You want to keep the severity of our environmental problems in mind enough to keep yourself motivated but not enough to paralyze you into depression.
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we've been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the 'I' gets bigger and bigger, and the 'we' gets smaller and smaller.
As I kept having episodes of depression, I realized that it was not a one-off: that I had, well, not a disease, really - more an illness.
I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
Any doctor will tell you a great treatment for depression is exercise, physical exertion, that it really ups the dopamine in your brain, so that's what a show is. I play a show and that's a high for me; I can ride that.
Often, we ignore the fact that our spiritual condition and psychological state of mind are highly affected by what is happening to us physically. Sometimes depression is simply the result of exhaustion.
Depression is internal. The upswings and downswings have pretty much nothing to do with what's going on in the external world. It's not like something sad happens to you and then you feel sad. Good things happen, but you feel sad anyway.
Mental illness lives all around us every day. I've seen it in other family members, I've seen it in friends, and I've dealt with it myself with my own postpartum depression.
My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.
Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.
Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.
It was well after college that I learned about depression. I got my first job for Jack Paar. I realized I was sleeping 14 hours a day and just living for the Paar show.
As far as I can find, almost no one in the profession - not even luminaries like John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, or Irving Fisher - made public statements anticipating the Great Depression.
I don't know about you, but I've saved cards that old high school flames wrote me as well as those that employees have written me over the years. The power of genuine, customized appreciation will never lose its value, even in a gloomy economy... in fact, it's probably what we're all thirsty for in this desert of a depression.
We often joke about men moaning about being ill, whether it's man flu or anything else. We want them to be silent and strong about these things. And that's quite dangerous when it comes to depression, because talking about it helps. People bottle it up until it's too late.
Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.
I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.
I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.
George Washington sets the nation on its democratic path. Abraham Lincoln preserves it. Franklin Roosevelt sees the nation through depression and war.
Hank Paulson, the happy capitalist warrior who spent his life pursuing and defending free markets, is now the biggest interventionist Treasury secretary we've had since the Great Depression.
