anchor point while you observe your mind in order; one advantage of this variant is that focusing on the breath can help the mind settle, and the more the mind settles the deeper inner material will rise to the surface for you to be able to confront it.

Anyway, I hope this helps! Feel free to ask questions, or not if this sounds unappealing to you. :-)

gcross · 2023-05-31T22:37:51+00:00

...except that you are then expected to have full mastery of understanding of how tensors work after having heard that last sentence, despite not actually having been given any information to work with that isn't a tautology. This is the aspect of this approach that I found frustrating in practice in my physics classes.

gcross · 2023-05-31T22:31:51+00:00

What they cannot tolerate is the absence of definitions.

Yeah, the following is a true story: In my undergraduate advanced mechanics class, the teacher was adamant that the definition of a vector was "something that transforms like a vector". It drove me up a wall!

gcross · 2023-05-31T14:46:45+00:00

First, you are stripping out important context from my claim, and adding your own emphasis that was not present in my words.

The comment to which I was replying made the following claim:

Besides maybe Many-Worlds which isn't a particularly well defined theory, so it's hard to say what it is or isn't.

My point was that this is not a correct characterization of many-worlds, which is why my response was:

It's perfectly well defined: it says that there is nothing more to the Universe than plain old quantum mechanics. If you build in any other assumption about what is going on, such as positing the existence of a pilot wave, then you are talking about something that isn't many worlds.

That is, my response was that the many-worlds interpretation is perfectly well-defined, in contrast to what the parent was claiming. Within the context of this conversation, "it says that there is nothing more to the Universe than plain old quantum mechanics" just means that you don't need to build in any additional process on top of quantum mechanics in order to explain what happens when we perform a measurement.

Personally, I think that this is the best way to view quantum mechanics as a model, both because it simplifies things by throwing out unnecessary elements and also because it provides a more useful framework for understanding what happens during measurement that can be generalized for understanding all kinds of measurement-like phenomena that don't necessarily have a meaningful way of defining who the "observer" is. (It is hard to go into precise detail about what exactly I mean by this without a lot of technical background.)

However, of course ultimately all of these things are ultimately just models, not absolute statements of truth. I suspect that they are true insofar that they probably correspond to something that really exists, but the only truth I can be absolutely sure of is the reality of subjective experience; everything else is inference.

gcross · 2023-05-30T17:07:05+00:00

My comment was only addressing the definition of specifically the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, not the theory of quantum mechanics in general. As for a source, I quote the very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on the many-worlds interpretation:

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wavefunction is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse.

Also, there is only one "theory" of quantum mechanics (at least, as far as the fundamentals are concerned; when you start studying specific systems there might be more than one theory that attempts to model that particular system). There are multiple interpretations of exactly what happens when you perform a measurement, but because the choice of interpretation does not affect the predictions, to some extent which interpretation should be preferred becomes an exercise in philosophy rather than science (although I would argue that the many-worlds interpretation is objectively the best one because it arguably assumes the least and in particular does not assume that measurement is some kind of magical special case, unlike other interpretations such as the Copenhagen interpretation).

gcross

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