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Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up With Depression (vice.com)
People with depression are more likely to feel bad in response to perceived inequality, according to a study published this week in Nature Human Behaviour. From a report: Simply, in experiments where participants were tasked with playing a game with a strong element of unfairness, those participants with higher levels of brain activity in depression-linked brain regions -- as recorded via fMRI scans -- were more likely to later demonstrate signs of clinical depression. This is a new test of an old idea, one that's been demonstrated in previous research. People with depression commonly demonstrate increased concern for others, or for the perspectives of others. More precisely, prosocial attitudes predict depression, which is in contrast to individualist attitudes. Individualist here basically just means selfish, or relatively selfish. The researchers behind the current study hypothesized that they would be able to observe these tendencies at the level of actual brain activity. Fortunately, there are some tried and true methods of testing prosocial behavior. One of these takes the form of what's known as an ultimatum game. The general idea is that participants are offered rewards that are to be shared among a group. Each offer differs in how much the participant gets in relation to the rest of the group, with prosocial participants more likely refuse larger personal rewards in favor of larger rewards going to everybody else. Individualists take the offer that best benefits them, while prosocial people are more concerned with other people in the group.
I give and I give, lots of great comments, and then people say I'm an AC and worth less than nothing.
If you don't care, you can't get depressed. Only selfish people would need to research this because it's unknown to them. And that makes me sad.
#DeleteFacebook
Nice guys appear to not only finish last, but end up homeless and needing anti-depression drugs, too. Greeeaaaaattt. CEO psychopaths will inherit the Earth!
If you rate yourself based on other people's outcomes compared to your own (basing your self-esteem on parity or superiority), you will always be vulnerable to depression. The only thing worse than this is equating money with happiness and / or satisfaction in life.
Want to be happy? Rate yourself on your own progress in life. Make yourself a little bit better each day. Wash, rinse, repeat.
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FTA: The differences in later depression indicators could not be explained away by demographics.
I wonder if they included religious belief/affiliation as a demographic because the game they played is based on economic (i.e. temporal) gains. If everyone was an atheist, this study would hit the nail on the head.
More importantly, IMO, FTA:
The implication is that people with depression (or likely to have depression) generally have a "greater empathic concern for others," in the words of Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado, psychology researchers from Rutgers University, who penned a related commentary accompanying the study. People with depression just feel bad when others get a shit deal.
The takeaway is much more about generous people being upset about others getting screwed over than, "nice guys end up depressed more than selfish guys."
You need to sort your own shit out first. This also goes for losing cabin pressure in an airplane and running a robust phone or data network.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you were truly a selfless helpful person, it wouldn't matter if they thanked you, the deed itself being its own reward and all that. While being thanked is nice, worrying whether you will be thanked tips you towards a selfish category; you help others so that you will be treated as a hero. When this doesn't happen you get depressed because now it was wasted effort for no psychological gain. As a 'selfish' anti social person, its amazing to me just how down people can get just because of diminished social reward.
Yeah - that's what the frontal lobe DOES, along with giving us the ability to imagine and plan. It largely suppresses the activation of other parts of the brain, so we can have culture and cooperation.
If we didn't hold back, otherwise 'smart' folks would just gather resources, then kill their 'opposing' cohorts. But they don't - because the same things that make them smart also let them imagine the consequences of using their ability to plan fully against others.
The depression that happens usually comes about in circumstances like this - where you're in some place you aren't allowed to leave, but care too much to use your power to harm others, even knowing that idiots will win from you holding back. So, you just stay in a loop, doing nothing with your relatively high potential.
Ryan Fenton
I'm a helpful person my nature, but recently I've started to wonder if it's worth it
Personally, that's not an equation that makes emotional sense to me. The problem is that if I'm doing better than the people around me (by whatever definition of "better"), then not doing what I can to help others out makes me feel like a selfish shit.
Whether or not others appreciate it doesn't factor in at all.
I think they need to use a different term for this..the given definition here is putting a bad slant on Individualism, which IMHO is one of the main things that made the US the success it has been to date.
Individualist means that one is self sufficient, able to take care of ones self in life and business...and doesn't need the govt or community really that much for the leading of his life and success (or failure).
That does not necessarily mean the individualist does this at the detriment of others or the community.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I have come across anecdotes about a person's depression being due to them being wrapped up in their own concerns, but when they decided to help other people they discovered that they were also helping themselves because their depression started to lift. As an example of such an anecdote, the start of the semi-biographical movie "Patch Adams" (starring Robin Williams) concerns the main character who enters a mental health hospital due to feelings of depression after his father's death. While there, he strikes up friendships with other patients, tries to cheer them up, and sees that their and his mental health improves. As a result, he discharges himself from hospital and enters medical school so he can have a career helping other people.
So, apparently being unselfish can make you depressed, but it can also help you escape depression. I read the TFM but it is light on details and the main study is behind a paywall. My hypothesis is that feeling bad for the misfortunes of others and doing nothing to ease that misfortune might make you depressed, but feeling empathy for the misfortunes of others and actively trying to help them can give you a sense of purpose, which in turn can bring satisfaction and happiness. As a side effect, working to help others can also increase your social circle and sense of community, which, in turn, are likely to be beneficial for your mental health.
"Life is a comedy to those who think – and a tragedy to those who feel."
Realizing you can't fix things, for an altruistic individual, could be a huge contributor to depression. Caring about other people and coming to the realization that nothing you do can make any sort of lasting difference would be a huge crushing blow to a lot of people. On the flip side, selfish people tend to me more successful because they only look out for themselves, so maybe the reason they don't get depressed is because their brains don't have to deal with the disappointment. Take it to the extreme -- the psychopath executives of large companies don't succeed by helping their employees out...they succeed by squeezing them as much as they can and taking the profit that results for themselves. They're a special case because they're physically incapable of feeling compassion for others, and the worldly rewards they have access to as a result mute out almost any negative feelings.
For the altruistic among us, religion used to provide a buffer against this depression that occurs when finding you can't fix things or people. Religion lets you say, "it's in God's hands" and teachings of most religions tell people to spend their lives helping others regardless of how much impact they make. That's becoming less of a draw these days, and I don't know what average people are going to do about it. Maybe they'll get more selfish. If you don't believe you'll be rewarded after a lifetime of self-sacrifice, maybe the logical step is to try to get as much out of life while you can.
Link to TFA study...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Why?
Because I genuinely care about the well-being of my fellow man.
Why do you feel guilt if you're winning the race, so to speak?
I'm not engaging in a race, so there's no "winning" or "losing". Ignoring that, I'm not motivated by guilt for having success -- why in the world would that make anyone feel guilty? -- I'm motivated by wanting everyone to be better off. If I am in a position to further that goal, it would be weird not to do it.
I can come up with a lot of logical, selfish reasons why this is a good thing to want (the better off everyone else is, the better off I am, after all), but the reality is much more basic (and still selfish): it makes me happy to see others doing well, and it makes me unhappy to see others not doing well.
Individualist means that one is self sufficient, able to take care of ones self in life and business
It goes beyond being able to take care of ones self; it also means the person is motivated to take care of himself over taking care of the community at large. In other words, selfish.
I don't believe those two are necessarily mutually exclusive.
You can be self sufficient, you can be successful.
After that, you have a choice...you can help others.
You many not to choose to help others...is that selfish? Not really.
Selfish is taking that prevents others from having too, and then not sharing.
But if you make your way through life, not breaking any laws, etc....you become somewhat wealthy. You're not obligated to help others. It is nice, a VERY good thing, but you're not being selfish if you don't give. Because, those others...had opportunity to do what you did and better themselves due their own individual efforts.
Charity giving is a wonderful thing, but it is not an obligation of life. Not feeling a need to be giving and being selfish are not always the same thing.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This completely explains the people I know whose lives revolve around hourly outrage against injustice on social media.
They have a personality flaw which causes them to over-empathize, which makes them prone to depression and emotional instability.
Waking up every day and logging on to deliberately find something to be outraged about temporarily resolves their depression by way of providing a strong countervailing emotion -- righteous anger. This also explains why President Trump is the best thing to happen to them and why our culture created him and why TV ratings for certain shows are up this year: his early morning tweets ARE the morning dose the over-empathizers need to push their depression back for a few hours. But of course, once you hop on the SJW cycle, once the outrage wears off you are faced with the sadness of how impotent you are to fix the thing you were insanely upset about, which sets up the depression cycle for the evening, which then requires late night fake-comedy/fake-news shows like Fallon and Kimmel and SNL which act as the evening dose to make people laugh and smooth it over and shake their heads at the world but feel the salve of shared humor.
Next morning the depression has returned and they wake up once again depressed a.f. and need to hop onto Facebook/twitter to get the morning dose.
It also fits with the logic of this brilliant treatise ( https://www.goodreads.com/book... ) on how most of our actions taken as a result of empathy are often really just symptomatic relief for their own anxiety induced by empathy. That is, empathizers do Stand UP! and Take Action! but their actions mostly just help THEMSELVES feel better, while not helping and often hurting the people who are the putative targets of the empathy.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
I agree with you BUT I think the reality is that individualism in USA is now mainly correlated with and revolve around selfishness and/or with little regards to others, which also correlates to many recent events from USA.
I don't believe those two are necessarily mutually exclusive.
You can be self sufficient, you can be successful.
After that, you have a choice...you can help others.
You many not to choose to help others...is that selfish? Not really.
Selfish is taking that prevents others from having too, and then not sharing.
But if you make your way through life, not breaking any laws, etc....you become somewhat wealthy. You're not obligated to help others. It is nice, a VERY good thing, but you're not being selfish if you don't give. Because, those others...had opportunity to do what you did and better themselves due their own individual efforts.
Charity giving is a wonderful thing, but it is not an obligation of life. Not feeling a need to be giving and being selfish are not always the same thing.
A rich person didn't get where they are without society. By not giving back, well....that's pretty much the entire definition of rent-seeking.
A rich person who doesn't give back to their community is a rent-seeking selfish asshole. Massage your conscience all you want, but society gave you the opportunity, and not giving back to it is a dick move.
How selfish of you to suggest they not use "individualist". Just kiddin'!
On another note, it's all the people trying to help others that destroy traffic in my neck of the woods. They are constantly coming to a complete halt to allow side roads to enter the main highway. They think they are helping the line of 3 guys trying to exit their neighborhood, but they fail to realize it is causing 250 cars behind them to have to jam on their brakes and come to a complete stop. Look in the rear view you unselfish selfish people!!!
It's deeper than that, it's not that they are concerned about how others perceive them. Instead some people care about the happiness of other people more than their own. And the world being the unfair place it is, people who put others before their own needs are taken advantage of and treated unfairly.
As for depression, people are depressed because chemicals in their brain tell them to be.
As for depression, people are depressed because chemicals in their brain tell them to be.
Ok, but why are buttons depressed?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Society only *works for* the ones that succeed. For them, it's an exploitable labor pool. That's how you gain superhuman wealth without superhuman productivity, by extracting wealth from the labor of others.
If you're poor on the other hand, society is mostly a collection of unaffordable high-end businesses and maybe some friends who will help you out a bit, if you're not surrounded by too many individualists.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
True. WW2 (and WW1 for that matter) only helped further increase its success.
The USA was successful because it had (as a whole) huge opportunities:
- A crapton of untapped natural resources, basically "all you want is here somewhere";
- Native population which was easy to get rid of through technological superiority (smallpox also helped);
- A steady influx of people from various nations who really-really-REALLY wanted to succeed (the fact that land was simply given away also helped);
- No neighboring countries who would pose a threat to its borders.
In a nutshell, the land of plenty and no competition. It would have been a miracle NOT to become successful.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You're right, this isn't a zero-sum game (to an extent -- the nature of our economic system is such that it requires there to be losers), and there's certainly no shame in making yourself better off.
But I take issue with the notion that making yourself better off is the best way to make others better off. It is important to take care of yourself -- it's hard to lift other people up if you're flat on the floor -- but simply being better off, all by itself, is not helping your fellow man. You actually have to, you know, do things that help.