How I feel about life and my depression

I am an atheist and someone with chronic depression who feels that without the ability to fully enjoy this one and only life, then this life is worthless including me. This is the one and only life and when I die, there will be no God and no afterlife which is the reason why I want this one and only life to be perfect (in terms of my mood and being able to fully enjoy life). Therefore, I feel that this life is worthless not only because of my chronic depression, but also because there is no reward in the end for all your suffering (a God and an afterlife) which makes this life even more worthless. This life gives you problems only to reward you with more problems for having these problems. And it also rewards you with something to make you feel even worse: No God and no afterlife of eternal joy for all your suffering.

Also, I am someone who has (or in this case had) a dream to be a composer. Music is all about feeling emotion and expressing emotion. Since depression is something that takes away your emotions, then my whole pursuit of being a composer and expressing and feeling emotion from music is all dead and worthless which is why I have given that up.

It's well known that intelligent creative people are prone to be depressed. But such intelligence and creativity is meant to be fully enjoyed. Without the ability to fully enjoy those things, then these things are worthless. Therefore, I hate my intelligence and creativity as it is the reason why I am depressed and I view it as worthless. Not only that, I view it as a mockery because if you are given the greatest gift in the world and you are then forbidden from fully enjoying it, then this is a mockery. If, for example, I found out that I was the greatest composer in the world, this would not make me happy. It would make me feel enraged due to the fact that I have chronic depression which is preventing me from fully enjoying this talent (since the world's greatest talent is something that is MEANT to be fully enjoyed).

Now it would seem as though this life "wants" the greatest talented people in the world to struggle and to not be able to fully cherish their talents. For example, Stephen Hawking has developed a rare condition that endangered his life. Bethoven also had a rare condition that made him deaf. I find it strange and no coincidence that these individuals with rare talents have developed rare life-threatening conditions to hinder their talents. Stephen Hawking's condition severly impacted his scientific pursuits. Not to mention, the most obvious of all (something that clearly hinders being a composer)--which would be being deaf as hearing is an absolute necessity for being a composer. But having struggles in life is completely pointless because even though struggles do sometimes encourage you to push further, you can just as have as much motivation (and even more) to push forward without struggles.

It would seem as though the more you choose to pursue a dream in life, the more struggles this life gives you. This life "wants" you to struggle in order for you to achieve greatness. Therefore, if I choose to do the opposite of what this life "wants" by choosing to instead give up, then it might be likely that my problems in life will disappear and my chronic depresssion will go away completely. But if I choose to pursue my dream despite my chronic depression, then it might be likely that my problem of chronic depression will persist my entire life in order to make me struggle to achieve greatness through my music. But it would also seem that this life "chooses" to allow people to pursue their talents despite their struggles. For example, Stephen Hawking was supposed to die in 2 years from his condition and yet, he has lived on for many years. This says that this life has "chosen" for him to live in order to achieve greatness.

Therefore, if this life wishes to choose me to achieve greatness, then it is going to have to completely rid of my depression. If I choose to pursue my music despite my depression, then it will be likely that my depression will last forever. Which is why I have given up which puts life itself in a position where if this life so desires for me to get back to pursuing my music to achieve greatness, then it's going to have to completely rid of my depression. Otherwise, as long as I'm still depressed, I will never get back to pursuing my music.

If I had the choice to either be someone who is a genius with depression or someone who is happy with no intelligence, I would choose to be the happy person with no intelligence. The person (part of me) who is intelligent and chooses to struggle in order to achieve greatness through music is the person I hate. But the person (other part of me) who lives a lifestyle of someone with ignorant bliss who plays videogames is the person I love. The reason I pursue music is because of my value towards feeling and expressing emotion. So it means everything in the world to me for me to be in perfect emotional health. But this value I have only serves to bring me hate as my chronic depression compromises my emotional health. In other words, me pursuing music brings me hate as I have chronic depression.

This is the reason why I have given up my value towards my emotional well being in music and have focused on going back to playing videogames because I find that when I play videogames, nothing in the world matters (not even my emotional well-being) unlike my pursuit in music in which everything matters which only serves to bring me frustration due to my depression. If I didn't have depression at all right now, I would pursue my music with full enjoyment and motivation with no feelings of hate or frustration whatsoever.

Finally, if you think my views here are somehow flawed, I am going to present the scientific truth here for people who think that the things we do in life have more value than any amount of personal pleasure (this even goes for any value you have towards yourself as a human being). No amount of intelligence or great things we do in life will ever make up for a lack of pleasure because in order to have such value towards these things is to have pleasure in the first place (as pleasure is what allows us to give value in terms of emotion towards these things). So it would be illogical to say that these things have greater value than our pleasure. Now if you were to somehow have value towards something with no pleasure, then this value would be nothing as it is nothing more than a thought. Pleasure is what gives any notion of value life and without pleasure, it would be completely dead. Therefore, pleasure is the only thing that matters and any notion of value is just a thought and nothing more. It is the processes in our own brains that give these things life in terms of value. Without such a process (which would be the process of experiencing pleasure in the brain), then they will have no such life.

It is, therefore, a moral to think that any amount of intelligence or great things we do in life holds greater value than our pleasure. Morals are not logic or science (fact)--they are false and irrational. This is the reason why I would give up all my intelligence and creativity in order to live a life of ignorant bliss in which I have no intelligence and have all the joy in the world with no depression.

I'm an atheist too and I don't completely agree with what you wrote. I agree with you in that I also think there is no religious type of god of religious type of afterlife. But in all reality we can't see and know everything about this life, we can't see beyond the universe and no one has an answer to how eveything was created. This is not me saying "so there must be a god" I'm saying that we do not know, more in an agnostic sense. Apart from that I also don't think life, and anything we experience in it has any meaning other than the meaning we give it. And us with depression have often been robbed of the possibility to give meaning in a positive way, or any meaning at all. This is just the product of a brainproces that makes us feel this way, and we can't influence this proces to the degree that we need to in order to experience meaningfullness again. So I for one do not care that all this suffering is for naught, because everything is, I care that I have this strange brain that makes it hard for me to apply meaning.

I can understand your struggle when it comes to your love for music that you once had I suppose, and you talents for composing. I on the other hand have no talents, I'm smart enough, but not thát smart, so kind of, above average. But I do experience so much joy at rare times from listening to music as well as singing. I'd sing if I didn't have the ugliest singing voice I ever heard. This makes me relate to you, I find it typical I guess that the one thing I'd love, I can't. But this too has no meaning. I couldn't even struggle my way towards singing beautifully.

I think the best thing you said is that you are going to focus on your videogames (what do you play?) Anything that will give you comfort, joy or a sense of being able to forget yourself for a minute is good I think. I whish I could get that with anything, I hate always feeling present and thinking about myself.

Do you find yourself completely lacking in any sense of pleasure to ascribe value to things? I could perhaps think that if you could enjoy making other people happy, you would compose for the sake of bringing joy instead of experiencing it. And, ignore if I am wrong, I think you should maybe let go of (or grieve for) the loss of your ability to love composing, it might take the pressure off and who knows what will happen.