Wanting Stuff Makes us Depressed

So, going on with Johann Hari's book Lost Connections, we have a chapter that might be hard to relate to, especially if you're struggling with money issues, but it's worth looking into anyway.

Chapters 8 and 19, the disconnection to, and reconnection to, meaningful values.

It's hard to imagine people talking about "meaningful values" nowadays without someone trying to sell you Jesus, and that's why I thought the title was weird when I began to read chapter 8. But, the chapters don't have to do with religion, but the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motives.

An intrinsic motive is something you do because you want to do it. You think it'll make you a better person. You learn to play an instrument. You learn how to be a better friend. You lift weights.

An extrinsic motive is something you don't want to do,, but you do to get something. You want money, recognition, sex, superior status, etc.

So we all have intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Studies have been done on the subject on extrinsic goals and happiness, and everyone of them says the same thing: Those that achieve extrinsic goals don't become more happy. If anything, they become more depressed.

For many people, the extrinsic goals is a manifestation of materialism. People who work to get the big house, the nice car, the fancy jewelry, they find themselves feeling depressed and anxious and they don't know why.

I thought of my dad when I was reading about this. My dad has plenty of money, and he spends it. Before he retired, he would take lavish vacations to Mexico with his wife every year. After he retired, he bought a luxurious motor home and they take cross-country road trips every year. Him and his wife have very expensive luxury cars. They live in a McMansion in a very well-off town. He also goes balls-to-the-wall every Christmas (as an example, my wife and I asked for a television for our bedroom and he bought us a 60-inch smart t.v.). My dad has spent his life chasing money and spent plenty to prove that he has it. If you wanted to envy someone with cash, he'd be it.

He also has a medicine cabinet full of antidepressants. He also never learned how to be a good dad or a good friend. He never really learned to be good with people at all. His "friends" were always his work subordinates, and after he retired, they retired him. And it pretty much goes without saying that his kids don't spend much time with him. When I do see him now that he's no longer working, he's lonely and miserable.

And then I thought of myself as a kid as I read more into the chapters. A lot of the chapters do focus on kids, as they make it a point to show how advertising warps our minds at an early age. A famous experiment they mentioned was one where they had two groups of toddlers. One group watched two commercials for toys. The second group wasn't given any ads at all. Then both the groups were told, "You're going to go play in a sandbox, and there's going to be two kids there. The first is a nice boy that doesn't have any toys. The second is a mean boy that has a toy truck. Which one do you want to play with?" The kids that saw the commercial decided that playing with the mean boy was better than playing with the nice boy. The opposite was true for the kids that didn't watch a commercial. So we're taught from an early age that material goods=happiness.

Two parts of the chapters really struck a chord with me. One of the people that was interviewed for the chapter decided to take his family out to the country, disconnect from all forms of materialism, and have mostly lived a happy life. His son was made fun of for his shoes at school. His son was confused by this, asking them, "Why do you care?" I remembered being in fourth grade and made fun of for my clothes. I also wondered why they cared.

When I was in the seventh grade, I became a lot more demanding of my parents to get me nicer clothes and better things, because I was tired of being made fun of for having clothes bought at K-Mart and wearing off-brand shoes. My mom was a single mom at the time, and she did her best to accommodate me. I remember her willing to go halves on me on buying a pair of the Shaq Shoes. Ah yes, The Shaq Shoes. The shoes to have if you were a teenager living in 1994.

These cost $120 twenty-five years ago

And I wanted a Starter Jacket. Starter Jackets, now remembered for being overpriced, overhyped shit, were so popular back then that people were actually murdered over them.

After I got both those things (thanks, mom), I got a few oohs and ahhs from my classmates, but after that, things went back to how they always were. And I didn't give a shit about either after a few weeks.

Fast forward to 2014. For the first time in my life, I have money to burn. I was working 70 hours a week and never seeing my firstborn or my wife, but I was paid. And I wanted to prove that I was paid. So I bought a camper and a brand new Jeep Cherokee. I didn't need either of these things. I already had a decent car that cost about $250 a month, but I wanted to show people that I had money, so I bought a car that cost another $200 a month, and a camper. Five years later and my car has 118,000 miles on it, I've had trouble making the payments (I was actually laid off from that job two months after buying both), and my wife and I miss tent camping. We always liked camping, just not in a trailer. Just like when I was a kid, there was a temporary high of getting the oohs and ahhs from people when I first bought them, but after a few weeks, I felt the same as before I bought them, except now I have an extra $400 a month in expenses.

When the wheels finally fall off of my Jeep, I'll probably just buy a Kia. They're ugly af, but they're at least affordable.

The chapters talk a lot about how advertising affects us and convinces us that buying stuff will make us happy. People that work in the advertisement industry have admitted for nearly a century that the goal of advertising is to make people feel inadequate without their product. Going back to the experiment above involving toddlers, it only took two commercials to convince them that the mean boy with the toy truck was better than the nice boy with no toys. We see way more than two commercials every day. We're told constantly that we're inadequate if we don't buy stuff. We have to work hard to defeat this mentality in ourselves, since we're bombarded with it several times a day.

Now don't get any of this twisted. I've already written extensively on financial distress and the toll it takes on mental health. There's a big difference between buying a big house because you think it'll make you happy and struggling to pay the rent. But we do need a reminder to be more focused on creating real human relationships and being better people than being focused on buying fancy shit.

It's one of the things that makes fitness so great for me. After I had bariatric surgery, I could have gone the route that many people take on their fitness journey and focus on the aesthetic-the extrinsic motivation. If I had gone that route, my fitness journey would have gone in an entirely different direction. I'd be hyper-focused on getting six pack abs, starving myself, and doing my best to make myself look good just to get the admiration of others. Instead, I decided to focus on meeting real fitness goals. I ran a half-marathon. I got started in power-lifting. Even now I'm on a diet not because I'm concerned with people calling me fat or whatever. I'm on it because I want to be healthy, and I don't want to go back to having diabetes and hypertension. I'm glad I chose the intrinsic path this time around. The extrinsic path would have resulted in demotivation, and ultimately, failure.

Two Weeks of Keto

Ahh yes, we're finally back to talking about dieting and fitness (I promise I'll write more on Lost Connections later). 

During my last depression wave, I drank alcohol constantly, ate like shit, and barely made it into the gym. Because of this, my weight went all the way up to 310 pounds and I started feeling the symptoms of diabetes once again. So instead of going on a calorie reduction diet or a carb cycling routine, I just decided it was time to cut out carbs completely.

I didn't really intend to end up on the keto diet. In fact, for the first few days I wasn't doing it. I was just not eating carbs. I didn't know there was a difference between the keto diet, a low carb diet, or the Atkins diet until I started looking up low-carb recipes online for meal prep. Going down that rabbit hole I learned the differences between the diets and that the keto diet isn't just a very, very low-carb diet, but it's also a diet with only a moderate amount of protein and a very, very high amount of fat. It was said that the body will learn to burn all the fat you're eating for energy in the place of carbohydrates. This is in contrast to the Atkins diet, which doesn't regulate fat or protein, but also can leave you feeling very tired throughout the day. Not a feeling you want to have when you're doing squats in the gym. So halfway through my first week, I decided to give this diet a go. The liver takes the fat and converts it into well, whatever's going to be used in place of the carbs. Glucose, maybe? I'm not sure. I don't feel like looking all that shit up again. Just trust me that the fats do the job.

Those that describe the keto diet weren't kidding when they said you have to eat a lot of fat. It's determined that for every calorie you eat of protein, you need to eat three times as many calories as fat. I figured that on the low end of my protein requirements, I probably need at least 200 grams per day Because one gram of protein is four calories, that comes out to eight hundred pounds. So, 800x3=2,400, so I need 2,400 calories of fat on this diet per day. Since one gram of fat equals nine calories, that puts me at about 266 grams a day, or 66 grams of fat per meal, spaced out under four meals. Regardless of what I eat, my carbs should be under 30 grams a day, and definitely never exceed 50 grams.

This has been easy enough to maintain, but it has caused me to spend an insane amount of time in the kitchen. It almost feels like I'm meal prepping, or adding food to my meal prep, on a daily basis. 

I heard on the news a few weeks ago that the keto diet is considered one of the least effective diets because it's so hard to maintain. Two weeks in and I'm wondering why people have a hard time staying on it. The large amount of cooking this diet has required aside, it's not like you're missing out on a lot of your favorite meals. There is a keto version of every recipe you could possibly think of.

There's dozens of different ways to make low-carb bread. Fathead dough, almond bread, keto hamburger buns, keto hot dog buns, keto pasta noodles, etc. That's just the bread part. There's a keto recipe for every type of comfort food out there that you would miss eating on a calorie-restrictive diet. Keto fried chicken, keto mac and cheese, keto breakfast sandwiches, keto pancakes, keto crepes...

keto biscuits, keto pizza, keto ice cream, keto birthday cake...

I did a search for "keto chocolate cake" yesterday just to see if my theory of "keto version of everything" held up. Sure enough...

The keto diet is like the internet's rule 34. If a recipe exists on the internet, there is a keto version of it.

But I don't think it's the lack of food options that makes one quit the diet. I think it's got more to do with the infamous "keto flu".

The keto flu is a brief stretch of time that usually takes place sometime between the beginning of the diet and the end of the second week. During that time, your body hasn't quite figured out that it needs to burn fat in place of carbs, so you start feeling weak and lethargic. I had this happen at the beginning of the second week, but it passed after a few days. If you can get past those few days and wait for your body to adjust, it'll be much easier.

I also haven't had any alcohol since starting this diet fifteen days ago. That's the longest I've gone without drinking since 2016. 

After the first few days of the diet, I felt really good because my blood glucose levels had stabilized, after what was likely a pretty continuous hyperglycemic state. I lost six pounds after the first three days. Then, no weight loss as the keto flu kicked in. Then, five days ago, I started to lose about a pound every day. I'm now down to 299 pounds. I have 29 more to go before I reach my goal, and since I'm planning on being on this diet for a total of 8 weeks, it'll be easy enough to do if current trends hold. 

I'm also working out five days a week. Since I went too long without going to the gm, I'm doing Starting Strength again until I can get my strength levels back up. I'm doing karate twice a week as well.

I plan on at least writing biweekly to track my progress.

This is (Probably) why I'm Depressed, and Maybe why you are, Too

Going into the next section of Lost Connections, we dig into Chapter 7 of Johann Hari's book, titled, "Disconnection from Other People", and also the solution, which is discussed in Chapter 17.

Here's my photo for social media:

For years now, my wife has wondered why I'm always on Facebook so much. I didn't know the answer to that until I read this book.

Even before Facebook and other forms of social media, there were blogs. And I was hooked on them. Before that, internet chat rooms and USENET. Yeah, I'm showing my age. Fucking USENET, people. Back in the days when dial up modems were your only option, and it took fifteen minutes for a teenage boy to download a pic of a nipple.

But there was a brief period when I wasn't hooked on any of these. From about the time I was sixteen until the time I left the Army. Like many people, I used the internet to communicate with family when overseas (as well as meet women on dating sites for when I inevitably returned home, as I was single at the time), but other than that, the internet wasn't that big of a deal for me. I wasn't using it as some form of socialization.

In my early teenage years, in my days before karate and weightlifting, I was bullied a lot. Like, a lot. The internet was in its infancy and my mom got a computer with an AOL account, so I used that to socialize. It helped to deal with being an outcast in school.

In high school, things were dramatically different. I fell into a group of friends, I wasn't bullied anymore (because of the whole karate thing, mostly), so I didn't spend much time online unless it was to look up new bands or (hey, I was young, dammit!) to spend fifteen minutes downloading a pic of a nipple. Occasionally I'd look for martial arts wisdom as well. Nothing but using the internet for what it was intended. Looking up information and porn.

In the Army, you're forced to socialize. Privacy begins and ends when you take a shit in a bathroom stall. I'm not exaggerating. That's the only time you get to be alone. You're required to communicate with people. Because of that, you're also forced to make nice with all sorts of people as well. So the Army forces real life socialization.

Some time after leaving the Army, that changed for me. I started using social media more and more to communicate with people. Many of my best friends are on Facebook. The years passed and friends in real life drifted away, but my buddies online were always there.

And then I had kids, and I had no time to see friends in real life at all. And then my wife wonders why I'm spending all my time on Facebook, and I don't know. I just know that I don't want to be without it. Ever.

And now I get why I'm always on it, and why I'm constantly depressed. I'm lonely.

Before Hari starts talking about social media and internet addiction, he cites a scientist that studied the effects of loneliness on the human body. He found that feeling lonely causes the cortisol hormone in one's body to soar to the same level as being physically assaulted. As Hari put it, "It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger." It has the same effect on your health as being obese. It causes weakening of the immune system. It just sucks all around.

Not only that, but loneliness makes it even harder to make friends and break the cycle of loneliness. When you start to feel isolated, it causes you to to withdraw even further. It's a part of our evolution. If we're isolated, we begin to see threats much more easily, and often times when they're not even there. We feel insulted or judged when there was no intention to do either on the part of the other person. It's a cycle that causes more isolation and more loneliness. In fact, as the book says, for someone that has spent their life in loneliness and isolation, it takes even more love and respect from other people to bring them out of it than a more outgoing and social person would need. And that's a lot of emotional labor that most people don't want to spend on a stranger.

It wasn't just the creation of social media that caused this. Since the 1980s, there's been a steady decline of social engagement among society. Hari cites one example given by the researchers he interviewed: Bowling. In decades past, people would join leagues to bowl. Nowadays, the average bowler goes by themselves. Active involvement in community organizations fell 45%. 

So many of us have turned to social media as a sort of band-aid to deal with the lack of real-world socialization. But Johann Hari compares it to the difference between porn and actual sex. It creates a short term fix, but you need the real thing to be truly satisfied. Hari, when interviewing one of the first therapists for internet addiction, that we've become more accustomed to using the internet as a means of communicating with friends, but what we really need is face to face communication. The internet just isn't the same.

Hari outlined a solution in chapter 17. He talked to a therapist that told a story of a woman that came to him because she was depressed. She was very lonely. So he put her in an experimental program in which she would work with a group of people twice a week in a community garden. The people, who were all suffering from mental health issues, were to build a community garden entirely from scratch. They had to meet twice a week to learn how to garden, to plan the garden, and build the garden. The results were, well, I'll let Hari tell it himself:

So some of you may be wondering, "If this is why you're so depressed, why didn't you discuss this first?"

Well, I had to take the time to discuss how economic factors make people depressed because as I learned about social prescribing, I decided to look into it myself. Try to find like minded groups of people that I could meet up with. I'm still very passionate about politics, so I decided to look up my local DSA chapter to meet up with leftists and find people I have things in common with. I looked at things involving fitness. And I looked and I looked, until I realized, I don't have time for any of these things.

I work nights, and I work almost every weekend. Guess when most of these social gatherings take place? When I'm either stuck at work, or sleeping.

The workplace condition and the social decline in this country are intertwined. In the 1980s, a concept called "neoliberalism" began to take hold. It's what's commonly known as "trickle-down economics". It goes against human nature. We're tribal creatures. We learned to survive for millennia upon millennia by banding together in tribes and working together, but now our economic social condition teaches us that we're all on our own. We're supposed to be able to handle everything ourselves, and if we don't, it means we're weak. And so instead of banding together and demanding better working and living conditions as we did in the past, we try to do it all on our own. We hustle harder. We work longer hours and take the lower wage because we have no means to increase our wage, and that causes us to live at our jobs. We're socially isolating ourselves so that we can afford to pay bills and die. And when someone comes along and talks about a solution to work collectively to make things better, we're told it's just socialism.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but it almost seems like the people that pushed neoliberalism designed it with social isolation in mind.

Well, that starts to make socialism sound pretty good, doesn't it? I mean, you have one side that has embraced some of the absolute worst elements of capitalism screaming, "Fuck you! You're on your own! I don't care if you starve!", and then you have the socialists saying, "We should work together to make the world less shitty and make sure your basic economic needs are met." If millennials and generation z are starting to embrace socialism, the reason for that is pretty obvious.

Is Economic Instability Making You Depressed?

I've been trying to crank out a post every week on the subject of depression as laid out in the book Lost Connections. I missed last week, so I'm shooting for two this week.

Anyway, here's another pic for my post to social media:

Johann Hari titles this chapter, "Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future", and it's chapter 12. He discusses the solution in chapter 22.

Hari mentions several examples of people that have lost a sense of a future. He starts by discussing a Native American chief before and after his tribe was forced onto a reservation, and the effects of it today. He talks about a study done that used both anorexic children and depressed children. And he talked about a personal friend working a shit job. The depressed people all had the same thing in common, and that's the lack of an ability to perceive the future.

My last post talked about how a lack of control over your workplace makes you depressed. This chapter discusses how not having a sense of a good future leads to depression. And how economic instability causes that.

While there were non-economic reasons given for this cause of depression, poor economic health is a major one for most of us, so that's where I'm going to focus this post, as many of us can relate to this cause, and the solution is also an economic one.

Towards the end of the chapter, Hari decided to meet up with an old friend from college named Angela. Angela was very happy and carefree in college. He described her as:

"One of those people who seemed to be doing everything at once—starring in a play, reading Tolstoy, being everyone’s best friend, going out with the hottest boys. She was like a firework of adrenaline, cocktails, and old books."

After college, she couldn't get a job because potential employers saw her as overqualified. Desperate for work, she took a job as a telemarketer. The job paid just above minimum wage. It had no set schedule. If she did poorly in sales, her hours were cut the next week. If she could get a full schedule, she'd have enough money to make lunches from chicken and take the bus to work. If not, she'd be forced to eat beans and walk. She would constantly be berated by her boss and powerless to fight back against him. It's the type of job that one only takes if they're extremely desperate for work, and too powerless to fight back against a boss that deserves to be taken out back and beaten with a metal pipe until dead.

Of course Angela was depressed. She, like many of us, lives a life of temporary personal survival that you have without any sense of financial security. She couldn't even take a vacation if she could somehow afford it, because she doesn't even know what her work schedule is going to be like. She couldn't envision any future outside of the current week because her job made it that way.

A lot of us are the same way. If you're financially insecure, you're in constant survival mode. You can't think long term, because you're just trying to survive to the next day, or at best, until the next paycheck. It's easy to understand how that much stress can cause mental health issues.

In chapter 22, Hari makes a case for what he thinks would be the solution. A universal basic income.

Hari talks about an experiment the Canadian government did in the 1970s. The government decided to give the population of a few small towns the equivalent of $19,000 in today's US dollars, no questions asked. The results were phenomenal in both improving the mental health of the population, and also helping people have the means to secure their own future. To quote:

"Depression and anxiety in the community fell significantly. When it came to severe depression and other mental health disorders that were so bad the patient had to be hospitalized, there was a drop of 9 percent in just three years.

...

It had another unanticipated effect, she told me. If you know you have enough money to live on securely, no matter what happens, you can turn down a job that treats you badly, or that you find humiliating. “It makes you less of a hostage to the job you have, and some of the jobs that people work just in order to survive are terrible, demeaning jobs,” she says. It gave you “that little bit of power to say—I don’t need to stay here.” That meant that employers had to make work more appealing. And over time, it was poised to reduce inequality in the town—which we would expect to reduce the depression caused by extreme status differences."

And contrary to popular opinion, it didn't cause the population to become lazy. While there was some reduction in hours, that time not working was spent being better parents to their kids. In other cases, it caused people to get an education so they could work at a job they wanted to be a part of, instead of being forced into working a shit job.

Hari noted that popular opinion keeps a universal basic income from being possible. Everyone knows that if they had more economic freedom, they'd use it to better themselves. You'd spend more time with your kids (if you have any). You'd go to school. You'd spend your free time volunteering. What you wouldn't do is stay home and watch Netflix all day. Unfortunately many people think that's what everyone else would be doing.

Now, I don't agree with Hari's ideas about a universal basic income, but that's because the numbers were crunched, and it would cause the U.S. national budget to double. It's simply not affordable. However, we can and should find ways to make sure that the basic needs of people are met regardless of whether or not they are gainfully employed.

We have four basic needs. We need food, shelter, education, and medical care. We should be finding ways to make sure that everyone has those basic needs met without forcing them to work. Everyone should have access to all of those things regardless of whether or not they are working. And before anyone says, "That just rewards laziness", look two paragraphs up. When the basic income experiment was done, people still worked. They'll still work because they want to, and also for one other reason:

Luxuries wouldn't be promised. We love luxuries, and all of us are willing to work for them. For some of us, having a kick ass, HDTV with a giant screen is a luxury we want. For others, it's an awesome vacation. For me, it's to have a membership at a good gym, another one at a good dojo, and plenty of time to put some hot lead downrange. All of that takes money, and none of that would be promised to me just because I didn't have to work to avoid starvation and homelessness.

I read this book about a year ago when I was still working as a security officer at an oil refinery. It explained very well why I was depressed. Not only did I hate the lack of control at my job (I was ordered to go to different places hourly, and all of my suggestions to improve the place went into the "deleted" section of my boss' email), but I had to constantly pick up extra shifts to make ends meet. For me, working 60 hours a week wasn't weird. It was just something I had to do. And I was depressed because of it. Now, I have a job that pays much more. I don't have to work overtime now. I'm staying home and doing dad shit.

When I talk to people about supporting programs that would eliminate the need to work for survival, I mention both the mental illness benefits of such programs, but I also talk about it in terms of freedom. Every day, millions of Americans go to work at jobs they hate and do it just so they can barely get paid enough to survive. This country talks a big game about freedom, but if you are forced to work to survive, you are not free. This is known as wage slavery, not to be confused with chattel slavery, which is in and of itself a horrific practice, but it's a form of slavery nonetheless. If our country is going to talk a big game about freedom, we need to find ways to make us truly free. The system of wage slavery needs to be abolished. Our country and our mental health will be better off as a result.