Is it because of the re-instatement of restrictions? Is it because of the superfluous heat & humidity? Is it because of the emergence of some really strong existential dread as the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel seems ever more farther away than initially noticed, which was already a pin-prick to begin with?
Is it... a true surfacing of a depressive episode?
Well, that last one is hard to know since I haven't thought of spending at least a thousand bucks to get looked at by a therapist to talk through whatever is going on in my head. It's not that my mental health isn't worth at least a thousand bucks (it's really worth much more, considering the amount of income I am forgoing while I am on this sabbatical), but that I do not believe that whatever is going on in my head is providing me with a negative quality of life; in some ways, it isn't really degrading my quality of life at all, let alone bringing it down to the negatives. I still socialise the way I do, given the bloody circumstances that we have now, and I am still taking relatively good care of myself (regular showers, not much change in appetite). I'm not completely anhedonic, though what counts as pleasure has always been a weird thing for me.
That said though, I think that I do run a little hot in that direction. And if things truly go sideways, I would go seek treatment. It's kinda like how when one runs a low-grade fever, the first thing that one does isn't to run off to find the doctor---it is literally to wait and see for a moment. Sometimes that low-grade fever is all there is, a transient moment of temporary atypicality to assist in the recovery/healing process. So, feeling down sometimes isn't that big a deal, if it isn't something that matches the DSM-V diagnostic criteria for an actual issue, and if it doesn't really screw up the quality of life.
I mean, [human] life isn't [human] life unless there are actual changes in emotional states. To live a life without experiencing its highs and lows is a life that is wasted, since what we truly carry with us throughout the entirety of our mortal lifespan is what we bring along in our heads. And despite all the rhetoric about how humans are amazing because we are rational (as compared to the other creatures), the real motivator isn't about rationality but about how we feel. I would even posit that we are rational because we see a need to share how we feel about things with other people in order to seek validation. Since decisions made of emotions cannot find an easy common ground at the emotional level, we back-think some ``hard facts'' that others can objectively observe/measure, and use deductive mechanics like modus ponens or modus tollens with consensually accepted implication statements to convey what we want to convey to others.
That's not a new sentiment from me though---this concept has existed philosophically for a while now. It's just that we are so enamoured with seeking happiness that we forget that happiness is in contrast with sadness, just as contentment (another lofty ``neutral'' goal of life that many seek) is contrasted against insufficiency.
I think that's enough out of this windbag for now. It's another short post, because I have set Eileen-II up for typing mode instead of gaming mode for updating my read-list, and didn't want to ``waste'' the effort to do so. ``Typing mode'' simply means having Eileen-II sitting flat on the table, while ``gaming mode'' refers to the lifting up of Eileen-II on four plastic legs to improve the air-flow from the in-take fans to cool her down as I use WASD to manoeuvre about in the specific game world. I don't like typing in ``gaming mode'' because that raised keyboard feels quite nasty on my wrists to type for long periods on. I've also decided to set all the offsets to −40.0 mV instead of just the CPU Core and Cache.
And now, I am truly done for this post. Till the next one then.
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