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Comment by omegaBroom | Hacker News Reader

As someone who was (in my opinion wrongly) labeled gifted as a kid, I think this is because it comes with very high expectations and forces you to think about yourself and your actions all the time. Depression is basically self obsession. Life is only good when you forget about yourself. This is the same reason why social media drives depression as well.

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Iirc Allen Watts likened obsessively thinking about yourself to two monitors facing each other (highlighting the discordant feedback).

While I still have cringe-moments when I remember things I've done (as a kid, 10 years ago, whenever), I try to remember that I am what I'm doing. For me, it puts legs on the concept of remaining in the present. Whatever self others ascribe to me, that's fine, but I don't have live by those expectations. When I'm folding clothes, brushing my teeth, writing something, taking care of the dogs, etc., I'm no more or less than what I'm doing. It eases my mind and lets me focus on the given task. With practice, I don't have to think of it as much. It becomes the natural way to approach things, but there are still times when I have to remind myself.

I think it's like when you're breathing manually. You can but it's just not the same. I always feel out of breath when I do it. Or when you start to pay attention to how you walk and simply can't do it normally, unlike when you don't even think about it. Mindfulness is misunderstood in my opinion. Everything that can be done properly automatically, should be done so.

I agree with you, many consider that being mindfull is about taking control (of breathing, emotions...) it is the exact opposite.

I've always had bad social anxiety (and depression) I've always thought of it like this too.

to constantly think about how other percieve me or how they react must be because of some sort of extreme self obsession right?

I don't care what people think of me and I've strayed far off a typical life path but idk how else to explain my social anxiety

I've had a similar experience like that. I too have bad social anxiety. It's like in my head I'm watching myself in a third-person view and imagining my response to different people in different scenarios even before doing that activity. Sometimes that third person view is of a person I know (or I am meeting) and I see how my responses or reactions are to the scenarios that might happen.

I've had this for like 5-6 years now and it is at an all time high right now. This constant wandering mind then brings me a lot of anxiety and questions over why did I think the way I did.

I also don't care what people think of me when I'm consciously thinking about the topic, yet I cannot explain this automatic response checking in my head.

> Depression is basically self obsession.

While there's something to this claim for common and mild forms of "depression", it's far too trivial a soundbite to truly capture what's going on with depression. If it were true, then volunteering at a soup kitchen or something equally selfless would quickly cure depression, no matter how treatment-resistant. It's simply not the case.

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