So maybe I'm not depressed but just experiencing life as it is. The whole idea underlying the concept of depression is that it is a suboptimal state, but maybe it's not. Maybe it is baseline and feeling happy and fulfilled is an artificial state. This is the typical kind of thinking that captures and grabs my imagination.

At this point in my life it doesn't help to be reflecting on this type of question, as I need to make friends and I want to be in a relationship. Which just makes me question how healthy it all is to pursue needs and fulfillments that resist the basic facts or our existence, i.e., it is depressing and tragic. Tragic in the sense that we are doomed to die, there is no guarantee of happiness or even the absence of suffering. In fact suffering seems ubiquitous. We are in a continual state of suffering, and we spend our lives avoiding that and convincing ourselves otherwise. Or we do what the Buddha did and transcend it. I do think that is possible.

One can look around and observe the different skill level of people as to their ability to escape the tragic reality of life and be happy. Once you accept that the baseline is sad, that our factual existence is essentially tragic, the range of human psychological adaptation makes sense, or more sense. I am not wallowing in this very depressing line of thinking because I am masochistic, I just believe that happiness, or my happiness is possible while embracing the basic facts of human existence. That in the face of knowing this I can still build a happiness and that it will be effective. Which points to another aspect, happiness is a program, a strategy, and has some themes and rationales necessary to it's logic. For example, the logic behind my proposed program is that stuff can make me happy and will be effective, successful in keeping me happy or sustaining happiness, by taking the basic facts always into account. Also I think or hope that working out all of the ramifications of this fact of a tragic and bleak human existence, will somehow enable my happiness project to have a strong foundation.

This puts me in opposition to all the helpful advice one can expect to get when they are depressed or melancholic.