diminished sympathy for the depressed
for the last two years i have been mentalizing quite a lot, and i now can confidently conclude that this habit has not expanded my empathy. to the contrary, i've seen what's going on in people's minds, and i don't like it.
i am, in some ways, a highly sympathetic audience to those who are hurting. i like to listen, i have a good memory, i like to hear authentic speech (though depression-talk is rarely authentic -- more on this later), and i spend a lot of time imagining, in the style of father brown, the internal states of those around me, and how such things relate to actions done. if you have something delicate you need to express to someone, and you choose to express it to me, i am always grateful and touched to hear it.
i also find it hard, in the final analysis, to really censure people. i have managed to maintain friendships with compulsive liars and sex addicts, for example, because after a certain point i remind myself that some people just can't help themselves. some things are in the genes / in the blood / in the soul / in the fabric of reality itself. there is a certain pleasure in learning to take the bad with the good.
that being said, my sympathy for depressed people has lately attenuated radically. i don't mean to imply that being depressed is a failure of character or of morality; i only mean to say that the presence of depression is neutral with respect to character. polite social scripts dictate that a depressed person is to be extended a lot of gushing sympathy. i now believe this reflex is wrong and harmful. there are many, many malicious and deleterious people in the world who have learned to game this instinct.
accordingly, i have compiled a list of dangerous depressive-type archetypes worth being on the lookout for.
those who see everyone as worthless
in high school i had a friend who both hung out with me and with a popular set filled with people who we both agreed were a bit vacuous. near the end of our senior year, i sat with this friend in a park and scolded him for spending too much time with the stupid-crowd and not enough time with me. after listing out the flaws, person-by-person, of this set for ten minutes, my friend stopped me and said, "i'm not disagreeing with any of this, but maybe you've noticed i'm spending time with you, and not them, right now?" this reply produced a spike of shame so acute it reorganized my consciousness. though i was not jealous of this "set," they were all good and interesting people, and my inability to recognize this revealed a limitation in my character. i turned this limitation into my friend's problem, by doing splash damage to him.
i now see this pattern as belonging to a genus: when one's self-esteem is so low you devalue those around you. an obvious mistake, you'd think, but there is a certain type of depressed person who does this all the time. it almost as if they're thinking, "if these people are spending time with me, they must be just as worthless." of course, no one actually believes this explicitly, but the pattern of behavior is common enough. for instance, i had a friend group which would meet every evening to chat and game, and one particularly depressed member of this group would occasionally lash out at everyone else with little jabs like, "wow, we're all such losers, spending all our time gaming..." meanwhile, i'd be thinking, "maybe you currently are a loser who does nothing, but i put in a full day at work, then set a deadlift PR, then did an hour of jiujitsu, then read a play, and now i'm gaming with you because i like you."
it's nice to believe that people who are depressed and low-status wouldn't be status-competitive, but this is far from true. some people are natural competitors who believe they're surrounded by a vast and lowing herd of human cattle. a subset of these people have been, by neuro-chemical happenstance, brought low by depression, but without developing apposite humility. linton heathcliff, from wuthering heights, is a model for this type: a mewling weakling who has been relentlessly brutalized, but nevertheless is himself a bully, who spends all of his time mocking and humiliating his illiterate cousin, hareton. linton was a man-child who couldn't have known better -- what's your excuse?
those who cry-bully
a cousin to the previous category. mostly self-explanatory. a depressed person who likes to dish it out but can't take it. everyone just has to stand around and nod politely while getting insulted, unless they're willing to risk watching this person have a mental breakdown.
last time i was exposed to a person of this type, i sat around and listened to them belittle all of our mutual acquaintances, while we both pretended like it wasn't perfectly obvious to me that this person mocks me, as well, in different company. the two most prominent examples of this type i know personally are (i'm sorry to say) women who think they are exceptionally empathic. there's nothing to do with this sort except avoid them. very bad when given authority over others.
those who amplify discord
this is very subtle, and is difficult to talk about across gender lines.
everyone in my family has sub-clinical bpd. by this i mean we form strong attachments very quickly, and then feel betrayed very easily. this unfortunate whippiness hasn't caused us to materially damage our lives (hence "sub-clinical"), but it's a very noticeable part of our personality structure. when i'm crashing out, i do something i call "discord amplification," which looks like this: someone says something i don't like; then i think about why what they said is wrong, and how what they said was poorly observed/argued; then i start asking myself trap questions like, "why did they think it was okay to say that to me in the first place?", and "what did they really mean by that?", and "if they really cared about me, wouldn't they have said X instead of Y?"; then i start enumerating the flaws in their character. and with that, we're off to the races. the discord feeds off itself. i have learned (i think) to mitigate some of this as an adult through certain strategies and mental exercises.
some people, particularly certain depressive-types, do just this sort of thing, but on the social level. perhaps your boyfriend said something you don't like, and then your discord-amplifier friends sit you down over brunch and start asking you the trap questions i listed out above. as easily as that, a whole community can give itself sub-clinical bpd.
one hysterical/demoralizing example: i used to be a part of philosophy discord server, which was primarily a place to coordinate weekly reading groups over voice chat, but also saw a lot of off-topic bantering in various text channels. over the five years i rooted around that server, i saw the following happen three separate times: text-only transwomen would start fighting over some topic, then split into two tribes, and escalate and escalate and escalate their conflict until admins were forced to start banning users, which would prompt the losing faction to leave the server en masse. again, this happened three separate times. i remember the second schism erupted because a transwoman in genchat said "makeup is transphobic" and another transwoman said "saying 'makeup is transphobic' is transphobic," and they started amplifying so hard that most-all the server's transwomen took sides, and eventually the losing side left the server (i am not joking about any of this). discord on discord! because of the dynamics of amplification and identity, calm outsiders couldn't say the obvious things, like "you're all trans, obviously none of you are transphobic" or "please talk about philosophy instead."
we don't have the social infrastructure to prevent community-level discord amplification. i hear a lot of bad ideas, like "things will de-escalate if we make sure everyone gets heard." this is a doomed strategy because amplifiers love being heard! my friend had an ex who would get in literal 30-hour amplification arguments with him; to fix this, the ex proposed going to a couple's therapist; a potential therapist turned them down as clients, because he accurately identified that the ex really wanted the therapy to be a new venue to force her boyfriend to sit down and listen to her amplify some more.
my most recent strategy for preventing auto-amplification has been to tell a friend in person, "wow, i'm having an epic bpd crash-out right now," then go off to stare at a sack of potatoes or something for ten minutes, then come back and sit and listen to people talk for fifteen minutes or so. around this time, out of nowhere, i will feel cured. this has been very consistent, and has stopped me from losing days to rage. i have no idea what the community-level analogue to this looks like, however.
i am quite sad about discord amplification, because it is so hard to stop, but it is ubiquitous, since it is parasitical on useful social infrastructure (e.g. whisper networks). for instance, i had two friends, a man and a woman, who i knew would naturally like each other (how did i know that? because i told them all the same jokes), but they kicked off their acquaintance on a minor bump which they both amplified in separate, gendered ways. luckily they both came down to earth before a losing faction got exiled, but it was astonishing how unhelpful everyone around them was.
those who demand love
i have recently observed someone crashing out of a social scene due to the following parameters: they were a perfectly likeable person, but would remind everyone daily of how they don't have many friends and are looking for more friends, and how they were confused about why they didn't have more friends, and would cut conversations short to ask people "why aren't we closer friends? what is it about me that is preventing us from being closer friends?", which is just a really unpleasant set of questions to be on the receiving end of. there was nothing except time preventing those budding friendships from really sprouting, but for some reason this person demanded full-bore friendship real quickly. essentially, they were being a "friend-pest." unfortunately, there was something more than social incompetence at the root of this.
the wisdom of la rochefoucauld
all of these dynamics are described by some as "toxic." i don't describe them this way, because i think therapy-language is a huge trap. therapoids seek to create a sufficiently expressive language that will fix all these problem -- to separate that which is "toxic" from that which is "healing" -- but the language of self-love is always exploitable. think, for instance, of the infinity of perverse use-cases the concept of "healthy boundaries" can be smeared over. scott alexander observed that concept handles in self-help are usually created and spread by the least qualified:
Advice is disproportionately written by defective people. Healthy people perform naturally and effortlessly. You walk so gracefully that a million man-hours into bipedal robots fail to match your skill. But if some stroke patient or precocious one-year-old asked your secret, you would just say “I put one foot in front of the other.”
If you want good advice about how to walk, ask someone with cerebral palsy. They experience walking as a constant battle to overcome their natural constitution, and so accumulate tips and tricks throughout their lives. Or ask a physical therapist who works with these people and studies them. Just don’t ask someone you see walking especially briskly down the street.
Relationships work the same way. Go to an elderly couple who have been happily married for fifty years, and they’ll give you vapid old-person advice like “Treat every day as a gift from God.” But go to someone who’s struggled with every one of their last thirty-seven relationships, and they’ll be full of suggestions! They’ll tell you all sorts of fascinating things about boundaries and gaslighting and the four-hundred-and-ninety-four principles of nonviolent communication.
the problem with telling people to start by learning how to "love themselves" is that human beings are already stuffed full of amour propre. the older i get, the more truth i perceive in the maxims of la rochefoucauld:
1: What we term virtue is often but a mass of various actions and divers interests, which fortune, or our own industry, manage to arrange; and it is not always from valour or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.
4: Self love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world.
11: Passions often produce their contraries: avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice; we are often obstinate through weakness and daring though timidity.
31: If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
86: Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.
90: In the intercourse of life, we please more by our faults than by our good qualities.
146: Usually we only praise to be praised.
241: Flirtation is at the bottom of woman’s nature, although all do not practise it, some being restrained by fear, others by sense.
i hated this stuff when i was younger, because i thought it was all hyperbole and cynicism. of course it is hyperbolic, but i do not think it is cynical. understanding that a person can be both a depressive and a horrible bully is, when viewed from the right angle, actually a pretty funny and endearing thing to know. i find i like people more now. i am, however, much more cautious about expressing sympathy.