Everything we do in life is to feel a certain way.

Anything with a brain is driven to acquire certain feelings and move away from others.

And all feelings have to do with the future.

That is, feelings are either

1. a prediction of what you believe will happen in the future. For example, happiness is the belief that something good will happen in the future.

2. a feeling that you should feel in the future when you come across this event again (data for #1 to work). For example, pain happens after you lose something, and this serves as a reminder for the future, if you ever come across this event again, don't do what you just did.

So on the topic of the post, what is depression?

Depression is the belief that you will not have good things happen to you in the future.
It comes from what you believe (in your emotional brain), not what you think. And your beliefs come from memories (which in turn come from experiences).

The more recent a memory / experience, the stronger it is. If you have few experiences of good things happening in the past X timeframe, you will start to become depressed. X varies for people, it can be 3 months or 3 years.

So what counts as a good thing or a bad thing?

It all comes from how you interpret experiences. This can be controlled consciously, but only if you bring your emotional brain into the meeting and communicate with it in language it understands (action and visualization).

For example, I used to be addicted to reddit. While I consciously knew it wasn't good to be going to reddit so much, my emotional brain didn't mind. But after discovering a process that uses these principles, I quit "cold-turkey" by imagining a lot of bad stuff in relation to reddit. I wrote (I find writing a good method for visualizing) about all the stuff I was missing out on because of reddit. I wrote about how all I was doing there was arguing with a bunch of fat sweaty no-life neckbeards, which would only lead to bad things to me. Then after I wrote this, I went to delete my reddit account and I thought "whoa this is serious" (you HAVE to feel this way, a.k.a. surprise. Surprise happens when your emotional brain realizes it's past way of thinking is invalid). I thought about it for a couple minutes, but followed through and deleted it. After that, I never went on it for months and would be repulsed at the idea of going there. I rarely go there now.

Anyway, about depression specifically to entrepreneurs or "goal oriented" people.
I believe the way to be happy here is to change our beliefs. The goal shouldn't be to have success, but to do the things well that lead to success.

Let's say you want to build a wall (think of the wall as your goal). If you're only happy if you have the wall, then you will be sad throughout the journey until the end when the wall is easy to see finished.

Then after the wall is made, well you don't necessarily have anything good to look forward to now (which is what happiness is), so your happiness will start to drop.

But what if instead, our happiness wasn't dependant on whether we have a wall or not, but rather how many bricks we laid today?

Then we could look forward to "I'm going to lay X bricks today!" and get a much faster success feedback loop.

I'm going to try a process similar to the reddit one above to link good things not with having the wall, but with laying the bricks.