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Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

Right, rumination is bad serves no useful purpose. It is good to analyze our previous mistakes but we should not lament our previous behavior because we cannot change it anyhow. We can only try to be better next time.

The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".

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Rumination and depression evolved to help humans survive. They aren't useless.

Maybe they helped humanity but sure they ain't helping me now. I think of them the same we "evolved" wisdom teeth and appendicitis.

I really can’t conceive of a way in which depression helps humanity survive. Just because we have a trait doesn’t mean it’s adaptive. More likely, it is a dysfunction of a related emotional state with actual utility (pessimism, paranoia, etc), but it is incorrect to say it helps us survive. It’s just not so maladaptive that it outweighs the benefit of the well functioning adaptation, on a population level.

Andrews PW, Thomson JA Jr. The bright side of being blue: depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems. Psychol Rev. 2009 Jul

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2734449/

Very untrue. Evolution didnt evolve depression, just as evolution didnt evolve every other disease or defect. These are byproducts of convulated systems.

Great point. Some things evolved (by evolution). Then some complications arose because of the different things evolving to their local maximal fitness.

Inability for the human body to cope with something is not the result of evolution but the lack of evolution. Evolution is still going on.

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