• You said:

Self-pity is considered a kind of unhappiness for which one is culpable, while depression is considered “caused” by phenomena

I say:

I think the usefulness of tracing the distinction between self-pity and depression—which you’ve done quite well—starts to dissolve as soon as you try and take the next step.

In most medical practice it is extremely useful to draw distinctions. If somebody strolls into a triage and says that their body is made of glass and will shatter at any moment, the doctor is not likely to offer them care in preference to someone who presents with a tangible complaint, like a severed limb.

Triage distinguishes in order to apply medical care where it can make the most difference. A severed limb and Glass Delusion are not only illnesses with different urgencies, they do not even compete for the attention of the same kind of doctor.

I say that self-pity and depression are, as you say, distinguishable in terms of responsibility, but that this distinction is not useful in their treatment. A person in the throes of self-pity is in the act of fortifying himself against the assaults of a malicious world. A person who is experiencing depression is in the act of aiming a variety of weapons at himself in order to punish his own worthlessness.

In both cases the person’s culpability has nothing to do with the next step, which is always compassion. Self-pity and depression are, with respect to behavior and responsibility, inverses of one another. But this distinction doesn’t change how you ought to treat someone suffering from either one. With compassion.

Imagine telling someone who is full of self-pity just to grow up and stop being the sympathetic ear they wish they could find in another person. The fact that they are building a fort makes any accusation into a further justification for having built a fort in the first place. Now imagine saying the same thing to someone who is depressed. A depressed person is likely simply to agree with you: yes, they are in fact despicably self-involved and narcissistic. They may even feel ‘better’ for having had their own self-hatred confirmed. Conversely, telling a depressed person that they are in fact good people in the grip of a mere physiological despair is about as effective as telling someone who’s sulking in their fort to surrender by growing up. In neither case is the person helped by having been spoken to.

This is because the point of talking to them is not to appeal to an objective reality (‘grow up’ and ‘you have physiological despair,’ respectively) but to coax the one out of his fort and to convince the other to disarm his weapons. Compassion is the only thing that can accomplish both.

I think, but couldn’t rigorously defend, that self-pity and depression are different from one another only in degree rather than in kind. There is an obvious gap of culpability, but at a level deeper than moral responsibility I think that they are connected. I think that self-pity and depression are behaviors we adopt in response to different intensities of exposure to an elemental despair.

If I think about what depression really feels like, I imagine a kind of featureless black substance that causes intense psychic pain as I approach it. As though there were a psychiatric analogue of radium and I was trapped in a very small room with it. This pain makes me adopt a wide range of behaviors like self-loathing or cutting or drinking or snorting heroin. The despair itself is none of these behaviors, it only engenders them. These behaviors are what you would call the symptoms of depression and all of them serve as layers of insulation from this primary, elemental despair. The symptoms of depression are all, in a sense, forms of treatment. The self-afflicting weapons that I, a depressed person aim at myself are only accidentally pointed in a suicidal direction. Their real target is this elemental and featureless despair, which lies behind and beyond my self, at the nearest approach my awareness can have to a purely physiological aspect of my mind. (That near approaches to aspects like these are almost always accompanied by delirious extremes of feeling—think about orgasms—says something about the dubious satisfaction a physical understanding of consciousness would provide…)

Self-pity feels like a small-minded and self-satisfied exercise to prepare myself for the pain that exposure to this same despair will produce. It’s the difference between a Civil Defense drill and actually being annihilated by a nuclear weapon. Between a selfish sort of self-preservation and vivid desperation. The fact that the drill can be called off by realizing my own self-indulgence doesn’t banish the specter that originally provoked it.

But regardless of whether I’m acting like a child or a terrified animal, the only way I’m coming out willingly is arm in arm with someone who soothes me.

- http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/61731269206/you-said-self-pity-is-considered-a-kind-of

• Q. why are ideas important?

A. because this is an endless piss factory of a world.

because when i’m on hold for ten minutes i can feel the urge to murder someone for three ounces of meat and their chamois skin cape come roaring back. because moving through time only encrypts our savagery until it becomes beige enough to ignore. because the state of nature still bellows in us even if its moments of peace now come from being flush with green rather than drenched in blood. because if they could they’d cut salt with chalk and butter with wax. because of cronuts and twerking and the assholes pulling the strings on miley’s wrists. because no one will spit out the teat on the udder of state even though the milk’s adulteration is headline news.

because faithlessness sits in the scabbard of loneliness like a sword.

-http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/59605476594/q-why-are-ideas-important-a-because-this-is-an

• Pride is one of several ways we give ourselves definition in order to see ourselves more clearly against the background of the world. In effect, prideful people draw their seeming accomplishments around them like a grand suit of clothes. In reality it’s more like a shawl, because the worry at the heart of pride causes chills. Prideful people (who, today, are mainly the falsely modest) always make me think of delicate old women, drawing an inadequate shawl around their shoulders as they hunch against the wind. The critical point is that pride is an obscene waste of energy. Which you spend on yourself because you think you deserve it. But in reality there is no you, and this is just an attempt to hide the ineradicable void at the heart of any self.

We all have a nothingness inside of us that is completely immune to introspection. This nothingness is why you frequently feel like existence is a transcendentally stupid joke. Why every belief can never be held as deeply as you feel it should. Why your understanding of yourself always seems to hit bedrock, even though you know there’s an ocean of magma beneath it. This nothingness is the blue out of which all ideas come to us. And pride of ownership is the selfish—ludicrously selfish—attempt to claim credit in the face of this, on behalf of a fictitious identity.

I would very much like to abandon the agonizingly human way of producing things for something more insect-like. Even if I say I don’t have pride of ownership and couldn’t care less if someone steals what I do, this statement was still made possible by a certain amount of self-murder. And so the indifference to someone stealing your productions becomes studied, and the result of discipline. But no termite queen has to suppress her self image in order to make what she makes. She just broods for a while and then the things emerge. At an incredible rate.

Once you decline to fear the vacuity that gives rise to your productions, you tend to stop hiding it behind bad wallpaper. And consequently start seeing people who would use what you’ve made to paper over their own emptiness as more deserving your humble sympathy than your prideful contempt. - http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/47765939374/what-do-you-think-of-the-possibility-of-your-writings