This is a response article to Devon Tracy of Atheism is Unstoppable YouTube channel about his videos that he tries to give advice and help depressed people in them.

To Devon Tracy:

A major problem here is that you are trying to address the manifestations of depression as if they are the problem not just a result of the problem. They are trying to explain to you (in this video and several previous videos about depression you made) how depressed they are. They could just tell you they are sad. What are you going to tell them? Cheer up bro? They give you these details not complaining about them, but to tell you that they got into all those problems and they are screwed up because of depression not because of these symptoms. Also, for the record, Depression is a clinical disorder and illness, not just a symptom. When a depressed person comes to you and tells you I suffer from somnolence you do not tell them they should train themselves to sleep 5 hours only and be well rested in that short duration. You understand that they do not want to wake up and start a day. You gotta dive deep into the disorder of depression scientifically before you hope to be able to offer some kind of drug free help to someone who is really suffering from major depression. Think of depression as brain failure, just as there is heart failure and liver failure. You may hit the gym someday and workout so hard and exhaust yourself lifting heavy weights until it becomes so hard for you to lift a bottle of water to drink from it. This is what the depressed person feels like when he is well rested. The brain is not able to do its normal job, which is work. Major Depression leads to neurological failure of functioning. This is why the energy could be as low as zero. Just like a heart that is not pumping at all (or a heart that is pumping but not enough blood to feed the various body organs, so it is called a heart that is failing to do its job). Imagine a brain that is failing to do its job. What would it think about or dwell upon? Nothing, except negative thoughts, and an overwhelming desire and urge to destroy the person that this mind belongs to. It is like the mind thinks of terminating itself because it feels like it is useless and is just a burden torturing and entire body with it for no reason. Unless there is a way out, the argument presented by this hopeless mind sounds compelling, although unacceptable, regardless of the justifications. Think of it like erectile dysfunction. You really are turned on and willing to perform sexual intercourse but there is no cooperation down there. He is not lacking the desire to be fine. Don’t try to convince him that the world out there is beautiful. Or try to make him come to terms that the world out there is not sunshine and bunnies, either. He has to be capable of taking a shower without feeling that he has no option but to spend or exhaust his entire day’s energy in the process. Who cares in this stage of the illness about life being enjoyable or the world being beautiful, he just wants to be able to survive, function, then he would start worrying about how to enjoy himself, live life to the fullest, be successful, and happy, if that is possible or if that should be a concern for him or an aspiration for him someday. You noticed he has that desire, to fix his life, face his limitations, and overcome his obstacles. It is that the presence of this desire even if overwhelming does not lead to anything and makes no difference. He cannot convince or trick his brain to kick in, function, and start working as it is supposed to be able to. Unless you figure out the underlying problems and the best solutions or any solutions that could fix and solve these problems, you won’t get any promising or real results. Putting that in your mind while dealing with depressed people would lead to you producing great results in helping them, instead of just patting them on the back.

Well, to-do lists are invaluable and you can’t be productive without them. If you are still productive though, then this is zero compared to your actual production capability. Also, calendars should be reserved for appointments only. Shifting stuff to later days only means you’re procrastinating them. Do not schedule an item for a certain day unless it is absolutely necessary to be done in that day and time only. If an item can be taken care of at any time or day before or after that point of time you schedule for that item on your calendar, then putting it in that place in your calendar is a waste of your calendar’s potential and it means you’re holding yourself back. Also, it would strain yourself greatly for no necessary or beneficial reason. You are committing yourself to have the energy, interest, motivation, and enthusiasm for that item at that point of time in the future regardless of anything. That is a recipe for extreme stress. It is okay to plan for the future, throw a suggestion into a day in the future every now and then, decide to take care of some matter in a particular day that hasn’t arrived yet. That is a good idea. Planning some of the tasks of some of the future days. But to get entire days in the future all already scheduled with tasks ahead of them before these days even start by a long time or by a few days before you reach those days in the future that are scheduled with tasks or by a very big number of days prior to them or at any day that comes before those days, then you are just restricting and restraining yourself. You are just holding yourself back. You are giving up your free will and on the spot decision option for some kind of certainty of outcome. It is not because you have no idea what might pop-up in the future that would require some kind of modification at its time, but it is because you got everything there is about these days figured out already, predetermined, and decided. You are then only acting out those days. How about the need to figure out what you really really want to do at present. The need to feel free and autonomous. You are totally depriving yourself from that privilege or option by making everything about these future days all figured out and predetermined. It is like walking and receiving what destiny has in store for you instead of you shaping or creating your own future on your own terms. You created it for a few minutes then you went through it like a robot for all the remaining hours and days. That is self or personal dictatorship or slavery. And it is detrimental to your mental health, well-being, quality of life, intelligence, and happiness. This may shut down several centers in your brain, at least some that are involved in assessing and decision making, leading to you not operating while you are fully functioning. You would want to jump instantly to the future where all those predetermined days are over, like time travel in a blink of an eye or in a second, because you can’t bear to be at present or you can’t stand being at that kind of present. On the other hand to-do lists generate an amount of mindfulness that topples or beats the degree or amount of mindfulness that you can get from any kind of meditation there is regardless of how long the meditation practice is or the meditation sessions are. An amount and degree of mindfulness no meditator ever thought or dreamed of reaching from any kind or duration of meditation possible. Too huge inhibition from doing anything else that is not indicated in the calendar is not something that I believe will not have a negative side effect on your brain in the long term. You will be a good soldier, but a horrible leader and manager of yourself. You can do anything, but from where will you get good orders to obey in the first place? From the corrupt dictator or bad government? How alive do you expect yourself to be? And how long until you start to complain from convulsing anhedonia? You shouldn’t take generating or coming up with good ideas for granted. They start to emerge in a whole new different way the more you start following your impulses as they are generated. Regardless of predetermined plans, brilliant ideas feel they are welcome to be poured into your daily plates as long as you do not shut them down, delay them, cancel them, inhibit them, repress them, suppress them, or sublimate them frequently or on a regular basis. This is key to your creativity, which includes creative problem solving. This might decrease your creativity during those days, and creativity does not just require spontaneity but freedom to be able to kick in.

It’s time I admit that I haven’t been kidding myself when I started thinking Tony Robbins’ principles are becoming somewhat obsolete. They are based upon changing you and then everything in the world would become better. This is not true anymore. When the world didn’t exist, like it was the case in the past, It was all about you. If nothing exists outside of you, you and your internal world will be all there is. With the emergence of a stimulating environment, principles about happiness through self-control advocated for in meditation, religion, and the self-help industry of the twentieth century or the self-help style of Tony Robbins should be considered obsolete, because now, it is no longer about happiness. It is about making your mind engage in this world that has become worth living. Even if you didn’t feel good or fulfilled or happy, discussing the green new deal with a strange acquaintance or a strange person is something that we couldn’t even dream of doing 3000 years ago and is something that deserves your attention and mental immersion, even if it doesn’t affect your happiness in any way. If you want to be very happy, fulfilled and in a positive emotional state, just lie on the couch and listen to your favorite type of music in an air-conditioned location. Don’t think about your problems. If you don’t want to disrespect your mind, think about your problems and how to address them one after the other until you reach a new level of well being you never experienced before and the lack of which you would have never noticed before because you had no idea such thing is possible or such thing exists in the first place. It is like conquering or exploring new territory or planet or galaxy. Not about feeling good while doing anything. It is about or it should be about what can we reach if we do this or that. Instead of what we can feel if we stop doing this or that, even if the result is positive emotions , fulfillment or happiness. Who cares about what I feel or will feel now, it is about making myself qualified enough to produce an opinion about my state that is worth me paying attention to it instead of just shutting it up because it is coming from a primitive being or self who doesn’t know any better.

We can be happy slaves. We can be oppressed and all our rights taken from us by authoritarian totalitarian fascist dictatorships and we can be tortured like hell kind of torture and still if we control our focus and state – the way religion or meditation or self-help advice of the twentieth century or the self-help of Tony Robbins explains to us we should do – we might be in ecstasy or feel extreme happiness despite all that is happening or regardless of all that is occurring to us or outside of us or anywhere in all space-time. But is shutting ourselves from reality and all that exists outside of us and all there is in the universe really what we should be doing? Is having no feelings to the extent that you order your emotions to feel a certain way it is supposed to feel because you chose to because you’re the one in charge or you are the arbiter boss a good recipe for the best quality of life you could reach and live? Or a life that is worth living and caring about and giving a damn about continuing to struggle in it to keep staying alive? Or is it feeling reality as it is and trying to make it better to experience the effect of this enhancement, or modification, or growth, or discovery, or expansion on you and how much it makes you want to live fully, and engage fully, and stay forever in this world, and positively impacts your well-being and quality of life? It is not about positive feelings. That’s why Freedom is valuable. It makes us able to reach higher states of existence. Without freedom you could still be happy. But is this life that lacks any degree of autonomy or freedom the best life you could ever have?

Two things screwed up Self-Help in so far. The absence of politics in it (i or the lack of importance of involving politics while thinking about anything related to Self-Help), and the absence of the atheistic factor in it (Or the religious beliefs spoiling whatever good the self-help producer might arrive at). The detachment from reality always doesn’t lead to beneficial outcomes. It just makes people feel good, happy and fulfilled. No wonder depression is more prevalent among people who are not religious.

As a child you shouldn’t make decisions that you cannot reverse when you become an adult. With or without parental consent, unless it is life threatening, children should be banned from making irreversible decisions which they cannot take back or return back to what they were like before they make them, decisions that would severely or greatly impact their entire lives and future, until they are at least 18 years old. But to say transgenderism doesn’t exist or is just a disorder is not really true. There are people who are females but because of biology they had the bodies of males in terms of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Do you know that all people are made from the start females, even if their chromosomes contained x and y and then at some stage intrauterine testosterone kicks in and turns the embryo into male, and if testosterone doesn’t kick in the embryo would become 100% female? Yes, being female is the default. Masculinity is the superimposed characteristic.

There is something called a brain that is female and the body is male, at least phenotypically. People often make fun of this by saying how is she female if she cannot become pregnant? Like the absence of a Uterus is gonna make a difference. Or that what defines females is the presence of the uterus or menstruation. Yes this doesn’t mean that men who act like women or with some femininity are females. It is okay and it doesn’t make them less masculine or less of a man. But to feel you are a female, and when that is not just a feeling but some kind of internal awareness, like a realization about yourself, then clearly there is something to that and we cannot assume that you are a normal man here. Being a weak man doesn’t make you a woman. There is such a thing as a strong kick ass woman, and not just physically but in terms of her character, personality and mind. A charismatic woman, and a man who is so weak and submissive to people and to reality and fate and what happens to him and to others and what happens in the world, that you are ashamed of calling him a man in any way. This doesn’t mean that this man is female. Femininity does not equal weakness of the body or the mind or the character or the personality or the psychology. Females are not the nurturing and caring half of humanity. And if you have that you are female and if you don’t you are a male. It doesn’t work this way. It is so deeper than that. Please do not categorize people or segregate people based on such roles and weaknesses. Repressing people for thousands of years is very likely to result in women preferring that naturally but this doesn’t mean that there is nothing more to being female than that or that any of this have to do with them being female instead of them being repressed or suppressed and trivialized and held back humans or life forms or living organisms for thousands of years. The environment has a huge impact and effect on living organisms, and it is what the evolutionary biology is based upon. Thinking that the conventional gender roles assigned to females throughout history is in the nature of females or suits females as a gender only turns out to be so because this is what the environment has shaped them to be like, and not because this is inevitable as long as their gender is female or related to their gender being female or is a direct result of them being female. The difference here is that the reasons for these behaviors or predilections or preferences is not their female gender, it is the repression, confinement, suppression, holding back, inhibition, and restriction that took place for thousands of years, generation after generation, often times cherished by most women themselves who would rather exchange safety for risk taking behavior, being totally responsible for themselves, entirely taking care of themselves, totally on their own, independent, and individualistic. To this day, women are still regarded as personal property even by many men who claim to be devout feminists. You love a woman, you feel you are supposed to own this women as property so that no other man would share her with you, and you defend that sick stance by saying this is because you love her and you’re jealous and you feel some responsibility for her. But this is not the case with transgender women. These are females mentally, regardless of the degree of their strength of character or how dominant or submissive they are or how alpha or beta they are or how strong minded or weak minded they are. People don’t transition because of their lack of masculinity or femininity, but because they figured out or determined that they are females with male phenotypes or males with female phenotypes. There is no gain or win or benefit or positive consequences that would result from making women stay looking like men or men staying to look like women for their entire lives, just to not offend cisgendered people. On the contrary this is for the greater good of all of us when those presenting themselves to be one gender or the other really belong to it, instead of themselves forcing themselves to act like they belong there for their whole lives because the alternative is forbidden and they are doomed to remain in a gender that doesn’t describe who they really are for their entire lives. Purifying genders from those who don’t really belong to them would be for the good of all humanity. We don’t want men who are forcing themselves to be men even if they are really females from the inside just because their primary and secondary sexual characteristics are that of males. And we also don’t want women who are forcing themselves to be women even if they are really men from the inside just because their primary and secondary sexual characteristics are that of females. It pays off to know that I am a man or a woman or whatever gender I am not because I have to, but because this is who I really am, and If I’m not, there is nothing in the world that would make me stay in this gender against my will and against my nature, and I will then become the gender that I really belong to, my true gender.

People are heavily influenced by their environment and media. Imagine that you grew up alone in an island empty of humans or 200 thousand years ago or on another planet. Your aspirations would not contain almost all of what they contain when you are here in this time and place. These stereotypes when children are faced and bombarded with all the time they affect the children and create references in their minds of these images and suggestions. These images and the environment in general that children live in shape who these children are going to become like when they grow up. It forms who they are. These children then start to imagine life as just that and start believing this is all there is. It is still allowed and legal to be a dancer female, but this should not take a bigger preference over being a female engineer just because you are born a female and as a girl you should pick up some girly career.

Peterson meant if you don’t have the ability to organize your life and pull it together then you cannot claim to posses the ability or vision to change how the world works. You don’t have what it takes. If you can’t grasp simple mathematics then you will definitely fail at complex advanced calculus. He doesn’t mean that you should finish taking care of your personal life first then start pursuing your mass effect aspirations that are concerned with the well being of the entire human race. He is not advocating for getting your personal problems solved first before attempting to reshape the world that is external to yourself. He is not saying you should address the smaller issues first before you attempt to hit the big ones. He is just saying if you don’t have the ability to be organized inside your mind, your internal chaos would spoil whatever good you wish to bestow on the rest of the world or humanity.

If an urge or impulse is generated, unless it is fulfilled or met it will prevent you to an extent from desiring anything else. These are called the unfulfilled decisions. These are naturally different from dreams in which you do not really make up your mind that you will definitely pursue. It could be deduced or extracted from what has been mentioned previously that whatever that you plan in any of your to-do lists would keep an open loop inside your head that will stand in your way to chase any other item not indicated in any of these lists. There are entities that have reserved a place in your reward system, and until those debts are paid no new checks will be allowed to be written, albeit picked or chosen to be pursued. This might lead to the inability to move problem. In which you find yourself unable to have fun for a while doing random stuff until you feel awesome then you start getting serious and address the tasks that are waiting you on your to do lists.

Countless people blame the majority of their suffering and failure on not having enough money. Why didn’t you do that or why did you do that? The answer is almost always: I didn’t have enough money. I couldn’t afford it. It is like we are all living in a state of emergency. Get money now or you will be as poor as bankrupt or broke or possessing zero cash. If you add to this people who are married and have kids, you are not the only one who is in danger. Young adults handling that kind of danger or pressure puts them under stress all the time. If you are threatened to be fired this isn’t just losing your job, but it is losing your ability to survive. You will not be able to buy food, and there are no animals or fish to hunt, or fruits and vegetables to gather. You cannot survive on your own now without money. Because of religion which primitively emphasized on being a good person by being generous and thoughtful, money has been associated with being greedy. And being rich has been associated with being a bad and corrupt person. Thinking of only yourself at the expense of other people, so you’re gathering all the gold and money for yourself and you are leaving all poor people behind to suffer and not afford to buy anything. As if it is a pile of coins or gold or money that you collect the majority of it because of your physical strength while the other weaklings fail to collect or gather as much so they end up being poor. The money is a gift from god and God is testing you whether or not you are going to give away everybody else their shares or you’re going to keep it for yourself, though in both cases you do not deserve any money you possess, it is just a gift from your God that you are not responsible for it, and you do not necessarily deserve it, you only deserve it if you give a lot of money to charity on a regular basis. This is not how things work since a long time ago. We do not collect money or gather money from a limited pile, we generate it. And it is about the flow of money. These issues or complaints or reasons that because of which people have some kind of intrinsic hatred toward money is based to a great extent on human stupidity that is to a great extent contributed to it by Religion. Money is not a bad thing, it doesn’t spoil people, it doesn’t defile people, it doesn’t corrupt people, and it doesn’t make people less moral. Money now is essential for survival. I am not mentioning a good quality of life because the Universal Basic Income will not even remotely guarantee that or touch that. It would be swallowed by stuff like rent and bill payment and it would be just enough money to buy food with it. Think of how much it will not be necessary to donate money to homeless or very poor people because now they get a universal basic income just like you, and they got a chance to look for a job to further enhance their financial states or statuses. There is no reason to be afraid of money. It is a good thing. If something bad comes with it it would be because of you or the person himself/herself, and not because of the increase in the person’s income or money. You are giving people a chance to not be under stress all the time, or be afraid to be fired from their jobs because that means they won’t be able to survive and their life would fall apart until they get another equivalent job. People could still make it even if they are fired or even if they got fired and this would not make them afraid all the time or under stress and pressure all the time, that was making them act like slaves all the time to please their employers, although they believe their employers do not deserve any of that good treatment from them. They are biting the bullet and forcing themselves to act nice against their will just to eliminate any chance of them losing their jobs because they are not what their employers want them to be exactly. How many times you hear a parent or a dad say: I am putting up with this only because I have kids. Not everybody could make money on the side. When they do not have a chance to reach and maintain financial security, they will accept a life they hate just because they have no way of obtaining any kind of money except their current job. The Universal Basic Income would relief them from that stress and pressure and inability to choose what they really want in their lives. You will not be able to do anything without enough money. You can’t think, you can’t move, you can’t buy food or look around for a job, you are depending on someone else until you get a regular pay check. Universal Basic Income would really mean that you have a chance to survive. Trying to make money one way or the other, through a job or whatever would be to increase or expand your income, not to make it not zero. You will still be able to survive and eat something until you get a job or your business starts to earn you enough. Also, that amount of money that is given through the Universal Basic Income will be spent every month. It will not hurt the economy because it will be circulating, and touching sources of production and means of production everywhere in the country, and this would enliven the economy. Businesses wouldn’t fail because people are holding themselves back from buying simply because they can’t afford to even try the new non essential product or service. Countless people think of buying stuff that cost as much as 1 to 4 dollars as expensive and they can’t afford to buy them simply because their income so far is zero or entirely consumed by regular or recurring bills, rent and minimum requirements of living every month. Businesses would flourish greatly because of all those countless people who now afford to spend from 1 to 50 dollars a month on stuff that is not a highest priority or that important or essential to their survival. Not to mention the possibility to make millenial people not reluctant to become independent and move out of their parents’ dwellings and be on their own and starting to support or provide for themselves as early as 18 years old or the moment they graduate from college or university because it would be possible instantly, and not only when they get a job that they are comfortable enough in it to be totally on their own, because now there is no excuse, with universal basic income any job may lead to you being able to totally support yourself and provide for yourself and become independent and be totally on your own now without feeling like a kid or without feeling entirely helpless.