(if it's TL;DR, just respond to to the title. inb4 warm gun.) I've noticed something kind of odd; there are people here who are depressed because they aren't happy. Read that again. Apparently, the fact that they aren't particularly enjoying life at the moment is depressing to them. What? Have we really gotten to the point that Happiness and Depression are the only two mindsets there are? If you aren't one, then do you have to be the other? Well you'd certainly think that way if your mindset came from [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u94-BJovYM]drug commercials.[/url] They've made billions selling the idea that if you aren't happy, something is wrong, and you need their product to fix it. Not only them, but most advertisers in general latch on to this notion, because it's the easiest way to hook a large number of people. Everyone wants to be happy right? But assume their product actually did grant perpetual happiness. Wouldn't that actually be terrible? Even if there were no sinister motives to keep you in a state of perpetual bliss, your inability to feel anything else would take away any meaning from feeling. Happiness is subjective and relative; without something to compare it to, it's meaningless. And don't think this is a Garem-tier anti-materialism or anti-modernization thread; I don't buy the idea that things were better in our past, and that our current state is somehow unnatural. Do you really think the hunter-gatherer humans lived in a state of perpetual bliss? Do you really think that they just enjoyed every second of living in their own shit, eating raw meat, and dying alone in a world they couldn't even begin to comprehend? Personally, I go for months at a time without experiencing what I would call happiness, but it doesn't depress me in the slightest. I set happiness as my reward for achieving a goal; nothing more. This doesn't make me a depressed person, and it doesn't make me stoic; it's just a reasonable expectation of how I'm likely to feel. TL:DR we're so damn quick to let someone tell us we have a problem when it comes to mental health that we don't stop to realize the end result of what they're selling us is pure bullshit. This isn't just mega-corporations selling pills either; it's religion, spirituality, and new-age movements right down to the hippy telling you about how they found inner-peace through crystals. Perpetual happiness can't exist, shouldn't exist, and is irresponsible to pursue in a world with problems. We have a virtually unlimited number of problems left to solve here. That isn't a reason to be depressed; it's a reason to get excited. There are things left to justify your existence by; we can worry about being God when we get there.