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yeah, Dalekk.

I don't think he'll be a European student. Nigel Farage assured me that they don't actually study, they just come here to get high-paying jobs making sandwiches and drive slowly in the middle lane.

Fucking love Nigel Farage. The amount of jokes he's allowed me to make - once I moved to the UK, Bulgarians already had a semi-mythical status of shape-shifting house-stealing, wife-raping wizards.

It was actually about five or six years ago when I joined. Left early 2013. Damn. I thought that had been longer. Time is weird.

Can you elaborate on that?

The way I've been seeing it, based on study of myself:

I used to end up depressed a lot. I had a weird dream involving Eris and chocolate some time ago. Weird shit happened afterwords, made some dice-decisions and ended up in a situation that sent me into something like a six-month long lucid psychosis. As in, I had become utterly psychotic, but to a large extent I was aware that I was psychotic. It was as if the psychosis was a drug that I was on, but I was still aware that I was on a drug, so I managed to sort of make use of it. I tried not to believe things, but it was very very very hard, so at all times I was suspecting things very very strongly. Anyways during these six months my mood would swing massively, but I would really allow myself to get immersed in every up and down to the fullest (I would go manic while I was up and when I would start to feel down I wouldn't fight it, instead letting it escalate until I was crying). Eventually I reached a point when both states were pretty much meaningless. The circumstances of my life weren't changing, but the way I was thinking about them was. And the way I was thinking about them was to a large extent the way that I had been taught to think about them (this is what I mean by playing your own game). And ever since I broke out of the psychosis I haven't had any problem with getting depressed. Sure, sometimes I will feel physically the same way as I would when I used to feel depressed. But now I know that while I might feel that feeling my thoughts do not need to correspond to it.

Example: When you are coming down of a drug (mdma for example) your serotonin is pretty drained. The effect of the comedown is often purely a feeling of being depressed. Normally this will affect your thoughts and make you see things as generally darker and sadder than you would normally. However if you get into the habit of identifying these thought patterns you can sort of break yourself out of them (i.e I'm coming down. It ain't that grim actually).

I guess from here on you'd need to have a precise deffinition of what depression means:
is depression sadness?
or
is depression that feeling of fatigue and laziness?

My favorite way of illustrating this point is the "Avocado and The Book about It" analogy. So you have the avocado, which is the meaty substance of life (so all the neurochemical processes in your brain etc.). The Book about It would be all of the language that you use to interpret that and the way you use that language. Sadness would belong to The Book, while the fatigue and laziness would be direct effects of something being wrong with the avocado. Based on my experience you can become better and better at writing whatever you want in The Book (weather you can actually write whatever you want is a different question though. I would guess not, since that would imply some hardcore mind/body dualism and a state of totally free will). As for changing the Avocado, I am still not sure how to do that. Or at least can't give a general answer. I have began to learn how to influence my avocado though.

If you wanna be all buddha-hippie/smartass about it you might ask: Well doesn't the notion of something being wrong with the avocado belong to the Book? how can anything be wrong with the avocado then? In case you insist on getting an answer to that question, I insist that you are no fun.

I tend to fuck around with people a lot. I find that it's a very useful filter. As in: when you tell a person a bunch of nonsense you can learn a lot about the person by the way in which they reply.

Kind Regards.

Depression is not a phenomenon, limited to humans. Some primates experience it as well. Chimps (or apes? not sure) experience depression under the following circumstances:
Chimp is in mating season, wants to shag other female chimps. Chimp not alpha enough though, so it gets beaten by other chimps. The chimp keeps on going though cos it's a fucking chimp in heat and it fucking wants to shag them female chimps. The other chimps keep on beating it down though. At that point the chimp starts getting depressed. It lays on the ground, does fuckall and most importantly withdraws from further attempts at beating down the alphas. Thus depression is a sort of a preventive mechanism. If the chimp didn't get depressed it would just continue attempting to get to the females (cos it's a chimp in heat!) and the beatings that it would take from the alpha chimps would eventually harm/fracture/kill it. Depression allows it to recover.

So an interesting hypothesis you can build out of that is that the high levels of depression within our society come from our bodies telling us to stop trying to play games where we are constantly getting beaten down by others.

I can personally testify to that. I had problems of getting quite depressed, starting when I was about 15. It got pretty intense and the first term of uni last year had me laying in my room and listening to sad music a lot of the time. It wasn't clinical depression. It was more of a habit of putting myself down, because of others putting me down and because of still being infected with many dangerous memes. It wasn't until I abandoned all of the games that I was supposed to be playing and started playing my own game that I solved that problem. Unless there's something seriously wrong with your brain chemistry, nothing should be able to make you depressed so long as you are playing the games that you decide to play and playing them well.

Kind Regards,
Out of-the Loop

Sorry

Hello!

I used to be a member of the forum about five or six years ago. Posted a lot, but at the time the cynicism, inpoliteness and no-bullshit attitude of PD members repulsed me and I stopped visiting. Now I'm twenty, study Anthropology and Politics in Canterbury and came back to the forums for the reasons that once made me leave (at the very least this seems to be one of the best places to get called-out on your bullshit).

My interests include: studying spirituality/religion in non-religious terms (been toying around with the notion of religious thinking as positive supersticion recently, will make a thread about it), making memes and spreading them (once accidentally started a cult), making offensive techno music and not so offensive psychedelic music ( http://soundcloud.com/vokestar ), having fun with the fact that I live in the UK and with the absurdity of British culture as well as toying with meaning and its various applications.

Kind Regards  <- (very magickal UK words)
Out of-the Loop

Sorry  <- (very magickal UK word)

PS: Safe

Man, fuck that. I'll become really good at politics, you'll see! And when my day comes, Cain, you will look like an amateur as I reveal to you how the world really works for real!!!

Compared to the delicate bouquet of burnt tobacco tar? 

IDK, I like the taste of baccie. E-cigs just taste like plastic.

It pisses me off that a lot of places are passing laws to treat e-cigs the same as regular ones. It's that fucking punishment fetish culture coming through again... "Oh shit, they found a way to enjoy something pleasurable without the cancer or bothering anyone! We need to punish them, STAT!"

I was looking forward to e-cigs catching on because I doubt the vapors will throw my lungs into fits like smoke does.

E-cigs taste like shit, though.

Throughout the whole movie I was split between crying my eyes out and laughing my ass off.

Yeah, I can see that from the trailer. Horrific scenes of villages burning. Some arshole with a directors beret wandering in and shouting CUT CUT CUT.

This used to be satire. This is the running man, this is the warning that's in Robocop. If it was fictional I would say it's brilliant, but it's not so all I can think of is I can't believe it's come to this.

How long before we start live streaming executions, or having Big Brother Syria edition.

Jeesus christ, no one is actually killed/hurt in the movie. Chill the fuck out.

Throughout the whole movie I was split between crying my eyes out and laughing my ass off.

It's not really murder porn. It's pretty surreal and an awesome portrait of fucked up morality.

Basically, the USA supported this genocide, because they were paranoid that communism was going to spread in neighbour countries, so everyone who was chinese/communist was murdered and the perpetrators continue to live as heroes today. Still, they haven't exactly managed to amputate their conscience/guilt, which shows in their constant celebration of their deeds as if they are constantly trying to convince themselves that they are heroes and not monsters. Highly recomended.

Have you guys seen this film? It's fucking brilliant.

A documentary that challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to reenact their real-life mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers.

trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQhIRBxbchU

A smoking addiction, paired with oral fixation is fucking hell.

Almost managed to stop last term, but as finals approached and I had to write all of my essays in two weeks I started again. I think I'll have a go at it after a couple of weeks. Quitting weed now and smokes are pretty helpful, when I get a craving.

Probably gonna do it cold turkey though. Withdraw is a high of its own.

Pro-tip on making everyone you meet in the uk angry/offended/scared-that-you're-going-to-rape-them: Sing "Blurred Lines".

Some girl actually stopped talking to me, when I told her that I like the song