I don't think most mental health professionals would say that mental illness is a reason to maintain a damaging lifestyle. Quite the opposite - damaging normal healthy function is one of the defining traits of a mental illness, and one of the ways that mental illness is distinguished from normal variance in human cognition and emotion.

But mental illness, as a framing, suggests a different course of action.

When I was severely depressed many years ago, I was constantly trying to force myself to take more actions, to do more to change my life circumstances. I was nearly always screaming at myself inside my head to JUST DO SOMETHING AHHHHH. But that didn't work.

It wasn't that I didn't want to do things. It was that I was, in a local sense, incapable of doing them. Not in the sense that I physically could not, say, move my muscles to go clean up my kitchen, but in the sense that I could not trigger the series of brain processes required to do that. The analogy I used a lot at the time was that it felt like being one of those old cord-pull lawn mowers. I could pull and pull and pull and pull and all I'd ever hear was the engine sputtering, and it was the most frustrating thing in the world.

But today, here's how I'd frame the state I was in:

* I was under significant stress from my living situation and self-criticism.

* I was under too much stress to emotionally cope with, so

* I disengaged from feeling anything too strongly about my life or the world around me,

* Which drained the positive and negative reward structures that feed into motivation, and

* I spent so much energy trying to fend off those thoughts that

* I didn't have sufficient mental energy for anything else, so

* I couldn't do the daily maintenance tasks needed to avoid further deterioration

Put another way, ability to overcome one's natural tendencies is a finite resource, and I was exhausting mine completely just getting through the day without losing it, which was disabling my ability to fix my situation.

I didn't need to yell at myself more. What I needed was an environment that wasn't constantly stressing me out, and to train myself not to burn all my mental energy hating myself. Once I got that environment, once I understood that motivation is only very weakly under my direct control, and once I trained myself to maintain an environment that didn't add stress to my life, my mental health struggles abated.

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To put this in more HN-y terms, mental illness has a lot of similarities to working with a crappy external API (that's the mental illness bit) and to technical debt (that's the life-state bit).

You can't go fix someone else's API. It's going to feed you crappy poorly-structured unreliable data all day long and there's nothing you can do about it. But you can build a wrapper around it. You can validate it. You can learn to view what it tells you with a critical eye, and to correct for its common errors.

And you can't fix technical debt today. Today you just have to engineer around it. But if that's all you ever do, the debt keeps accumulating and the problem gets worse. But if you can free up some time to go fix things, that frees up even more time to fix even more things, and you can find yourself on a more positive feedback loop that brings you back into a healthy place.

The way you're framing this, BLKNSLVR, is like saying "it's possible to build software on top of this foundation, so just do it". And it is possible. But it isn't easy, it burns far more resources than it should, and it doesn't fix the problem. The proper solution is to figure out a way to not be on fire today, then fix the underlying problem so you're not on fire tomorrow.