[ledwix]

Happiness, applied intelligence, and the correct alignment of one's priorities and chosen daily missions are basically all one and the same. It is dynamical, not a stable plateau. And so one way to escape depression is to wonder what a happy person would do, and then do exactly that. Incrementally, one will become the happy person one imagined. One will also feel less reliant on the artificial loops of pleasure fixes and drugs previously considered previews of happiness. Thus happiness is a feedback that one is on the right path.

Expecting people to feel so sorry for you and "fix" everything is not realistic, since all have been wronged on some metric they have judged important. Life is innately suffering and innately composed of subjective unfairness, from all angles, and thus is ironically fair in the end. Every moment in time and point in space is a reset button as long as you say so.

Depression, at least in the first world, generally means not that life is too hard for you, but that life is too easy for you. I've seen it time and again and experienced it myself. Third-worlders generally have no time to be depressed.

Depressed people are accustomed to darkness of the mind. Well wouldn't the darkest thought of all be that, after all that suffering, disappointment, lack of fulfillment, and inability to attain that item, circumstance, or relationship one considered the "final" answer to one's sorrows, one would be obligated to appreciate and enjoy the experience regardless?

The short way to express the previous sentiment is that happiness is a moral obligation. It cuts so hard because it's true. Anything that occurs is new information that allows for personal growth and empowerment. And we might as well be thankful for that.