Yes, sure, there is more than one way (maybe even as many ways as patients). My point was not about gym or not, it was about the idea that depression is something that is totally outside of one's own control.
> You don’t care about your work because you’re depressed.
> Same with everything else.
> take it seriously and find a good psychiatrist to help with it.
So, you're seeing a depression as an external "illness" that can only be cured by pharmeceutical compounds?
I can only speak for myself, but to me that was dangerous advice. it removed accountability for my actions. the only thing that helped was getting into new actions. actively changing small things.
i was diagnosed with severe depression more than once in my life. things started to change for me only when I stopped believing this narrative.
a psychiatrist will give you pills, a psychologist will talk to you with a "playbook", both will try do bring some predefined indexes of clinical depression down. nothing of this is tailored to your personality.
because you mentioned it: gym does not change everything miraculously (neither do pills), but it taught me that my actions have significant effect. going through a perceived hamster wheel all the time, that realization was a big step forward to me. i did things that i did not want (like meeting people, applying for jobs, etc.). that helped, and it gets easier with each step.
Isn't it just that we were pioneering web2 in a time (after the dotcom bubble) in which access to the internet became more ubiquitous?
Remember the beer app on the first iPhone. Playing with Sensors and graphics on a new device was just fun. Just like tinkering with the Raspberry has been.
Then, this got commercialized and optimized for money to the ground. To me, as sad it might be, "tech" and "web" has just become a mature market.
> Not just the vibes, but the net hope for humanity and short/medium/long term forecasts of the health of the united states were all much higher among the average joe
I'm European, so genuinely curious why that optimism faded away in the US
Happy that you found your way, too.