I remember reading something a long time ago about a study that showed that people suffering from depressive episodes made more accurate assessments of the true state of their finances, their relationships, etc., than people who were always happy.

What if, in the process of meditating, you've thought long and hard about your lot in life, and have realized that it actually is shit?

Maybe it's a mistake to strictly focus on the "depression is a disease" narrative. Maybe a lot of people actually do have a lot to be sad about while also having nothing they can realistically do about those things. If a person is stuck in a dead-end job, in a place with no opportunity, with responsibilities that prevent you from taking risks, with no savings, then it's really hard to see how that person can be "happy".

I've struggled with depression for most of my adult life. The absolute worst period of depression I went through was when I was single, living alone, working a job I hated, in a city that was far too encouraging of drinking as the only viable past time (Philadelphia). I was very fearful of medication at that time. I had heard a lot of bad stories, not just about side effects, but about effects, like the medication removing both the lows and the highs of their emotional state. There were also stories of negative consequences for people's jobs: losing security clearances and the like (which are very old stories by now, but such rumors don't have a lot of respect for changing times).

I was able to get out of that state through career coaching. I was feeling bad because I hated where I was in life. Fixing that, I got a lot happier. It felt really good to put form to my woes, to put a target on them, and eliminate it, one by one.

I got married. I had kids. And then I hit another, big, depressive period. Work had been a mess going on 5 years by that point. My wife gently pressured me into going to see a doctor and get medication.

I did the medication for a while, and it helped at first, but I think it mostly just confused my own, internal understanding of my emotions. I started it about 2.5 years ago, in the middle of a hellscape of an office. After a year, it just stopped working. The doctor increased my dosage levels, but things never went back to square. I think what happened was that I just recalibrated my understanding of my emotions. I had physical cues before the medication: heart racing, running thoughts, a physical feeling of the floor dropping out from under me. Now, I lacked those feelings, but I actually recognized situations in which I should have felt them, and in some ways the lack of the feelings felt like stumbling, like taking a step for a stair that isn't there. I spent another year on the medication, under the belief that things would be a lot worse without it. There were some negative side effects that were also having a bad impact on my mood.

But I think the biggest positive impact on my mood was getting a good job where I'm respected and nobody brow-beats me over made up deadlines. Halfway through that last year of medication, I changed jobs. I noticed things getting better. I got so sick of not feeling like I was in control of my body, listening to doctors who had no clue what was going on just make guesses at what to do, that I told my doctor I was going to make my own guesses and quit the medication.

I've now been off of it for 6 months and everything is... as good as the best days when I first started the medication, minus the negative side effects, so better in every aspect.