I quit an easy job because of philosophical despair

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enamdar, years ago a doctor told my mother that depression could start off situational (or presumably philosophical as well) and become biochemical. I think I’m somewhat vulnerable to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). It seems as though, if I get out early, even on some pointless little errand, I will feel better for hours. Plus, if you’ve having negative social interaction at home, even the neutral interaction at a store can be an improvement. And I think exercise has been demonstrated to be a mood elevator, but that’s probably the last thing you feel like doing, and if it’s just one more task and burden and “should,” that’s the trap of it all.

Okay, at times you have trouble just getting out of bed. That sounds serious enough to go to a doctor. If you already have a doctor you can talk with, even partially, maybe see him or her. Or a new doctor. Trust your gut. Maybe Monday, maybe not, try and make the phone call and get the appointment. Unlike the poster above who seems to think institutions generally work okay, I think our institutions generally poorly serve us, although people within them can elevate them but they really have to be a rebel to do so. The upshot, there will be at least a fair amount of bureaucracy and you may have to go through several doctors before you find one you can talk with.

I am not a doctor, but I understand that once you’re on an antidepressant and you’re going to come off of it, it’s important to ease off slowly. Okay, that’s part of the game. It doesn’t mean that you don’t need it at this time.

And, if you’re going to be wrestling with the big issues, as I tend to do, I tend to be pretty serious-minded, please jump in there and give us the benefit of some of your thoughts.

Try and get involved both locally, maybe your local city council, and internationally. That’s a mix that seems to work for me. Get to City Council and leave early, or at least give yourself permission to leave early, and then if you’re staying, you’re staying because it’s good. Take notes, it helps to keep me more alert. And if there are golden social skills, maybe it is appreciation (at least being open to appreciating others) and reciprocation. So, if in the five minutes before the meeting and someone attempts to strike up a conversation with you, reciprocate, keep it light to medium, light to medium self-disclosure, and ask them about themselves. (Obviously, I tend to have the Aspie style of talking in paragraphs. Yeah, obviously!)

There are all kinds of myths and misconceptions, but people are getting more and more sophisticated about the environment.

I remember a Jewish peace group (I think something like Tikvah) that was pretty impressive. And I think there’s also good work on Northern Ireland. The philosopher Jonathan Glover said you could view it as the optical illusion where it’s a bird from one view and a rabbit from another, it’s both and it’s neither. I think people are starting to get it, you can’t build peace from all this war. And people will resent us, yeah, just like we would resent them.

I participated with Amnesty International for a while, they were okay, they had their way and they sure weren’t interested in new ideas. And in general, people come to groups and then are not particularly social. I do not understand it, but that seems to be the way it works. For starters, I can’t just pounce on someone with a big complex idea all at once, even if we are in general agreement. That’s part of my skill set. However, I can certainly add to my skill set, even if some of the new skills are in the nature of a second language. Like Tagalog, I may never become perfectly fluent in Tagalog, but I probably could become pretty good.

But more than just my communcation style, people come to groups and they’re pretty shy, as if they’re already out on a limb. I’ve come up with the theory that only 1 out of 9 groups, for whatever reason, works out. That doesn’t mean, don’t go to groups, but it does mean go with realistic expectations. Have a light touch, don’t expect a whole lot, go slowly with how much you invest in terms of time, effort, emotions, and money in a group.

You might want to jump in and help out with the issue of Swine Flu. Your fellow citizens could use a lot of help. They oscillate between overworrying about it (occasionally) and deciding the media is overhyping it (usually). Okay, the baseline of flu is already pretty serious. Approximately, 36,000 people die each year from just regular seasonal flu in the United States. The pandemic of 1957 doubled that. Okay, so it’s not cataclysmic. 1918-1919, that was approaching cataclysmic. But just a regular pademic, 36,000 extra deaths, maybe unnecessary deaths. A four month lead time on vaccine seems awfully slow, but maybe it can’t be faster, not right away. Canada has experimented with in-school quarantine, instead of sending all the kids home where they disperse to malls.

Anyway, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done for serious-minded people. It doesn’t mean you’re obligated to do this all your life, but if you want to jump in and help . . . Sure!

(I still get the idea from your original post that you’re British.)

I can see why the one who started this thread never came back. On this board I would especially expect others to often feel overwhelming despair about interactions, about life in the real world, how they can easily see how things should be and wonder why people aren't doing the right things. When someone reaches out for better understanding and gets called an idiot, yeah, name calling always works.

I was feeling like emander was and then the song Imagine came out. I wondered how John Lennon could read my mind. I quit some perfectly reasonable jobs for no other reason than I didn't understand what to do about making myself feel better about life, the universe and everything.

Having a son who needed to some introspection to cope with the culture of NT humanity helped me to understand more of my own thought processes. It's a rewarding and productive puzzle. And we don't shut down the exploration of our often naive observations by name calling. We evolve and build on our realizations.

I would say that everyone else is an idiot, and well, he does have a point, I'm somehow of a pessimist and misantrope myself, and yeah, people suck, and people are to distrust, imbeciles, cruel, etc. so yeah, one should want to get rid of their useless company , I'm one who feels a lot more comfortable being alone and never being bother, so I can see how he may have quitted his job, it is a bad thing of course, because he doesn't benefit from that, it seems it can be related to psychological issues, like depression and stuff, so really, in that case some evaluation and professional help would probably do.


well, yes, in some schools they seem to teach human values, which, I often been inclined to think to be useless, because few kids don't seem to change and realised some of their issues by just learning moral values in school, in fact, most kids probably don't care and would think of them as waste of time, having problems at home would render the learning of said values pretty much meaningless. Heck, this is when sometimes, irony comes to play, at my school some of the bullies were supposedly good christians and learning christian values, and given their own nature and behaviour, those values seemed meaningless in the end and just a means to teach them to behave and even if they seemed to work, it was just momentary.


well, existential depression should be related to psychology given that you are having a depression and the issue of why you don't have friends and girlfriends must be related to it, lonely individuals who have problems socializing and interacting with others are likely to be prone to experience these existential issues.


Yeah, well, that's because people suck, so said reaction shouldn't surprise him that much, given that he already acknowledges this part of human nature.

Being surprised or not, I think feelings can still get deeply hurt.

Honestly, when I first read the post, I couldn't tell who the first respondent was calling an 'idiot.' If that's directed at the OP, I say "WTF?"

Don't know enough about the OP or the case in point to make that harsh a judgement. Hence, I gave the OP the benefit of the doubt. Yeah, I too essentially said "Suck it up and learn to live with the world's idiots," but at least tried to say it with some empathy.

True; we can't do a lot to change the cruelty of the world around us. We can do our little bits, but not a lot. However, that doesn't mean we don't have a right to be upset, pissed off, or depressed about it.

Express the depression over that which you can't control. Be mad about it. Let yourself have those feelings. THEN figure out what you can do to 'learn to live with it.'

In response to the recent posts that are going soft on the OP, maybe that could help him in a way, but it should be emphasized that his pessimistic learnings and opinion should be done away with. They make things for him and those around him worse. I use to be similar, so I can relate at least to some extent. He didn't even quit his job for a related reason to his philosophy though, such as that his coworkers were jerks and therefore proving his beliefs. He just doesn't like life, to my understanding.

That's all true, in a nutshell. Life is hard for delicate temperaments and it helps to have others act as sympathetic interactive sounding boards as one tries to work through the feelings.

I quit a good job, too, when I was young and realized that no matter what effort I put in, life hurt so much, so why bother doing anything. I did work through all of that. Never changed anything other than got a thicker hide and lived life more like that serenity prayer,
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
except I prayed to the ceiling at night, rather than a god.

Sorry, can't tell if you're saying it was a good or bad decision? In any case, I've quit jobs for reasons that, while not entirely inane, were not the best, and I wholly regret it. It has much to do with my current unemployability.

It wasn't a good decision but it was who I am, trying to cope without any understanding about why I couldn't just accept everything and not feel waves of anxiety that I couldn't control. If I had stayed in those nice jobs, maybe down the road, holding it together would all implode. I don't know. Life was looming ahead as an anxious path where the efforts I put into it didn't reap the rewards of feeling satisfied with me. I wish I had somebody back then who would have helped me figure it out. My wimping out just made me hate myself and feel less confident about success.

I wholly regret a lot of my decisions but I never had an ASD blue print of how to navigate through an NT designed workplace.

I'm trying to create better job opportunities for my son and people like him (and me.) I wish more of us would resist the desire to be reclusive and work together to make these changes shoulder to shoulder.

Can I have his job? *is currently unemployed*

I quit an easy job because of philosophical despair

You might be an Aspie if...

My argument to my dad is this: he brought me into life without my consent. In order to continue to live I have to work. But he made the life decision not me. Therefore he owes me a living.

So much for the stupid crassness of "nobody owes you anything".

No one, including my folks, address the deep metaphysical existential issues. Instead its just "thats the way things are". So all the stuff about the "real world" and having to eat. Is really just saying what is is. My metaphysics are at that cosmic level. So just insulting me or pointing to practical considerations is sidestepping the issue. I don't know why people are so shocked by or hostile to my arguments. From my perspective they are not outrageous or extreme although there is certainly room for disagreement.

My point is simply that employment, your job, earning a living takes up the bulk of your time and existence, and your salary determines your life offhours too. I'm just unwilling to commit my life to that. I think it is rational for me to say that. It is no more rational to say the opposite. Of course the practical results will probably be negative, but that doesn't address whether I'm right or not on the cosmic level.

The human drive to survive which you refer to is just Schopenhauer's will to life, Nietzsche's will to power, or Freud's Id. Or most recently Dawkin's self-replicating selfish gene that uses human as robots. That force no longer drives me. I could care less whether my genes are passed on. And at the end of the day thats what its all about. Thats why people put up with the hellish drudgery of work. Since I'm free from those restraints and have no desire to integrate, why should I have to put up with the same obstacles? At the end of the day I refuse to be a robot for Dawkin's selfish gene and that's what gets my dad so confused and angry. Its like I'm speaking a different language from Mars.

Did any of y'all see Neil Fergueson's ascent of money. He said that businessmen need the carrot of vast wealth and workers the stick of dire poverty in order to keep the economy running. Well if you didn't treat me like a horse, a mere beast of burden. But as a human personality, who knows what I could accomplish? Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle, Socrates all the Greeks, they didn't have to work for a living. Did they become lazy bums? If I were free to work freely. I wouldn't be a couch potato. I would sculpture my body into a work of art. I would tame nature. I would change the course of mighty rivers. I would take part in industry. I would study natural science and philosophy and explore the depths of metaphysics. I would write poetry, paint artwork, sing hymns. Who knows what a free me, would be capable of? So its that I need a chance to do, not freedom to sit on my butt.

That is what is lost, when a soul like mine is enchained to a Jabba the hutt boss.

As shocking as it may sound I find your mode of life, and decision to accept work as irrational as you find my rejection. I don't understand why and human being would submit himself to this sort of existence. Of course the easy answer is you gotta eat. But that eatings for the sake of eating, thats purchasing life as the expense of the chains of slavery. Its selling your body nay your soul. Selling your body to a boss is like a prostitute selling herself to an extra sadistic John who wants to plat master. Work to survive. Why? So I can survive to work. Look I know from a functionalist practical perspective what I'm saying is nonsense and what you say is logical. But from a cosmic metaphysical perspective you folks are speaking gibberish, and my nonsense is perfectly rational. Which is right? Since when was the worm's eye view so superior to the bird's eye view. Why is it so blindingly obvious that the small picture trumps the big picture?

Why I haven't been as insulting, to be honest the life you folks have accepted seems just as crazy to me as mine does to you.

Before I knew better, I thought of most of my most severe episodes of major depression as philosophical or existential crises. I used those exact words. Now I know better: depression will trick you into thinking that the despair is the truth, the agonizing truth. Don't fall for it.


That's a pretty good indicator, right there. Therapy and the right meds* can help you build up the life patterns that heal depression. It does no good to know that you should eat well, exercise, have some social contact, etc, if you can barely figure out how to make a sandwich or drag yourself to the shower. I hope you'll get some help.

* I learned the hard way that it can take many years for major depressive episodes to lift on their own.

It's both. Depression can become biochemical. However, enamdar does raise very real issues.

From films on pollution in elementary schools and stories of people starving to death in India that no one seemed to care about except for me, to the alarmingly widespread sexual assault and sexual abuse on college campuses that people only seem to make jokes about, as if they lack the skills to constructively deal with the issue, and that's a big part of it, people do lack the skills. In particular, if guys are matter-of-fact and say "that s**t ain't cool," that will go a long way. That will go a long way to creating a climate where people predisposed to this beahvior will not be able to fool themselves that most people accept it. If you wanted to do more, you could write healthy pornography that models positive stuff and that is genuinely erotic (and people into sadomasochism or fetishes or their own personal kicks are sexual minorities and do need to be treated with respect, are people, do have the right to be different, do have the right to pursue their own lives, and even though many of the fantasies may be way out and nonconsenual, the actual actions are consensual--so it gets complicated, it quickly gets complicated. And the whole issue can use someone like yourself able to handle the interplay of complex ideas.) Straight up, we give adolescents bad information about sex, it's Penthouse magazine on one side and all the goody-two-shoes advice on the other and no one, seemingly, works the middle. For example, the distinction between good wildness and bad wildness, I think that could be very helpful.

So, yes, yes, a lot of things bother me. Like when I was working at H&R Block, why do only me and one other fellow employee---over three years!---think that the practice of "cross-collection" was highly questionable and inform our customers in a meaningful way, and not just let this blur as one of ten pieces of paper we ask our client to sign? I don't know! People conform to whatever, more than they need to.

Like I have written before, groups, whether they are the Green Party or peace groups, generally are disappointing. There's grandstanding, people pull radical credentials, people seemingly need opposition (even within the group itself), so I recommend having pretty modest expectations and going a little on the slow side as far as getting involved in a particular group. Hold yourself back a little and see how things go.

Another method is that of animal rights activist Henry Spira (as described in Peter Singer's book ETHICS INTO ACTION). Henry kind of went it alone. As a seasoned activist, he was very skillful in picking targets. His first major target was the American Museum of Natural History who used tax dollars to do research on cats (a name institution, tax dollars, sympathetic animal, plus the research wasn't much referenced by later research, weakening the traditional science argument). It still took more than a year. One very smart thing, the families that came to the museum, they've traveled all the way into the city, they've made plans, instead of asking them to boycott it, Henry asked them to put a single penny into the donation canister as a protest. (About Peter Singer, I am aware that he has at the very least communicated clunkily on the topic of euthanasia.)

Henry made decisions and asked other people to participate, and he wasn't real particular that people did it exactly right. He did not have endless, grueling, tedious meetings in order to have a "democratic" group (which usually just ends up being a clique of a few like-minded people with powerful personalities).

A couple of times, I've tried activism by myself. I don't necessarily recommend that either. What you really need is two or three fellow activists, short meetings, short meetings, really just discussions, and then invite other people to participate in the activities you've already decided on.

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enamdar, I'm in there pitching because a little bit, I've been there, too. Maybe not to the same extent, but at least a little bit I can see where you're coming from.

Now, sg33 talking about the right meds. And if it's like he says where you're having trouble making a sandwich and dragging yourself to the shower---and if you have a doctor you can halfway talk to or can get a doctor you can halfway talk to---certainly something to consider.

And at the same time, engage, don't conform, engage to work on some of these issues, preferably with others if possible. You only need one or two co-activists. Probably take a while, might take a long while (long streaks do not just happen at the poker table), but you might get lucky!

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Please allow me to pitch a little more on philosophy. Okay, we have Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, those cats, but we also have Jonathan Glover's CAUSING DEATH AND SAVING LIVES (1977), I think the best book from a largely utilitarian perspective. Now, now, now, I know what you might be thinking, that utilitarianism gleefully and self-righteously . . . not my versions it doesn't! The best academic version is motive utilitarianism.

The version I'd really like is a framework of Kantian ethics and within that, we practice utilitarianism, and I can't believe no one has really developed that but apparently, no one really has, and we could easily, easily use about ten people. Oh, it's a hybrid theory and the philosophical basis . . . well, I'm no longer that interested in foundationalism, I'm more interested in practical applications. Okay, something else, another version, something slightly different than motive utilitarianism that acknowledges we have grown up in violent, authoritarian, hierarchical cultures, and these "options" are likely to be at the forefront of our minds, and we need to develop and get conversant with other options.

You might also want to revisit G.E. Moore and his ideal utilitarianism (where beauty, knowledge, a few other things, in addition to happiness have intrinsic value).

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I've probably written enough. I'll try and add some stuff on jobs later. And it has to be engagement, not conformity.