LW - What Depression Is Like by Sable

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What Depression Is Like, published by Sable on August 27, 2024 on LessWrong. I was thinking to myself about the difficulties I have explaining depression to people, when I thought of a relatively good metaphor for it. Bear with me. Sudoku For anyone unaware, Sudoku is a puzzle where one tries to fill in a 9x9 grid of numbers according to certain rules: Each row, column, and 3x3 square must have the numbers 1-9 in them, without repeating any numbers. Black numbers are given, red numbers start as blank squares and must be solved by the puzzler. It's a common form of brain teaser, much like a crossword puzzle or logic puzzle. Some Sudoku puzzles are difficult and some are easy; for our purposes we'll think about ones that are relatively easy. Brain App Imagine, for a moment, that someone hacked your brain, and installed an app in it (don't worry about the how). What this app does is force you to - whenever you want to do something - solve a mild Sudoku puzzle first. Not a hard one, it's not difficult, just annoying. Want to get out of bed? Solve a Sudoku puzzle. Want to start work in the morning? Solve a Sudoku puzzle. Want to get dressed, workout, eat, talk to someone, etc.? First you've got to solve the puzzle. At first it's irritating, but you adapt. You figure out shortcuts for solving Sudoku puzzles. It's brainpower you're not expending on anything useful, but you get by. This is the base case, the core of the metaphor. Now we expand it. There are two dimensions along which this nefarious app gets more annoying as time goes on: 1. It decreases the granularity of the actions to which it applies. In other words, where before you had to solve a Sudoku puzzle to go to work, now you've got to solve a puzzle to get dressed, a puzzle to get in the car, a puzzle to drive, and a puzzle to actually get started working. Before all of those counted as a single action - 'go to work' - now they're counted separately, as discrete steps, and each requires a puzzle. 2. It increases the number of puzzles you have to solve to do anything. At first it's just one Sudoku puzzle; eventually, it's two, then three, and so on. Having to solve a single Sudoku puzzle whenever you want to do anything is annoying; having to solve five is downright irritating. So what happens to you - what does your life look like - with this app running in your head? Dimension 1 As the depression gets worse, the granularity of the actions requiring Sudoku solves gets smaller. What does this look like? At first you go through your normal morning routine, except that upon waking up, you need to solve the Sudoku puzzle to get started. Then you have to do a Sudoku puzzle to get out of bed, another to make coffee, another to get dressed, another to shower, and so on. Then you have to do a Sudoku puzzle to open your eyes, another to sit up, another to swing your legs around and another to actually stand up. Finally, each individual muscle contraction comes with its own Sudoku puzzle. Want to sit up? That single action is composed of many pieces: your arms shift to support your weight, your stomach contracts to pull you up, your leg muscles tighten to keep your lower body in place. All of those now require their own puzzles. Each puzzle, on its own, isn't particularly difficult. But they do take some nonzero amount of effort, and when you add that required effort to every single thing you do, suddenly you find yourself doing a lot less. 'Getting out of bed' is now a complicated, multi-step operation that takes way more work than it used to. Solving all these puzzles takes time, too, so you're slower than you used to be at everything. Activities or jobs that you used to breeze through in seconds can stretch into minutes. Parts of your routine that never left you tired now leave you feeling like your brain has been lift...