💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202106 › 20210623-more-than-one-room.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:53:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A post about depression,^ to which a reply was linked on the CAPCOM Geminispace Aggregator a few days ago, caught my attention. The post contains an excerpt from an article on Substack, in which the author relates an account of a person whose mood seemed to be correlated with how many rooms they had been in that day.
I find this a very useful tip for helping to deal with depression, chronic or not. It also makes perfect sense to me. Humans did not evolve to sit statically in one place and never experience a change in environment. Humans were hunters and foragers before they were farmers, and the well-documented need for humans to be social in one way or another necessitates us to go where humans are--at least in the real world.
Today the way in which we interact with other people is often different. The telephone and the Internet gave rise to virtual communication, and with the arrival of COVID-19, physical gatherings are now either discouraged or outright banned. We seem to have to make a choice these days: be social but do it only virtually, or go out to places but not be social while doing it.
In-person interaction is much more beneficial to my mental health than online interaction. I need both socialization and the ability to go places where people are. The strange thing to me is that fewer and fewer of my peers seem to feel the same way. Most of them seem now resigned to having to make that choice, or even prefer it. I'm not saying they're wrong, but my mind can't understand their satisfaction at all.
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[Last updated: 2022-01-05]