 G'day, mate. Forty here. Welcome back to Forty University. Today's class is psychology. So what are the evolutionary benefits of depression? What are the evolutionary benefits of sadness? Why did we evolve to feel sad at times? Like what's in it for us? What's the payoff? Like how on earth could getting depressed be evolutionarily adaptive rather than maladaptive? Also, culture plays a huge role in in depression. So I'm looking at this terrific 2007 book The Loss of Sadness How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Alan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield. So they make the point that an American woman who goes into major depression because she held hands with a man and then has had no further contact with that man. All right, she's not experienced a sufficient loss to explain her depression symptoms because American cultural values don't define the situation as humiliating. Having held hands with a man and then losing contact with him is not socially stigmatizing. And so if a woman gets depressed in response to the absence of any special meaning, social cultural meanings here, this seems pathological. In contrast, in many Islamic cultures, a young woman who has any physical contact with a man whom she does not marry can face social stigmatization and degradation. So any touching, however innocuous by Western standards can lead to serious social consequences in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan. But let's get back to why on earth do we get sad? What are the evolutionary benefits? Because sad people tend to display less initiative. They are less motivated. They increasingly withdraw from everyday activities. Happy people, by contrast. Participate more widely in life. They have more sexual partners. They're more sex. They have more food. They have more access to money and resources and all sorts of other things that increase survival and reproduction. So under ordinary circumstances, we would think that consistent levels of a negative mood should be selectively disadvantageous. Right. So why would intense sadness responses be naturally selected through evolution? What are the special circumstances in which the benefits of temporarily experiencing depression or extreme sadness outweigh the obvious costs? So what are the particular contacts? And only in those contacts do states of a low mood have increased fitness precisely because they make people less active and less motivated. And perhaps the best analogy is acute pain from an injury. So that acute pain stops activity and it's adaptive because it helps people avoid further damage to the tissues. By contrast, chronic pain unrelated to any underlying physiological damage is harmful in the same way that ongoing depressive disorder unrelated to circumstance is harmful. So what could be some reasons that we evolved to feel intense sadness and depression? So one explanation is attraction of social support. It's a cry for help. So the withdrawal, inhibition, vegetative aspects of depression mimic illness and they signal to others to draw the suffering individual back into the group. So postpartum depression, all right, may arise under circumstances such as poor infant health and lack of social support and it functions as a signal that mothers will reduce their childcare efforts until they receive more support from the group. Now, there's a good rejoinder to this that depression tends to tends to drive people to reject rather than to offer support. So we typically respond with avoidance and rejection rather than support of depressed people. So perhaps only non-disorder, non-pathological sadness that arises in appropriate situations that attract social support. So we often have intense mobilization of ritual expressions of sympathy after bereavement and other serious losses while dysfunctional depression involving severe and sustained states of despondency without sufficient situational cause will tend to alienate an anger of the people and will diminish social support and will lead to isolation and rejection into fitness disadvantages. So another theory is that depressive symptoms of despair may protect infants in the immediate aftermath of the parental loss. So if a person withdraws sometimes, that makes them less of a target. And then there's a different theory here that Darwin proposed that the initial period of loud protest after a significant loss, right, screaming, that has attention getting benefits. So presumably both strategies have their purposes at different times in different situations after a loss. The psychiatrist John Bulby proposed, he's the very influential John Bulby. How do I explain John Bulby? He developed attachment theory. So some people are securely attached, other people are insecurely attached and other people are avoidant. So he says the prospect of the pain of depression and sadness following a loss of attachment motivates people to vigorously seek reunion with lost loved ones and to not give up the lost tie and to protect their important attachments. So grief at the thoughts of loss allow social bonds to persist during frequent temporary absences. So grief after the death of a loved one is a byproduct of an adaptive response to attachment losses that were not permanent. Then there's another evolutionary explanation for deep sadness. There's the protection from aggression after a status loss. So when people become depressed and sad, they experience lower testosterone, elevated cortisol and retardation and behavior. So this is deeply rooted in the reptilian brain is present in most vertebrates and all mammals. So animals also get depressed like dogs slink away when you yell at them, like apes and monkeys and chimps, they all get depressed. So negative behavior, negative mood, negative thought arise as adaptive responses to circumstances of defeat and subordination. So in general, when you look at the people around you, those who are consistently defeated by life are much more likely to be depressed and sad than people who are winning at life. And this may be an adaptive response. Maybe it's part of an involuntary subordinate strategy, ISS, involuntary subordinate strategy. So it's a state of inhibited action marked by withdrawal, lack of assertion, nervousness and anxiety. That's what most people go through when they fall in social prestige. So maybe this goes to primitive brain algorithms that assess our relative strength, our relative weakness, our relative power, our relative status. And then we adjust our actions accordingly to produce sponsors of flight, fight or submission when we confront others. So depressive feeling may be an adaptive response when you judge yourself to be weaker than the people around you, because you are signaling to others that you have seized competing with a dominant animal that you have accepted your defeated status and you are signaling your submission to the winning team. What about people who don't experience and exhibit real emotions? Well, in some, I'm sure that's evolutionarily adaptive in some circumstances. So I would think in more isolated circumstances like in Northern Europe, a more stoical approach to life may well be evolutionarily adaptive while growing up, evolving in a place where there are far more people and there's far more social connection, then that would probably elicit a different adaptive response, a more expression of your emotions. So in some circumstances, I would expect that a detached and unemotional response is going to be evolutionarily adaptive and in other circumstances, a valuable emotional response to loss will be adaptive. So I think for most people most of the time, sadness and depression are adaptive reactions, adaptive responses to subordinate positions from which there's no possibility of escape. So what about not being able to feel anything? Well, I'm sure that there have been situations that people have evolved in where lowered intensity of feeling is evolutionarily adaptive. So in life, the defeated party who fails to defend territory or loses a status contest, they could respond with anger and aggression rather than concede to the winner, but an open expression of aggression and anger could very well lead to serious injury or death of the defeated party. So many of the symptoms of intense sadness and depression communicate that you, the loser, will not confront winners. You will not attempt to gain dominance and you're giving up the status struggle. So submissive responses from the loser protects the loser from further aggression by showing the dominant that it is safe from additional challenges and that the dominant need not feel threatened by your continued presence as a loser. So subordinates that make submissive responses may be more likely to survive and reproduce than those who respond to loss more aggressively. So this theory explains the situation-specific qualities of the depressive response. They are adaptive only when facing potential defeat by stronger adversaries. So the inhibition of self-assertion would be naturally selected to occur in certain contexts of loss. It's also compatible with the widespread finding that depression is more common among people and among animals at the bottom of status hierarchies. And this explains the persistence of depression among those who are in enduring states of subordination. So almost universally women are more likely than men to be in subordinate positions which may account for their double the rates of men in their rates of depression. And so sadness is frequently an appropriate and adaptive response to reductions in status. What's your take on depression as a neurobiological disorder? I'm sure it is sometimes. So depression is a dysfunctional response when it's not appropriate to the context and it's harmful to you. The current medication based treatment model I'm sure it works for some people. It's of no benefit to others and actively does harm to others. So I'm sure it varies. I do strongly disagree with the DSM-5 that if you have five of these nine symptoms of major sadness that you've got major depressive disorder if you have these symptoms over two weeks because extreme sadness is often an appropriate response in a certain context such as loss of status, loss of assets, loss of earning power, loss of a romantic partner, loss of a spouse, loss of a child, loss of health, loss of the use of a limb. Sadness would be an appropriate response but if you're still bummed out because you lost your wallet three months ago then there's a dysfunction. Then here's another adaptive response for major sadness. It can promote disengagement from non-productive activities. So you noticed I haven't done much live streaming over the past month. So I used to do on a typical day a three-hour show. Now on a typical day I do about a 30-minute show. So sadness arises when people cannot obtain a crucial resource that is important to them. So I didn't feel like my show was working. So I stepped back from my show. So my lack of activity in creating and producing a show is you could understand that as a perhaps as a symptom of sadness or like I don't feel sad but it's just a stepping back from my habitual activity of doing a three-hour show. So depressive experiences may be adaptive when they disengage people from their investments in unproductive efforts. So I felt like my investment in producing a three-hour daily show was not productive. I have not read Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker. So I am reading right now from a terrific 2007 book The Loss of Sadness How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. So I am disengaged from my investment in producing and delivering a three-hour daily show because I didn't feel like it was a productive use of my time and energy. So depressive experiences can be adaptive when they disengage people from their investments in unproductive efforts in unreachable goals and goals with low probability of success. So I have withdrawn from an activity that I was doing for about three and a half years because I came to see that it was not a good use of my time. So by withdrawing what do I do? I share the light of Torah. That's what I do. I'm a light unto the nations bro. So disengagement helps people step away from unproductive efforts from unreachable goals from goals with a low probability of success. And so by stepping away from doing my three-hour daily show I'm making possible eventual re-engagement with new more productive activities. So over the past month I've been spending more time earning money. I've been spending more time just recuperating and chilling from my efforts at earning money. I spent just time without feeling a burden to produce or create. So it's kind of an in-between time. Everything we do is in between. We're always in between one thing or another. But this feels like particularly an in-between time. I'm not sure where I'm going forward. So I'm just kind of disengaging from what I was habitually compulsively doing so that I could think a second time, think a third time, just take some time out, see what my spirit prompts and writing in my journal. Is it kosher to use Alexander Technique while on psychiatric medication? Sure. What are my thoughts on OnlyFans and is sex work really work? Well, my thought on OnlyFans is that the major credit cards essentially decide what kind of content can be monetized and what can't. So essentially it's in the hands of Visa and MasterCard and they respond to social incentives. So it's not just that Visa and MasterCard are imposing these standards on us. They are responding to social incentives such as articles in the New York Times. So suspending current activity accompanied by intense ruminative activity. That's what I've been doing. I suspended my three-hour daily show. I accompanied it with intense ruminative activity that is characteristic of depression. I mean, I don't feel depressed. May facilitate the difficult shift of energy to new projects or attachments. It's hard to change. Like change is stressful. Strange change isn't easy. We tend to follow a path of inertia. I was following a path of inertia. I was churning out three-hour shows that not many people were watching. So eventually I got to the point. I think a triggering point was reading that Colin Liddell profile of me for affirmative right where he described me as an unsuccessful live streamer. And I thought, yeah, he's absolutely right. I am unsuccessful live streamer. Let me just take a break. So let me cease my current level of activity of three-hour daily shows. Let me accompany that with intense thinking. And this may facilitate the difficult shift of energy to new projects and to new attachments. So intense sadness responses usually emerge after life crises. And during a life crisis and after after it, people generally forced to reevaluate their futures. So they are adaptive taking time out from activity is adaptive and helping individuals avoid rash decisions. You take all possible dangers into account and you don't overestimate the chances of success in new activities. So that's, I guess, the mode that I am in now. So in this situation, pessimism, lack of energy, fearfulness can prevent calamity even if they perpetuate misery. So the transient nature of most normal sadness allows the individual to emerge properly motivated by newly selected goals. So depressive disorders that involve such severe loss of motivation that efforts cannot be channeled into new pursuits. Obviously, that's dysfunctional. Have you considered going back to your own interview streams with some of the more intriguing distant right personalities? Yes, I would like to do a lot more interview shows. That also wore me down, like setting up interviews such as with Judas Maccabeus. Like I'd set up all these shows with him and at the last minute he'd say, oh, can I show up 30 minutes or an hour late or he wouldn't show up at all. He'd show up two and a half hours late or he'd have some other pressing obligation. And so I planned to show around him. I prepared for a show around him. I'd set up notes and questions to be around him and he doesn't show up. So that's tiring. And so I thought, let me just, instead of trying to schedule more shows with people who don't show up or show up late, let me just take a break from scheduling more shows. Would I ever work with Dover and Jen? Sure. So a sad or depressed response after significant losses or defeats in status, contest or the collapse of your meaning system or inability to reach your goals, can have functions that explain why such responses are naturally selected. So the communication of a low affect after losses of attachment can attract support and sympathy from others. And its anticipation can sustain relationships. The submission of depressed people in subordinate positions can prevent punishment from dominance and promote survival. Lower motivation, physiological slowness can disengage people from unproductive forms of activity and allow them to pause, reassess and eventually engage in more productive endeavors. So different situations produce different types of symptoms. So social losses tend to be followed by crying and emotional pain. Failure to achieve goals is usually associated with pessimism, fatigue and a lack of pleasure and hedonia. So these explanations are not mutually exclusive. Different types of situations produce different reactions that meet specific adaptive challenges. Luke, John David Ebert has hit rock bottom and so visible on his Twitter. Luke Fordshire was the only place he ever met a dude who was bipolar and alcoholic. Bye-bye.