I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the deep sense of despair and apathy associated with depression, revealing a lack of self-worth.
In this quote, Philip K. Dick reflects on his newfound understanding of depression and the struggle it entails. He highlights that depression can lead to apathy and a profound sense of worthlessness, making it difficult for individuals to find motivation or desire to change their state. The realization that one cannot simply 'snap out of it' points to the complexities of mental health and the misunderstanding often surrounding it.
In practice
During a talk on mental health awareness, one might reflect on this quote to emphasize the importance of empathy for those suffering from depression.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.
"Do you have information that there's an android in the cast? I'd be glad to help you, and if I were an android would I be glad to help you?" "An android," he said, "doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for." "Then," Miss Luft said, "you must be an android."
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
A man is an angel that has gone deranged.
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy.
Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
There are peaks, there are valleys. But they're all kind of carved and smoothed out, and it feels like a low level of despair you live in. Where you're not getting any answers, but you're living OK. And you can smile at the office. You know? But it's a low level of despair. I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything's just OK.
Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs
When you're depressed, there's no calendar. There are no dates, there's no day, there's no night, there's no seconds, there's no minutes, there's nothing. You're just existing in this cold, murky, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.