I’m keeping this post on standby because from time to time people ask me what to do if one is depressed, or thinks they are depressed. I am not a professional, I am just some guy. But sometimes people want to hear from some guy. So here’s what I got.

I believe I’ve been depressed a couple of times. Here are my thoughts about it.

transcript:

What’s up, guys? So for today’s video, I felt like I wanted to talk about depression, which is something I have, I think I have some experience with. I wouldn’t say that I’m an expert or, you know, I’m not a mental health professional or anything like that, but I do feel like I have some experiences worth talking about and worth sharing, so let’s, let’s do that. Where to begin? I guess, narrative wise, let me talk about my life story a little bit again.

I don’t think I was depressed as a child. I think my childhood is pretty pretty alright. I was, you know, having fun, reading books, playing video games, you know, I I didn’t have any reason. Well, even the phrase reason to be depressed is a very tricky one because, you know, it implies this certain cause and effect relationship in which depression is an outcome, and I don’t think it works quite that way. I have a thread on Twitter somewhere about how, you know, somebody said something like, you’re so success to somebody else.

Somebody said something to somebody else, which was along the lines of, you’re so successful. What do you have to be depressed about? Which I think reveals a belief system where you might be depressed if you’re going through difficult things, and you shouldn’t be depressed if you are, you know, achieving conventional ideas of success, which if you examine the data, if you look it up, you’ll find that it doesn’t correspond to reality. I think a lot of a lot of Nobel Prize winners subsequently have been depressed and even, committed suicide. Why is that?

I think, you know, so to some degree, so I think the phrase that I had or the tweet that I had was, I don’t think I think depression very often or, you know, some amount of the time is it’s not so much a function of, the relative value of the cards that you’re dealt in life, but just a frustration with the way the game is at all. Right? So, there there are some facts, like, people in in cities are more depressed than people in rural communities. There’s a bunch of quotes from, Sebastian Junger’s tribe. He has a whole bunch of stats and figures, and and I think there’s there is correlation between kind of, how much a person feels embedded in their community.

It feels taken care of, feels kind of, socially embedded, socially relevant, valued, and and how much they’re not. So, you know, in a in a more atomized, capitalistic kind of society where where, you know, even if you have a lot of money, the fact that you need to spend money to get what you want is can be depressing in a way. I totally believe that they are depressed billionaires and, you know, the money might have made them it might have made them happy to to to accumulate the money, but then sitting in the chair, right, where you have to then kind of, be the one to to make things happen or, you know, just, you know, who who are your friends, right? Like, do you know if the people in your life really care about you or are they just hanging out with you for the money? You you everything becomes kind of, materialistic.

It becomes kind of, you start worrying that everybody wants something from you. That they don’t actually care about who you are. They just care about your money, stuff like that. That has to be depressing. Right?

Like, it’s people who don’t have money will say that, you know, oh, boohoo. Cry me a river. Like like, I’ll trade places with me. I’ll happily be depressed in your shoes, which it’s easy to say, right? But, you know, I think it’s more complex than that.

Anyway, yeah. I think okay. So my first experience of what I think was depression was around, I would say, around the age of 17. I think there were smaller incidents and smaller frustrations that that accumulated from school when I was about maybe 12, 13, I was doing pretty well. I was doing very well in school early on and, you know, straight a’s and everything like that.

But then eventually, so I got into Singapore’s, gifted education program, which I might make a separate video about. And, I, you know, I did well by national standards, but I didn’t do well by gifted standards. So, you know, relative to my peers in my class, I I was made to feel like I was, underachieving, and I was not doing well enough to get into, like, the best best school. And my my parents were disappointed with me, and, I had to go for, like, counseling. It was it was a mess.

I I I might talk about that separately, but it was just, it was really unpleasant. But I thought that I, you know, I I remember being sad. I remember being, pretty miserable at not doing as well as I’d hoped. I remember crying. I remember, just kind of beating myself up and feeling like I was being beaten up by by society, by my my family, and my my context.

But I didn’t I don’t think I felt depressed then at 13 or 14. Maybe it was like accumulative, maybe. I don’t know. But, like, around 17, so things got messier. I repeated a year in school, in junior college.

I didn’t know what I was gonna be doing. I I felt like junior college was way more, almost dystopian. Like, it felt like, so like, you know, when you’re 13 or 14 or when I was 13 or 14 and I was in, secondary school. Right? So you’re still learning English, math, science, chemistry, physics.

Like, it those things at that level, it still kind of felt relevant to life. Like, it felt like I was learning things that were, you know, sensible and worth learning. But by the time I was in junior college, apart from, like, the general paper, like, it felt like the math and science that I was doing there, it seemed not relevant to my life. It seemed like kind of excessively specialized and I wasn’t interested in being so specialized. And I realized on retrospect, it would probably have been better for me to go to Polytechnic.

So in Singapore, you have like, when you’re done in secondary school, you can go to junior college, you can go to Polytechnic, you can go to there’s there’s other tertiary institutions. But you are generally so if you are, like, you know, middle class or, you know, moderately smart, you’re generally expected to go to junior college. Well, it depends on on the crowd that you hang out with, but, like, you know, I so I used to hang out with the gifted kids, and it’s all gifted kids pretty much go to junior college because junior college is a stepping stone to university. And so it’s it’s just assumed that by the time you’re age 13 or so, that you’re gonna wanna go to university, which, you know, I didn’t even have a chance to make that choice. Like, the the choice was architectured for me.

You know, it was it was framed for me that, you know, all my friends are going to university. Any smart kid would go to university and to go to university, you gotta go to junior college and you gotta it just it it felt wrong to me in a way that I couldn’t explain. And looking back now, I can kinda say that, you know, I was already on the Internet around age, like, 7. Right? So I had I had already been on the Internet for, like, a decade at this point, and, you know, I was playing in a band.

I was on Myspace. I was on forums. I felt like I was learning something from the Internet that that was telling me something about the state of the world and how the world is and building relationships with people around the world that felt very dissonant with what I was going through in school and school just felt fake. It felt fake. It felt forced.

It felt arbitrary. It just it was it it didn’t make sense to me. I hated it, but I felt like I had no choice but to go every day and, around the so I I in 2007, I was repeating a year in school. I so I had a band that was a big source of meaning in my life. Like, I’ve written a whole draft of a novel about, my experiences in the local music scene.

And my band was kind of falling apart because, my drummer so me and my guitarist, we both repeated a year but my drummer didn’t repeat a year so he had his a level examinations the 2nd year And so towards the end, it felt like, just the we we couldn’t practice anymore. We like, he had to focus on his studies, and the band was kinda taking a back seat. So the thing that was kind of one of the primary sources of value and meaning in my life was kind of fading out. My girlfriend then, who is now my wife, we we got back together, but my girlfriend broke up my girlfriend and I broke up. So that was super depressing and I mean it was upsetting.

Right? And so my girlfriend broke up with me. My band was falling apart. I repeated a year in school. I tried dating other girls, and it never worked out.

Like, I think it’s because on retrospect, I think it’s because I was coming at it from such a place of neediness. I think every girl who I interacted with could tell that I was kind of almost desperate for the validation, I guess. Right? Like, what does a what does a 17 year old want in a relationship? Like, you know, what does a relationship mean someone to to just share a space with, like, an emotional space, intellectual I mean, and it’s hormones, your horny, you wanna you wanna make out.

But, you know, it’s the the the it it doesn’t When I try to make sense of the feelings that I had, I just felt unwanted, unloved, unappreciated. I felt like I was in a kind of prison. Right? I felt like, I had no choice but to follow this path that I didn’t believe in and didn’t care for. And, you know, I had all these beliefs about how things should be, but reality the reality of my situation was not in accordance with those beliefs.

And so I felt distress at being at, you know, at at that at that kind of, discordance. Right? It just just dissonance. It just felt like, you know, like like an out of tune instrument. Like it’s jarring.

It’s like, oh, what’s going on? And, you know, so either I I had been the whole time I was growing up, you know, everyone would say that I’m really smart. So and I felt smart, I guess. Like, I would just get things quicker than other people and and and I’m used to I read a lot of books. And so I never doubted my own intelligence, like raw intelligence, but I didn’t seem to be able to do what I was told.

I didn’t seem to be able to even even myself, like, when I try to make a study plan for myself, I couldn’t seem to follow it. And I just felt it’s all I almost feel like it’s almost a kind of dysphoria. I mean, I I don’t wanna so I’m I’m a straight guy, so I don’t wanna make claims about experiences that I haven’t had. But it it reminds me of that. It felt like I was living a life that wasn’t real in a way.

Right? I felt like I felt like I was in a bad dream, like a persistent bad dream that wasn’t going away. And I did have suicidal thoughts. But you know, the thing that I I don’t think I ever took those thoughts seriously because I was I would I I felt like I had to be right at some level. Like, I I like, my criticisms or my discomfort and all that, Like, I I I felt that I was being rigorous about in my examination.

On retrospect, not as rigorous as I could have been, but I was as rigorous as I could be at the time. And just it didn’t make sense, and so I wanted to figure out what I was wrong about. Like like, I felt like I was mostly right but wrong in some ways that I couldn’t comprehend. And, you know, from past experience, I know that I eventually comprehend things when I just try to make sense of it long enough. So I did that and you know, I also felt that like if I committed suicide, you know, it would have been too too small, you know, like, I so, you know, I I am a dramatic individual and I did feel that, you know, if I had I remember thinking so I remember there was 1 year, I don’t know if it’s 2007 or 2008.

I went to Bay Beats, which is like Singapore’s annual public music festival, And, you know, I knew a lot of the bands that were playing. I knew a lot of the people who were showing up to show to catch those bands. So I was walking around all these people and, you know, every other minute or so, somebody about, hey, Visa. Hey. How are you doing?

Hey. You know, like, I was people recognize me and one of the bands even gave me a shout out from on stage saying, like, Visa organized this wrote a review, and that was really nice. Blah blah blah. And, you know, it should have made me really happy, but I just felt empty inside. I just felt cold and, like, you know, all these people are saying my name, but like if I died in a month or 2 months, they would have moved on and then it would be like I had never been here.

And that idea made me, I don’t know. I want to say angry, but not, you know, not at anybody specifically. It it made me want to change that. It made me want to to change the world in a way, right? Like, I felt that the world that I inherited was not good enough and that I needed to change it and I was gonna change it.

It is You know, so I sometimes joke in private that like, I actually feel like I have a lot in common with, mass shooters, which is that, you know, I believe that we share the same sense of frustration with social reality. And the difference being that, first of all, I I don’t believe in violence. And second, I I have kind of imagination and vision to to reshape the world or reshape my world around myself to become what I believe is right. And, you know, there’s a poem that’s like, that ends with, the red washing down the bathtub does not change the color of the ocean at all, which is that, yeah, like, you know, if if you want to make if you want to change the ocean, you can’t use your blood. Like, you have to do something much bigger, much longer, much more, you know.

So in a way, like, I think the thought I had last night was like, in a way, I did commit suicide in a sense. Like, you know, again, not this is I don’t mean to to trivialize people who have attempted it or, you know, who have been through it or who are grieving family members who’ve been through it, friends who’ve been through it. I, you know, I, my my heart is with everyone who has suffered. But like, you know, so that’s their suffering, which I will never relate to, hopefully, or, you know, it’s difficult stuff. Right?

But, like, I went through what I went through, and it did feel like there, like, you know, I’ve and I’ve spent a lot of time reading about suicide at that point, and, I I’ve spoken with people. You know, I’ve been on, like, our suicide watch and I talked to a lot of people and just the sense that I get is, you know, very often people who have suicidal thoughts or, like, who are who that kind of thing, they they it’s not that they want to die so much as they don’t want to keep living anymore. And I feel like, you know, in to some degree, I I did Yeah. I did not want to live like that anymore. And I guess, you know, like, to there’s there’s probably some privilege in the fact that the pain of my life at the time, while painful, was not unbearable.

Right? So I That is what it is, but, just I remember I guess I just want to talk about how how bleak life felt when I was 17. I felt like I truly felt like I was trapped. I truly felt like like I was in prison in a way and, like, for a crime I did not commit, right? For the crime of being me.

Like, why me? Why why did I have to be subjected to what felt like disproportionate, well, I can’t say abuse but like just ill treatment. I don’t know. I just I did not feel You could say it’s selfish maybe like, you know, everyone goes to school or whatever. But I I genuinely feel feel like I was picked on more because I’m tall and dark and have a funny name.

And, I don’t know. I’m I’m not neurotypical, I guess. I I I still can’t entirely explain it. I will still need to talk to a lot more people about their experiences and their lives and then their thoughts to kind of contextualize. I know how I feel about it.

The challenge in talking about it is calibrating my utterances to resonate with other people’s perspective on the world. And so I’ve had to study other people’s lives and beliefs to try and understand how I can talk to them about my experiences. Right? So this is just another attempt and I will revise my perspective on this as we go. But I do believe I was basically clinically depressed when I was about 17.

I just, how did I get through that? I just lived through each day. I journaled a lot, I guess, and, but I still played music. Music meant a lot to me. I I am one of those guys who will say that music saved me in the sense that it gave me, you know, it’s it’s musicians and artists are like, are like the therapists of the human species and like, you know, they Yeah.

They You can You pay for their albums or or gigs and whatnot, but like they are underpaid, you know, for the for the emotionally for the for for how they help people with their feelings. Right? They put words to feelings. They put sounds to feelings. They give people a context to make sense of their feelings.

You know, so even when you’re singing along the My Chemical Romance and singing I’m Not Okay, if not for that song, would I have been able to say that? I don’t know. And it’s it’s it feels good to say it out loud whether to to to whatever degree is true or not true. Like, it’s theater. Right?

It’s drag. You experiment with the utterances to see how it feels and see whether it resonates. And, yeah, I would say that a substantial amount of my emotional intelligence is a function of music and my exposure to theater and the arts. Yeah. So I survived day by day.

I was very miserable, but somehow I just kept persisting and it felt like, once I guess once I was done with universe sorry, once I was done with junior college, that was a huge weight off my shoulders. I got back together with my girlfriend. We were both we were separated for, like, 2 whole years. We broke up when we were 17, and we got back together when we were 19. And it felt like we were different people.

We both tried to date other people, but we didn’t nothing. Nobody worked. And, we got married, like, a couple of years later, which was nice. I mean, we’re still together. We this is our house.

But, yeah. Then I went to the to the army. So in Singapore, every able-bodied male has to serve, either in the military or the police or the civil defense force, and I was assigned to the military, and I much preferred military life to school life. I feel like, while mandatory conscription is a bit of a drag, you know, in the context of Singapore, as a Singaporean, I understand the reasoning behind it. You know, I understand the purpose.

I felt to some degree proud of participating in my national, process. Like, you you know what I mean? When you talk or when you when one guy talks with other guys about NS, we all kinda complain about it. We’re like, you know, gotta surf, waste 2 years of our lives, you know. It’s it’s as individual experiences, it’s it’s not something I would really recommend, but, you know, within the broader context, like, having suffered through it or whatever, it’s nice that when I see another guy wearing, army singlet, I know that we share that common experience.

And, you know, I understand the purpose of national service for men in Singapore. So and I felt like the people in that institution were honest with me about my role in that organization and kind of, what we were what was expected of us. Like, I feel like there’s this double speak in school where they don’t they don’t entirely at least in in my case, in my experience, where they don’t where they aren’t entirely honest with you and they kind of just have these vague platitudes about, oh, it’s about your future or it’s about your education. And, you know, I am now now 29 years old. I’m gonna be 30 in like 3 months.

I make a living with entirely on the Internet with skills that I picked up on the Internet. Nothing from junior college helped me. In fact, I would say junior college set me back as a writer. Like, I had to unlearn what I had been forced to learn in school in terms of writing because, you know, school has a very strict and formulaic style of writing. And the style of writing that normal readers actually like to read is when you write like you speak or you write, you know, write from the heart.

You write you write what you think. You write what is most important and what is most interesting, what is most funny as opposed to here are my topic sentences. Here is the here is the, you know, evidence behind my argument. Like, that there’s just something there’s something stodgy and and formulaic about that structure that is just it takes a while to shake off if you’ve been learned to if you learn to do it. I mean, I was getting I was doing really well in for, like, essays and stuff, and even then it’s like, you know, I would be improvising and and just goofing off.

But, where was I going with that? Yeah. So I, you know, I make a I sell I, you know, today, I think I crossed a personal milestone and I sold, like, US100 dollars worth of ebooks. Nothing in junior college prepared me for that. Every I learned how to do that from playing in bands.

I learned how to do that from running a MySpace page. I learned how to do that from arguing with people on forums. Like, I have been entirely responsible for my own education and my own economic viability. And I and I get that, you know, for most people, that’s probably not really an option. For most people, you know, I I am so tired.

I I I don’t agree that most people can’t do it. And I I think most people have been conditioned to believe that they can’t do it. And so once they believe it, it becomes true. Like once you believe that you can’t live in the wild, then you have no choice but to live in the zoo. Once you live in the zoo, you have to jump through the hoops to get your food.

But, you know, every zoos are recent inventions. Like, for a long, long time. Like, civilization is a recent invention. For 100 for, like, a 100000 years, humans lived without civilization. And, you know, it’s only been we have lived with creature comforts for a relatively short amount of time, and we are already, you know, so just so kind of, dependent on them.

I mean, we seem dependent on them, but I don’t think we’re as dependent on them as we think. But, like, we are so afraid of discomfort and, failure and all of those things. Anyway, this this video is not supposed to be about civilization. This video is supposed to be about depression. Anyway, yeah.

So National Service was actually pretty good for me. I had a lot of time to read. I had a lot of time to write, which I didn’t have in junior college. So I think that was like a release valve for me, and I became less depressed. I be you know, I became more well adjusted.

I started I was spending more time with my friends. I was writing a lot. That felt pretty good. You know, I I had a good time psychologically, emotionally during my national service. I created a Facebook group with a bunch of friends locally, and we did meetups, and that was another source of meaning for me.

So all of that went pretty well. I became, like, a blogger in Singapore. I was blogging about local politics, and that, you know, that gave me another sense some sense of meaning and and made me feel like I was contributing to something, like I was being a part of something. And then in late 2012, I got married. And so in 2013, I had to get a job to pay for this house, right?

And, I got a job at this software company, It’s called Anaphor Referral Candy, and, it was it was, you know, I spent five and a half years there. I was the the the founder, Dinesh, he found me through my blog, and, it was some of the best I would say it was the best 5 years of my life in terms of, learning. You know, Dinesh was a real mentor to me in a way that I had never had before. He was like this this model of of productivity and responsibility and and, you know, to some degree, a certain masculine excellence. You know, I I don’t know if he would have described himself as masculine excellence, but like just a male role model that I admire that, you know, I looked at and I thought I want to be more like this guy.

And, you know, I I know that I will never be him him because, you know, each person can only be themselves. Right? So I wanna be the best version of myself. Dinesh would never be wearing rings and sitting in front of a video camera and talking about his feelings on YouTube. That’s a that’s a Visa thing to do.

That’s not a Dinesh thing to do. But, you know, the discipline my priorities are, figuring out what my goals are, figuring out what step figuring out what steps I need to take towards my goals. These are all things that, you know, I may have read about before, but it was witnessing Dinesh going through those things that taught me how to do these things, and so I’m doing them. And so I’m very thankful and hashtag blessed that Dinesh found me and hired me and kept me around for 5 and a half years. Let’s say, you know, he wouldn’t have found me if not for my blog and, you know, so shout out to 17 year old Lisa for blogging, right, because blogging was my way out.

Blogging was like my tunnel in Shawshank. It was my way out of my circumstances into the world and the world, you know, know, I was kind of doing a trust fall into the world, but it’s not really, you know, the cool thing is like the idea of a trust fall is scary because if nobody catches get hurt because eventually someone will catch you. And if nobody catches you today, they might catch you. Get hurt because eventually someone will catch you. And if nobody catches you today, they might catch you next year, you know, and there’s there’s no harm.

Yeah. But okay. When I started work, I quickly found myself kind of, overwhelmed because again, like, I never learned to study. I never learned to manage my time properly. I never learned to keep to a schedule.

And worse still, all those years of getting punished for failing at things made me develop kind of negative associations with those things. Like, I’m bad with even today, I’m bad with schedules. I’m bad with to do lists. I’m bad with following up on things that I’m over I’m kind of like, if I miss a deadline, I’m bad at following up on it, like, I tend to that kind of thing. And, I found myself beating myself up at work because I felt like, you know, to some degree at some level, working for Dinesh was like my dream job.

Like, literally, a year earlier, I didn’t know if anybody would ever hire me for anything because I didn’t have a degree, I didn’t have any skills that I that I thought were valuable. And then, here’s some guy who reads my blog and say, hey, I like your blog. Wanna come and work for me for a software company writing blog stuff? I’m like, wow, I get to make money on the Internet. Like, I get to I get to be paid to be online.

Like, my my first name card, like, you know, the there’s the formal name card and the informal name card. My formal name card said, blog slash social media manager, and my informal name card said, Internet addict, I think. And it was just it was just so fun to get to be an Internet addict for for a living. And, Yeah. I I was I was very, very blessed, and I I felt like my circumstances were great things that I had not earned.

I mean, I did. I get at the time, I felt because it was my first job, I’ve and I felt like I was like, Dinesh took a chance on me that he didn’t have to. And so I’ve I I think even to this day, I feel I feel a sense of, gratitude and obligation even that, you know, he paid me for the work that I did. He paid me pretty well. And, you know, he he gave me a context in which I was able to discover opportunities, which was it’s just amazing in a lot of fronts, but I felt I was in over my head to some degrees.

Right? Like like, it was a very high functioning environment. Everyone was really smart. Everyone was really hardworking. Nobody explicitly informally, you see everyone being so good at their work.

You just feel compelled to keep up. Right? Like, you don’t wanna let your teammates down. And, Yeah. I I just felt like, I was always kind of not doing enough, and, I felt like I didn’t have time for myself.

So, I mean, there’s there’s layers to this, right? So part of the reason I felt like I didn’t have time for myself is because I’m bad at time management to begin with. And then there’s the context that I’m in, and stuff like that. And so I started to feel, like, started to I remember I remember there was a day where I was at work, and I was feeling very sorry for myself. I remember specifically thinking, like, at some point, the thought, like, fuck my life crossed my mind, and then immediately, it got hit by, like, a train in the opposite direction going, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Like a couple of years ago, this would have been beyond your wildest dreams. Right? Like in 2011, if you had told me that you will be hired by a smart, elder guy who understands where you’re coming from, who will be a good manager to you, who will be supportive and encouraging and yet challenge you in the right ways. And you’ll be working on the Internet and you’ll be reading and studying about, like, e commerce and and, you know, learn about the world and all those things. If you knew that that was your job, you would be ecstatic.

And that’s true. I would have been. And yet, you know, something about the circumstances of, like, I was working on a blog post, and I felt like I I I wasn’t on top of it. Like, I had done a lot of research, but I didn’t know what the blog post was gonna be about. It just felt all over the place.

Yeah. I just felt sad for some reason. I just felt like I wasn’t good enough, I think. And at the same time, because I wasn’t, you you know, like, now that I look back, like, I did I now that I look back, like, a couple of years since I left, I look back at my trajectory. I can say with with, you know, with pride that I do think I was one of the best in the world at doing content marketing for a software company.

You know, I I when I joined the company, I think, we were getting our blog was getting about a 1000 hits a month. And when I left, it was over a 120,000 hits a month. Like, so I I made a substantial difference. You know? I I I definitely made a material a positive material impact to the company.

I do think that I was I contributed more than my money’s worth. I think so. Or, you know, at least I I don’t think I don’t think, you know, so while I was there, I was constantly worried that I wasn’t kind of carrying my fair share of the weight. But since leaving and looking back and talking to other people, I do feel like I did my part, you know. I I made I made a contribution that you know, I I still look at some of the posts that I wrote back then, and I think what I am current like like, 29 year old Visa is impressed by 23, 24 year old.

Wow. It’s, like, 6, 7, like, 8 years. Impressed by 23, 24 year old. Wow. It’s like 6, 7, 8 years.

7? 6 or 7 years. I 29 year old me is impressed by the amount of effort that 23 year old me put into his work. Like, I would agonize about shit. Like, I would think about things more than I was paid to.

You know, I would I would be thinking about work even on the weekends, even, you know, at home. I’ll be doing work after work, which, again, I I don’t recommend this and I don’t think it’s healthy. And I think I in fact, I think I would have been even more productive if I had been better at demarcating my time and and kind of managing it properly. But, anyway, what I’m kind of getting around to is, when I realized that I couldn’t keep up with, like, my blogging, like, my social, political, Singaporean blogging, and, like, my marketing, ecommerce, like, day job work. You know, I sat down and analyzed it.

I’m like, I can’t be arguing with people on Facebook when, like, I haven’t shipped all of my work. Right? I haven’t done I haven’t met all of my deadlines, blah blah blah. And so, like, you know, I made the decision to kind of get step away from, like, the blogging scene and, like, the social like, if you wrote a good blog post, people would be posting, blog posts on Facebook. But these days it’s like, you know, if you want content to go viral on Facebook, like, you can just post a status, a status, a status directly to Facebook and people share that instead, which is, you know, it’s a different dynamic.

It’s a different it’s a different the game has changed. But, like, even so, you know, I I was arguing with people on Facebook all the time about local politics and stuff, and, I got quite disillusioned with it. I think around late 2013, maybe, like, I I unfriended everybody on Facebook, and I unfollowed everyone on Twitter and Instagram and, like, also I went dark on all social media, which was a very I was kind of a I I I think I went into, like, a little bit of a of a shock. Like, you know, just just it’s like suddenly going on a on a sugar fast or something. Right?

Like, just the the sudden absence of stimulation kinda rattled me a little bit. And, you know, it was a source of of, of self worth for me, I guess, to be participating in these conversations and feeling like I was making some kind of difference, like, socially, whatever that whatever that meant, like, arguing with people on Facebook. And I and, you know, I was posting roughly the same shit. If you follow if, you know, if you follow me on Twitter or if you look at this YouTube video, like, I was it’s basically this sort of thing. Like, I was talking about what I felt was the right thing to do, blah blah blah.

And I don’t I don’t regret that I used to post those things. And, you know, I’m now that I’m here in this position at this time in my life, I find myself kind of revisiting those ideas and kind of approaching it in a, I think, more healthy way. But basically, when I when I cut that stuff out of my life, I became depressed again. And because I cut the stuff out of my life per se, but because I came to realize that, like, the meaning I was deriving from that stuff was kind of conditional, was kind of, I think I used to talk so I used to I used to have 1 on 1 to my boss, and, one of the things I discussed was kind of, just I I had developed some kind of addiction. Maybe addiction is too strong a word, but, like, I had a habit of seeking validation from, like, you know, superficial ish interactions, and I didn’t want that.

I I I wanted to do something more substantial with my life, and it just it felt like the curtain was pulled the the rug was pulled from under me. It felt like I was suddenly forced to confront the fact that the stuff that I was hope kind of deriving meaning from was in my own new assessment wasn’t really all that meaningful. I wasn’t really making that much of a difference. And, when I pulled that rug out, I found myself falling. And also, you know, just having bills to pay, right?

Like, like it’s just relentless. So I bought this house, right? It’s not it’s not a it’s not an amazing house. Like my walls aren’t painted. Look at that stuff.

You know, it’s it’s, it’s a very spartan house. Like, you know, it’s a a 4 room HDB flat. And, you know, my wife and I couldn’t afford to renovate the kitchen. So the kitchen even today, like, 6, 7 years after we bought it bought the house, it’s kind of in a state of disrepair. Like, that we don’t really have proper cabinets and stuff.

And, I’m okay with that. But, like, at the time, after a couple of years of working and, you know, while I was making progress at work and while I was married to the woman I love, I just felt like life felt so relentless. I had less time for leisure leisure leisure than I had ever had before. I was constantly exhausted. I feel I feel like I was rushing from deadline to deadline.

Life just felt so relentless, and it felt like a jail sentence all over again in a way. Like and and this time this time, you know, it was with much better parameters. So it’s like there was this shit jail that I was in the school. And then I broke free from that jail. And then now I entered this nice jail which is where like, I love my colleagues, I love my boss, I love my wife, but existence just feels like fucking prison anyway.

Like I have to wake up every day and go to work and get in the train. Fucking suffer through the Singapore rush hour commutes, crowded trains. I have this long ass commute from Yishun to Bishan. I gotta change trains from Bishan to one off. It takes like an hour, 20 minutes sometimes.

And then, you know, I go on my commute. I’m like, I’m like I would write on my phone every day, which I’m very proud of my past self for doing. I would write as much as I could on my phone every day, which made up like a lot of my word vomits on a word vomit project. But, yeah, I was just really tired. I was so tired all the time.

I was like spiritually exhausted. And, I didn’t you know, there’s there’s a lot of variables that go into this. I didn’t feel like I had the right to take vacations. Like and, you know, I I’m I’m sure if I talk to my my colleagues and my boss about this right now, they’d be like, Visa, what the fuck? Why didn’t you take more vacations?

Like, you it’s your entitlement. Like, you know, you’re supposed to take vacations to to clear your head and then to be a good employee. And I don’t know. I just I just felt like, I was always behind. Like, I on retrospect, was I really?

Was I really behind? I mean, there’s all like again, if you wanna be running as fast as you can, you’re always you’re gonna set targets as always slightly out of reach and you’re always gonna fall a little bit short and that’s kind of okay. Like, you know, you have to you have to to step outside yourself and see the bigger picture and and evaluate your performance kind of like how much time are you spending? But, you know, I’m so bad at making tracking my time. So, you know, if I could live my life all over again, there are a lot of things I would have done better.

But again, like, you know, that’s that’s, easy to say with the benefit of hindsight. So I’m trying to do better moving forward. But, at the time, I felt like I was exhausted. I felt like I didn’t have I couldn’t give myself permission to take the bricks that I needed, which would have made me a better employee and a better husband. You know?

So, like, yeah, the person, like, it I was it was not great. I wasn’t a great husband the first 5 years or so that I got married. I mean, I always I always and my my wife knows who she married and kind of like the bulk of my my value proposition as a husband is that, you know, I’m I’m very, I always feel and as well as not just as a husband, but also as a friend. Like, I’m there for you in times of crisis crises. If you make any mistakes or you fuck up anything, I will forgive you immediately and take care of you then.

I will be I will listen to anything you have to say, like, you know I mean, I can imagine my wife rolling her eyes at that because there are times when she tries to talk to me, and I’m kind of just, like, not really listening. So, you know, when I say listen, even that is kind of, with asterisk. I have become a lot better, I think, since since leaving my job and having spent spent time together with my wife, my marriage has definitely improved. So, you know, it’s a sobering realization that, like, having a job is bad for your was was bad for my marriage at the time. You know, it’s it’s multi it’s complex.

You get it? It’s it’s it’s multilayered. I I can’t reduce anything down to one single variable. Like, me plus job, plus marriage, plus mortgage, plus bad time management skills, plus, you know, faulty assumptions about how to live my life, plus just inherited bullshit. All those things added up to a very, bullshit.

All those things added up to a very tight and painful situation where where I I didn’t feel like I could carry all the weight that I was carrying. And, you know, the people who suffered the most as a consequence were myself and my wife, I think. And, I am in the process of making it up to her and making it up to myself. And, yeah. So I was really depressed, I think, again, kind of clinically ish depressed around 2015, 2016.

Yeah. You know, one of my jokes is that maybe I get depressed, like, you know, like, if I was depressed at, like, 16 ish and then 25 ish, maybe I’ll get depressed again at, like, 36. Maybe it’s like every square, you know, like, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64. That is a nice cadence at which to experience depressions. I think I had a I had there was a moment as well, like, during my depressive state.

And, you know, like, the second time I was depressed so the first time I was depressed, I was fucking struggling. Like, I couldn’t do shit. I couldn’t I mean, I mean, I was going to school every day, but I was like a zombie. The second time I was depressed, I was functionally I was functional. I was like going to work and I was like participating in meetings business while depressed.

I haven’t felt depressed since that time. I think I have processed my experiences. So I don’t think of depression for me. So so, you know, I believe that there is a thing where depression is like a chemicals chemical scenario in your brain, like, you know, your receptors are wonky or whatever. But I also think that there is the depression that I went through, which is I wouldn’t say it’s like a passing like an emotional, you know, so you like, if I if I understand correctly, like, when you get a fever, the fever is actually kind of, it’s not that the virus or whatever gave you the fever, but rather when your body detects the virus, a care of the virus, kill the virus.

Right? I feel like for me, my depression states may have been something similar. Like, it may have been kind of my body slash mind’s way of telling me that something’s not right and you have to address it. And it seems kind of ridiculous because, again, like, when you have a fever, you’re physically kind of condemned. Right?

Like, you you can’t condemned is like a military. In the military, I think in in in my storeroom back in the military days, when you say condemned, it means like a, an item can no longer be used. Anyway, Yeah. When you are when you are when you are in a fever, you’re kind of like forced to rest. And I guess that’s the point of sickness, like, you’re, like, you you haven’t been sleeping well, you haven’t been eating well, and your body is kind of, like, hey, what the fuck?

Like, we we we are in a state of distress, and then fuck it, fall sick. And now you have no choice but to just lie there and and recover. So it’s like, you know, there’s a quote that’s something like, if you don’t schedule your maintenance, it will be scheduled for you, like, with regards to your physical well-being and fitness. Like, if you don’t have a rest day, if you’re working on every day, then your body will schedule maintenance for you by getting injured and falling sick. And I feel like depression for me to some degree, was something like that.

I mean, maybe it could have been kept at bay so, like, you know, it seems like it seems like so a thing that happened in both of my depressions, depression states, depression experiences, was that in both cases, I’m realizing there was, like, a collapse of meaning. Right? So when I was 16, collapse of meaning. Right? So when I was 16, 17, I was getting meaning from music and and my social reality, and then that kind of collapsed.

And then I had to kind of reconstruct it from scratch, and then that also kind of collapsed. And, you know, if I hadn’t been through those depressive states, would I have been able to reconstruct you know, all the way through. I’m not so sure. I don’t think, you know, so I think there’s an element of creative destruction to my depressions and which is, again, I don’t want to romanticize it cause it’s fucking miserable. I don’t know.

I have I I have photos of myself when I’m on the train, on the way to work, on the way home, and I’m fucking depressed, and I have a selfie. It’s like, they just like, I just wanna die. You can just see in my face that I just wanna die. And there’s nothing romantic about that. There’s it’s just pain and not even pain, you know, like, you know, I guess, like, when I was 13, I experienced pain.

Pain. When I was 17, it wasn’t pain. It was it was this absence of feeling kind of. It’s it’s just this this vacancy. There’s this cold, dull, bleak, blurry, meh.

You know, just just just what is the point of anything? Where am I going? It’s like the the the opposite of excitement, the opposite of of of zest and life, just this prison vibe, you know, this this desolation. Like, you know, like like, I find that coming out of depression, you get to feel sadness. Like, feeling sad and crying can actually alleviate depression, I feel, for me.

And, yeah. It just it takes it takes something to feel. It’s hard to, you know, I’ve I’ve been talking for 50 minutes and I I don’t feel necessarily like I have completely kind of articulated everything I wanna say, but I don’t wanna make this I don’t want this video to go on for over an hour. But, you know, I I have a lot of feelings about this stuff. I feel like, I do feel like I spent some time in what people people call the dark night of the soul.

And just, you know, it’s it’s total collapse of meaning. Not nothing you do can save you. Nothing, like, you know I think Louis CK had this line. I was just re watching it. He said, you know, deep deep down inside, you’re fundamentally alone and it’s all for nothing.

And, you know, that that When you’re not depressed and you say this, that kind of thing, it doesn’t it doesn’t, I can say that, and it doesn’t fuck me, you know. It it’s just yeah. It’s true. Alright. I’m I’m but I’m making a video and I’m gonna post the video and people are gonna respond positively to it or whatever.

And, I remember what it was like. That’s the thing. I I remember when everything was so bleak and everything was so dark and nothing I read, nothing anybody said seemed to help. One thing that did help was listening to Alan Watts on YouTube, which is that, so he wasn’t in denial about the bleakness of reality. I think anytime anybody came at me with, like, oh, life’s not so bad.

I’m like, fuck you. You know, life is life isn’t is advertised as an adventure, but it’s really a fucking ordeal. Right? So don’t don’t pretend that it’s not an ordeal. You know, don’t pretend that I don’t like like don’t don’t condescend to me with with life’s not so bad.

Life is bad. You know, that was that was my feeling then. But, what I how Alan Watts got to me was he didn’t deny that. He was like, you know, he he saw that life was funny. And it it is also funny to this I read about him later on and it turns out that he eventually became an alcoholic.

But I like to believe that, you know, so somebody once tweeted, Alan Watts was an alcoholic. And I like to flip it and say, an alcoholic was Alan Watts. Like, someone who was an alcoholic was also Alan Watts. You know, it’s like diamond in the not rough. Just just unlike like, you know, enlightenment can come from strange origins.

Right? And, Yeah. I think I think humor definitely helped me. I think, I think trying to cheer up a depressed person by telling them to cheer up is the most counterproductive and useless thing you can do. I if I could go back in time and hang out with depressed visa, I wouldn’t tell them to cheer up.

I wouldn’t, you know, I would mostly ask questions. I would ask him to describe his situation. I would ask him to describe his problems and not in a way that I’m gonna solve them. I’m not gonna solve his problems for him. I’m not gonna show him some magical answer, but I would just have him articulate his frustrations, articulate, you know, so, like, what is it about your life that is bothering you?

And, you know, like, so even now I can say collapse of meaning. Right? And I feel like I am now well equipped. I I believe, right? I’m probably gonna be proven wrong the next time this hits and then I can look back at this video and laugh at myself.

But see, I can laugh at myself. That’s that’s that’s a thing that I have that I didn’t have before, right? Anticipating what the next depressive state is gonna be like. So I do think that my 17 year old depression, like, was the worst of my life. I don’t think it’ll ever get that bad again because because I had no idea what was ahead.

I had no idea if I was gonna make it out. I had no idea if it was gonna end, you know. Like the like it’s like the first time you’re you’re drunk maybe and you don’t know whether is it ever gonna end? Like, it’s it’s it’s like, once you’ve experienced the full cycle the first time, the second time is not so bad. Right?

Yeah. So in my case, the second depression was just, what was doubly depressing was that. So in my set of circumstances. Right? Like no control, no just being in an environment that I had no control over.

And then just just all that kind of I don’t know anything about the world and I I seem to be stupid. I seem to be wrong. Like all those things. I resolved those things that were around my first depression. So it shouldn’t happen again.

And it didn’t happen the same way. It happened differently. But, yeah, I feel like I fixed those conditions and then there’s a new set of problems to fix. And I think I fixed those as well. I wouldn’t put it past myself that, you know, I I wouldn’t be surprised if I get depressed again at some point.

I’m not gonna lose any sleep over worrying about why I might someday get depressed again. But, like, you know, I talk to depressed people from time to time, and, I like to try and be a nourishing and supportive presence, and I think that’s the best you can do. I don’t think I don’t think you can pull someone out of their depression. I think I think a depression is almost like a like a a, I mean, so apart from people who are kind of chemically like, because of brain chemical issues, who are kind of, like, forced to and I I have no I have no judgment for how you manage your depression if you’re depressed. I have no judgment for what you do to cope.

What you whether you take, you know, medication, whether you whatever it is you gotta do, you gotta do it. Like, I’m not gonna I won’t judge anybody else for how they deal. Right? Because life is life is fucking ridiculous, you know. And like, you have to survive.

I mean, you don’t have to survive but, you know, it is what it is, man. Guys, girls, friends and, yeah, I just wanted to talk about this and, I don’t know if I’ve said anything that’s of use to anybody. I imagine it’ll be of use to some people just to hear me talk about depression at all because I think some people this have this impression that I’m some kind of super cheerful, super optimistic, super kind of, eternally sun eternal sunshine guy, which is extremely far from the truth. I’m I carry my my sadness with me all the time, and I I I like that about myself, you know. I think I posted on Twitter today that was I replied to somebody who said he was sad, and I said I’m all like, he said, what do I do with my sadness?

How do I make it go away? And I said, you know, I’m always sad. And people were replying saying, oh, I’m so sorry. Like, you know, like, that’s that’s they I I think when people see someone say I’m always sad, they think that’s a bad thing, like I’m suffering. I can see why they might think that or I can see how I can I can choose to interpret it as they are trying to be good friends and they’re trying to show concern and care, which I appreciate?

But, I think my sadness is something I carry with me in a position of strength. I think I think my sadness makes me strong. I think it makes me it makes me sensitive to other people. I think it makes me relatable. I think it makes me real, right?

It means that, you know, I’m legit. Like, you know, I had a client who was like, she had some some plans for her career stuff that she was gonna talk to me through. And then, like, the next day she replied with like, I’m just too depressed to function. And I’m, I’m, you know, I felt great that she felt comfortable telling me that. And like, then we can have that really honest relationship.

Right? So, you know, being sad is a part of who I am. And, you know, it’s like it’s like, you know, imagine music with no minor chords. Like, that’s just you know, you need minor chords in music. Even in happy songs, there are minor chords.

And, like, similarly, like, in life, you need sadness. Like, you can’t live a sad, free life. That is, in a way, grotesque and dystopian. Right? Because life is light and dark, yin and yang, happy and sad.

And, like, you know, depression and sadness aren’t aren’t the same thing. Like, you can be sad without being depressed. And when you’re depressed, like, your sadness takes on this monotonous disengagement. That’s, I’ve crossed an hour already. So I’m just gonna I’m just gonna end it here.

But, you know, if you’ve listened to the full hour, I’m amazed. I hope you guys have, like, video speed controller to watch these things at faster speeds. And, I mean, leave me a comment if you guys like and, tell me about your experiences and we can chat about it. I’m I’m I’m happy to chat with anyone who is, you know, interested in talking about these things. And, I do believe that it’s something that can can make us stronger, can make us wiser, and, you know, we do you don’t have to you don’t have to suffer it alone.

You know, I think I was I was very lonely both times. I think the first time I was lonely be yeah. I was very lonely. I I think being less lonely would have helped. I I don’t feel like I had anybody I could really talk to about my feelings then.

Like, I had my like, I didn’t feel like I could talk to my wife about it because, you know, so these days I can talk to my wife about more things. But at the time, you know, I felt like just my wife and my boss were the 2 people I talked to the most, but they were also they are also people who are in my life, if that makes sense. Like, they are they are they are participants. Right? Like, you don’t want no matter how cool your boss is, you’d never really want to go completely, unprofessional around him.

Right? And I I think there is some version of that in a in a marriage. Like, you know, it’s I wouldn’t say professional, but there’s there’s some shit that you don’t say to your I’m not saying be dishonest with your spouse. So so that’s a challenge of honesty, right? You want to you want to convey as much as you can about your state to your spouse, but like, you know, you don’t necessarily want to, like, and I mean so the the the thing about marriage, I think, is that eventually whatever it is that you’re trying to not say will come out anyway.

Right? So at some point, during one of my my kind of slightly manic states, like, my wife and I were having a conversation, I think, and and I just blurted out at some point that that she’s such a burden, which is, you know, I rig Do I regret saying that? It was it was not a nice thing to say, but it was how I felt at the time and I I’m not proud of how I felt, but it was how I felt and she was she was upset with me, understandably so. And we had a conversation about it and, you know, it’s it’s not like my feelings were wrong, but just I should have you know, part of the reason I felt the way I did was because I hadn’t been able to communicate with her better up until that point. And so, you know, the way that we worked through that was to talk more about the origins of those feelings and and what we went through and stuff like that.

And, yeah. So where am I going with that? I think it’s super helpful to have people that you can talk to about your feelings without worrying that it would have immediate consequences on on your life. So with regards to, for example, telling my wife that I thought she was I felt she was a burden, it would have been helpful if I had said that to someone else first and they could have responded with, dude, why would you say that? Like, what’s let’s let’s examine this.

Why? What is the origin of that thought? And then, you know, I would be like, oh, you know, because I do all of this and I do this, this, this, that, that, that. Whatever it is, you know, like just someone else could have helped me trace back the feeling to, like, what is the kind of starting condition? And then I could have just gone to her with that and be like, hey, can we talk about this?

And then so, you know, that would have spared us some conflict and some pain and some frustration. But, you know, life is life and, some amount of that of conflict is kind of inevitable. Right? And, I don’t think it’s healthy to be completely averse to having conflicts. But, you know, I I guess I’m describing the role that a therapist ideally would provide because, you know, they are not your family member.

They are not your colleague or spouse or whatever. And, you know, you you they are there to help you troubleshoot your life in a way that even your friends can’t entirely do. I I think that, you know, if you have like an anonymous Twitter account and you have anonymous Twitter friends, that can be a pretty good proxy. Again, because I I I never wanted to I do believe therapy can be great, but, I have a I’m skeptical of the I’ve heard some horror stories about, like, mental health professionals and therapists in Singapore, and so I am not a big fan of that’s a separate conversation, but, yeah. This video has gone on for way too long, so I’m gonna end it here.

Let me know what you think if you’ve made it this far. Thanks for hanging out. Done.