A Run-Up
You don’t fall into a depression overnight.
Things have a run-up. Sometimes a run-up of thousands of days.
It’s more like this:
Day 1: a little bit sad – Day 2: a little bit more sad – Day 1000: depression.
Thousands of days without a pleasant conversation and you become gloomy.
Thousands of days alone and you no longer know what to do with your loneliness.
Thousands of days with only your computer and you become psychotic.
Thousands of days of news and you develop an anxiety disorder.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that if you have thousands of days with good conversations and do enjoyable things, things can become good again too.
Why are Buddhists scared of thoughts?
“Don’t dream away,” they say. “Stay in the here and now.”
I wouldn’t even know how to escape the here and now, I said. Maybe if I pretend I am not here.
Maybe if a child is scared, it pretends it’s not there to escape the pain. Besides that, I don’t know how to escape the here and now.
Thinking and daydreaming are also things that happen in this room, here and now, I think. There is no way to escape.
Thoughts from the past keep popping up because you need to reflect on them. That’s why you often find yourself thinking about something that happened years ago. It should work like that.
The problem with Buddhism is that it’s like a moving goalpost. It doesn’t matter what you argue against it; there is always a new argument that comes up (a different interpretation, for example) about why Buddhism is right. A lot of the finer points of thinking are not well understood. Also, Buddhism has a passive view of thinking, as if thoughts happen by themselves.