Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

What your life is missing is meaning. Meaning is action. If a word means anything at all it is because it is in reference to some kind of actual experience.

Blogs, books, and media of all kind are basically meaningless. Vanity of vanities and all that jazz.

You need to experience life. You need to find meaning through action. You need to become a poet by becoming the poem.

Help your neighbor with his hobbies. Cook dinner for your family. Sing a song for a friend. Do something, anything, for someone else.

Realize the inaction and the meaningless nature of sitting in one place and searching for answers on screen or in print.

If you must read, read all text as a poem, or at least read poetry itself!

The darkness that you see is just a fiction. How could it be anything else? The magic spells are just words on a page. Belief is what makes them seem real.

Go outside. Go for a walk. There is no darkness. It is boring and peaceful and that should put your mind to rest.




Consuming media without further participation in life may be meaningless, but to assert that they're inherently meaningless is nonsense. Many people are perfectly capable to grasping ideas in the abstract and then implementing them in reality.


You could argue that symbols are all 'inherently meaningless' without breathing some life in them from your own needs and experiences. 'Fingerspitzengefuhl' [1] is one of my favourite words in German and I think gaining that kind of understanding is impossible if one spends all their time in letters and doing nothing of the stuff that necessitates writing them. I took the author to mean that endlessly reading without doing any living is somewhat of a dead existence. As the person they're replying to, that's what I got from it anyways.

I tend to intellectualise this way of looking at depression (and how to get out of it - how to just get out the damn house!) as related to the Symbol Grounding Problem [2], in a semi-serious, semi-metaphorical way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengef%C3%BChl [2] http://www.socphilinfo.org/node/100


Thank you for such a charitable interpretation. This is basically what I was trying to get across.

Depression is a son of a bitch that I have also known at times and it really is as hard and as easy as just doing anything at all.


Wow, that was really spot on, and good to read.

Thank you for writing that.


Thank you.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: