There's some good stuff here, but it completely skips gratitude.
Focusing on what you're grateful for is one of the more powerful and best proven methods to combat depression. I've been through clinical depression and consider it the key to my recovery.
There's an overwhelming amount of evidence that gratitude is inversely correlated with depression, and a good amount that shows it to be useful as an intervention as well. Even the article that you provided as evidence to the contrary found positive effects, just not dramatically higher than placebo.
For example, here are the first couple pages of results I got for gratitude studies. Every single one found a positive affect.
Often I have had a similar struggle to the one you described because I have not found my own personal reason for being grateful. I know now that it's because I was often living inside the narrative of people who were close to me, that was not my own. Being captive in this 'not-self' narrative has been quite deceiving. Taking back my own narrative has been super powerful for me.
In other words, I no longer think I am weird for not feeling joyful or being grateful for things for which I have not yet been given the chance to ask myself if I actually am grateful for them, or if I actually personally value them at all. Being stuck in someone else's narrative, or a cultural narrative, is to me like being in a jail, because the narrative will not correspond to my feelings, because it's not mine.
I now use the Nonviolent Communication set of strategies to listen to my own feelings, and use them to learn which of my human needs are unmet.
I also had Compassion Focused Therapy, which brought me back from the dead.
1. Without wondering if you sincerely mean it, make a point to say "thank you." Typically if you are depressed you will be alone, and so it is possible to recognize situations where you took an action now to make something easier for yourself later: for example, doing the dishes now instead of waiting for them to pile up. When that happens, verbally thank yourself on behalf of your future self. If you're capable of doing this, it jump-starts gratitude after a while.
2. Instead of feeling gratitude for things you perceive as positive, look for things that you perceive as neutral. The majority of your sensory experience is neutral. If your emotions are very negative, instead of looking for a dichotomy between negative and positive, look for a dichotomy between negative and neutral. You will perceive that neutral is not-negative. Because neutral is not-negative, increased perception of neutral sensations is a positive. If you perceive neutral sensations as positive for long enough, it jump-starts gratitude after a while.
The problem with that though is I perceive nuetral as negative. Neutral is registered same as negative because it's not positive. This is why gratitude is hard because people like me can't find the positives nearly enough to start recognizing and changing how I think.
In fact, I find it difficult to think that people are okay with neutral because how is that any better? You arguably still failed at whatever you were trying to do, just the results weren't as harsh. I dont know. I think I might just be really far gone at this point.
I'm talking about neutral perceptions, not thoughts. An example would be something like the visual perception of a sidewalk. Presumably you don't get an emotional reaction about the sidewalk one way or the other, it's just a sidewalk.
The majority of your sensory experience is neutral perceptions like that. Once you notice them, negativity seems small in terms of proportion of sensory experience. What actually happens is that negativity occupies the majority of attention, meaning that your mind is latching onto things you perceive as negative. Broadening the scope of awareness to include neutrality means that definitionally the mind is not as latched-onto the negative, therefore negative things seem smaller, therefore they are slightly more tractable to deal with.
Great question. I wouldn't worry about feeling grateful. Just reminding yourself of "what you have," as you phrased it, is enough.
When we're depressed we have a tendency to fall into the mindset that everything is bad. Reminding yourself that there is something good in your life helps break that cycle. If you can make it a habit your brain actually gets better at finding the positives and it starts to create a positive feedback loop.
Ok, here they come imho: 1- smart working aimed at increasing productivity, because a lot of time is spent at office but the output is too low and / or mediocre quality to stand up at global level in the 2020s; 2- cultural business as artistic heritage, creative industries and beautiful landscapes, which really need better overall standards to compete against Spain, France and the Balkans, especially in Southern Italy.
While true, you do have to ask how the hell there could possibly be 100 MB of just code.
Consider Windows calculator. In Windows 10, it consumes 15+ MB of RAM. When desktops have 8+ GB of RAM, 15 MB is essentially nothing. And yet, 15 MB is an astronomical amount of RAM considering the functionality Calculator offers. There's really no reason it should be more than a couple hundred kilobytes.
I didn't have a look at the code but the binaries aren't just code. Apart from things like embedded icons and stuff, there can be lots of engine embedded resources inside;
There is a reason for that, which is that UE4 has an absolutely massive amount of features out-of-the-box compared to most other engines.
If you were to add all the stuff from the Unity marketplace you need to be equivalent to a base UE4 install, it would probably approach that size as well, presuming all those features were even available.
My non-expert opinion is that the size of most game installs is tied directly to the amount of voiced dialog in the game, and in a similar context, how many languages that voiced dialog has been translated and included in the install.
Theoretically it would shuffle around and be different sizes each time, so it would never be quite the same. And you could alternate shoes to mix things up a little more.
Of course if you're the only one with gravel maybe that would stand out. Which is why we need to get everyone on the same gravel-based onion network :P
Kind of like active suspension in a car, it would randomize your gait but I suspect it won't be so easy and that a certain arms race of detection vs confounding / mimicking would ensue.
Reddit has terrible search too, but you can appreciate that "Reddit but with good search" isn't all it takes to compete with Reddit. That's 0.001% of the work.
And of course Goodreads has issues of its own, but none of them are show-stoppers for most people, especially few of the people who just use it as a glorified Excel spreadsheet.
I only chuckle about this because, like many enterprising HNers, I myself have considered building a Goodreads competitor in the past and even managed to build the ol' weekend prototype (i.e. 0.001% of the work). It's one of those projects where you start and, after you get some of the easy things done like fuzzy search, you go "wait, wtf am I doing? Who would switch to this?"
Using and improving OpenLibrary is also alluring, but pretty hard to do without an application with actual users that have some sort of "edit book" functionality that you can then moderate and submit upstream to the OpenLibrary data source.
I think most people use Reddit to just browse the subreddits. GoodReads is about searching for books an adding then to your shelves, many of those might be books that someone just mentioned to you in passing, or you don't remember the full/correct name.
