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Consuming media without further participation in life may be meaningless, but to assert that they're inherently meaningless is nonsense. Many people are perfectly capable to grasping ideas in the abstract and then implementing them in reality.

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You could argue that symbols are all 'inherently meaningless' without breathing some life in them from your own needs and experiences. 'Fingerspitzengefuhl' [1] is one of my favourite words in German and I think gaining that kind of understanding is impossible if one spends all their time in letters and doing nothing of the stuff that necessitates writing them. I took the author to mean that endlessly reading without doing any living is somewhat of a dead existence. As the person they're replying to, that's what I got from it anyways.

I tend to intellectualise this way of looking at depression (and how to get out of it - how to just get out the damn house!) as related to the Symbol Grounding Problem [2], in a semi-serious, semi-metaphorical way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspitzengef%C3%BChl [2] http://www.socphilinfo.org/node/100

Thank you for such a charitable interpretation. This is basically what I was trying to get across.

Depression is a son of a bitch that I have also known at times and it really is as hard and as easy as just doing anything at all.

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