When you’re lonely, you don’t become cripplingly hopeless and withdraw from life? You just contact some friends or easily make new friends and have a good time and carry on with life?
When you’re driving your car and everything is fine until you come to a stoplight, you don’t suddenly become depressed at the stoplight like I do?
When you wake up every morning, you don’t have crippling existential dread? You just get up and go about your day cheerfully, without analyzing the futile meaninglessness of the big picture?
I wouldn’t say that my mental state is perfectly optimal at all times, but I usually don’t experience any of these. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with the world, when life feels like a treadmill going faster and faster and I just can’t keep up. Usually that resolves at some point though, and then I can be somewhat happy and cheerful again in the here and now. Nowadays I tend ro try and dissociate a bit from what’s happening out there.
There’s war, famine, and crisis in the news every day, but I just have to accept that I can’t change the world on my own. I tend to ignore the news mostly, apart from the headlines every now and then, because it just constantly got my mood down. Me being sad about it doesn’t help anyone.
And life may be meaningless once you start analysing everything. In 200 years there will be barely any trace of me. The more reason to just do the things that make me happy, even if it ultimately doesn’t matter to anyone else.
I’ve found that the ability to be happy is something subconscious that can fail from time to time. In 2019 I wasn’t doing great and everything just felt empty. I did fun things, but didn’t truly feel anything from it most of the time. When I recovered in 2020, I felt a weird happiness that I didn’t understand. The world was going to shit due to COVID, and yet here I stood smiling at 2 birds fighting over food. It’s like I got a sense back that I didn’t realize was lost. Since then I try to remember this “irrational” happiness whenever I feel down. At some point it’ll always come back again, and the exact same situations will suddenly feel happy and worthwhile again.