We all suffer from depressive hedonia, but it takes historically (and probably generationally) various forms. Moral reformers urge us to "dare to struggle, dare to win," but we vary in our ability to believe (have faith) in the possibility. --CGE
Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> Voyou wrote:
>>
>> "The majority of students I encounter seem to be in a state of what I'd
>> call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterised in terms of
>> anhedonia, but the state I'm referring to is constituted not by an
>> inability to get pleasure so much as it by an inability to do anything
>> else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is
>> missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment
>> can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this
>> is a consequence of students' ambiguous structural position, stranded
>> between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and
>> their new status as consumers of services."
>
> More or less ture -- but banal because no more true of the 21st-c than
> of the 1950s. One part is profoundly wrong, that which focuses on
> "pleasure" as though these depressed students were looking for positive
> pleasure rather than anaethesia in order not to focus on what one was
> not doing because, through that, what was simple, easily done, and would
> cause trouble is not done, the person simply does not do it: it's not
> that she won't do it or can't do it or has something else to do; she
> simply does not do it and an hour later cannot for the life of her figure
> out why she did not do it. AND I MEAN SIMPLE AND EASY: Like not making a
> 3-minute phone call to change an appointment to avoid a conflict, or
> retype the last 10 pages of a dissertation to get in the mail to the
> person who will type the formal copies or make a two-hour trip on a
> lazy summer day to check a footnote which is the last thing to do before
> getting the dissertation to the typist. Instead one reads an Earl
> Stanley Gardner mystery or rereads a Dickens novel for the third time or
> plays solitaire for an hour or two -- which to the outsider will look
> _exactly_ like pursuing pleasure.
>
> Carrol
>
>
>
>> --
>> "Why must man's vocation always be to distinguish
>> himself from animals?"
>> http://blog.voyou.org/ -- Baudrillard