You Risk Depression If You Keep Doing This

AVAlexander Volchek

A depressed state is a reduction in your scale. A reduction in your scale means fewer opportunities and less ability to experience the joy of life. You should reflect not on other people who are depressed, but on yourself. Why? And reflect on the root causes. The reason you're depressed is not that you have no money. The reason you're depressed is not that you have no husband or wife. That makes no difference. All those numbers, all those comparisons, have nothing to do with depression. It's very important not to deceive yourself here. Whenever you work on something, it's important to recognize its source. I'm going to give you a key now, the most important key: what you can do, guaranteed, to make sure depression never arises. You're at risk of depression if you keep doing this. Essentially, throughout your life, you've been doing things that drive you into depression and intensify it until it's almost impossible to escape. By recognizing these mistakes, you have the opportunity not only to remove or reduce depression and move out of it, but to grow enormously in your own scale, to grow very substantially. I'll keep my sunglasses on. It's very sunny today. We finally have good weather in California. Number one is comparing yourself with other people.

If you're looking at social media and comparing yourself with someone, comparing yourself with other people, acquaintances, friends, or your parents... Comparing with parents, by the way, is an extraordinary mistake. It's when parents want their children to be like them endlessly, throughout their lives. If they have this proud feeling that their own life was great, they burden their children with and impose on them the same things they did themselves. If something went badly for them, they artificially use that to impose something else on their children—something they liked in, again, other people's lives. It's all a matter of comparing yourself, endlessly comparing yourself with someone else. Remember something very simple: you are an absolutely unique person. Just as every child—your child or any other—is absolutely unique. They don't have to be like their parents. Mistake number two is wishing bad things on other people. How can you catch yourself doing this and observe it? Throughout the day, notice how many people you have genuinely wished something bad on. It doesn't matter whether you were buying coffee somewhere, at a restaurant, at work with colleagues or your own employees, with your boss or partners, with your husband or wife, girlfriend or boyfriend, children or parents.

Who did you wish something bad on? What bad thing did you think? You see, thinking is the same as wishing—in this case, when you're looking at this particular mistake. You might ask, “How is wishing bad things on others connected with my being depressed?” Directly, completely directly. When you direct an intention toward another person that something should go badly for them, first and foremost you set that state in motion for yourself. This combination of depression, stress, fears, and illusory perception inevitably, absolutely inevitably, gets set in motion when you treat other people badly. And here, treating others badly means just one very clear aspect: wishing something bad on someone. At this point, I'm not even talking about helping other people or treating them well. Simply look at whom you thought about, and how. You're watching a reel, you see someone, start comparing yourself, and start wishing them harm. Even when you think they did something wrong, that there's something wrong with them, that they're a fraud or a liar. All of that starts the process of these negative emotions. It's one of the deepest factors affecting depression.

All the factors I'm going to describe are very important, but this is a fundamental mistake. In the meantime, I want to ask you to really support my channel. Give the video a like. It helps my development a lot. I really want to keep making videos. Thank you very much. One of the most important states in a person's life is this: they're living today, they're thirty, for example, and they think their life has already taken shape and is simply what it is. I'm forty-two now. If you take me twelve years ago—what year was that, two thousand and... 2013. I lived in Moscow, I had one child, and I was a co-owner of Business Molodost. I was also still its CEO at the time. That was my life. What I've just described isn't the inner states I was in. Twelve years have passed; I live in America, in California. I have four children. My businesses are completely different, my professional work is completely different, with businesses in entirely different fields. I'm not a CEO anywhere at all, and here I am, sitting and making YouTube videos. Just twelve years. If you look twelve years ahead, I'll be fifty-four, and there is an entirely different life ahead.

Likewise, subtract twelve years from 2013 and you get 2001. In 2001, I'm a second-year university student studying programming. I have no idea what will happen or where. I live in Minsk. My father is still alive. I have no wife, no child. I'm with a different group of people, with completely different circumstances in my life. I'm not even working yet. I started working as a systems administrator at a computer club in my second year, probably around that time. We also tried starting a business selling phones. I hadn't even started that phone business yet—it only lasted a few months. It hadn't even started yet. I was still working as a systems administrator at the computer club. What could I possibly say about life, about any plans? Why is this a mistake—not understanding that there are still decades ahead? Because you've sealed off and completely shut down your perception of the breadth of what happens. The problem is that this makes you miss a huge number of opportunities. Of course, there are things you won't miss. Your life will definitely change. There will be major changes in business, in your professional work, in your relationships, in your emotional state, in your experience of life, in your perception of different spaces—entirely different spaces. They will change in any case.

Often someone says, “I don't like red.” Five years later, they like red. Someone says, “I don't like going to the ocean.” Ten years later, they're an ocean fanatic. Someone says, “I don't like hiking.” Five years later, they're hiking. “I don't want to play the piano.” “I play the piano.” “I'm going to work as a programmer.” They work as an artist. Life changes completely. Very different circumstances arise, very different circumstances that are hard even to imagine. In fact, if you work through this state and really recognize within yourself that you have an enormous amount of life—an enormous life of your own—I'm not talking about opportunities here. Look, I'm not talking about opportunities. I'm talking about your actual, personal life. This state alone will automatically throw you out of depression if you begin. This is one of the fundamental mistakes. I was about to say the previous mistake was the most important; this is one of the fundamental mistakes. Do this: spend a week in this state, live in this state for a week, and you are guaranteed to reduce your level of depression. Guaranteed. If you generally remain in this state, depression is impossible. The point is that simply being in this state, just with regard to this one mistake, makes depression impossible.

But fundamentally remaining in this state and maintaining a space like this is very difficult. That's why I'm giving you a series of mistakes you make. By working on this series, you have the opportunity to maintain a reasonably healthy balance overall and avoid falling into a depressed state. A depressed state is a reduction in your scale. A reduction in your scale means fewer opportunities, less experience of joy in life, fewer new emotions, fewer new people, less professional development, less business, less of everything. It's simply a narrowing, a narrowing, an endless narrowing. Depression is only a narrowing, a narrowing of perception. There's a very good example. When people drink alcohol together, why do they start having fun at first? It's not because they tune in to the same wavelength, but because everyone's perception narrows. With narrowed perception, with very narrow perception, it's fairly easy to find a single point of connection. Very easy. If you put everyone together in a room and narrow their perception, it will be very easy for them to do the same thing. What happens the next day? Your perception partly, partly expands. But it doesn't actually expand: a window simply opens somewhere here, a window opens somewhere here, a window opens somewhere here.

You feel completely out of harmony because your perception hasn't come together. It has become active in different areas, while before, everything had narrowed to a point. Depression is what narrows your life down to a point, and you will inevitably die within your own life—die not in the physical...

Within your own life. You'll die not physically, but as a person. You won't exist as a person. We live in a world where hundreds of millions of people, probably more than a billion, are in endless depression. The number of people with depression will only grow. You should reflect not on other people who are depressed, but on yourself. Why? And reflect on the root causes. The reason you're depressed is not that you have no money. The reason you're depressed is not that you have no husband or wife. That makes no difference at all. All those numbers, all those comparisons, have nothing to do with depression, nothing at all to do with depression. You can easily recognize this and see how people who have nothing aren't depressed, while people who seem to have everything are depressed—and another person who has everything isn't depressed. It's very important not to deceive yourself here. Whenever you work on something, it's important to recognize its source. This third mistake is extraordinary, simply extraordinary: you experience your life as something very narrow. Every person has the opportunity in life to grow a thousandfold, to feel far stronger, bigger, more wonderful.

To make your life fuller, brighter, interesting, rich with flavor, very interesting—a broad, vibrant life. Absolutely every person. It's interesting. I'm observing this right now. As we record this video, the camera operator filming me—we spend quite a lot of time together, and he films me very often—I'm watching how he doesn't recognize, doesn't recognize that he still has a huge number of years of life ahead of him, a huge number of years of professional work, a huge number of years of family life. What he understands of family life now is a fraction of a percent of the whole life, of the full breadth of life to come. On the one hand, that's wonderful, because there are a huge number of new events ahead. But we all want all the best events to happen tomorrow, right here and now. People in the modern world want every good event to happen right here and now. You say, “If they happen now, what will you do afterward? What else will you want afterward if nothing different happens later?” On the other hand, a person doesn't believe anything will happen. They're certain everything is already over, everything has collapsed into this point. Like a hamster on a wheel, they can't escape it, can't escape this routine, can't escape this state of absolute apathy, depression, disappointment, falsehood, this endless daily routine in which every day is the same.

The same difficulties, the same problems. They simply take different forms for different people. You compare yourself with someone else and think, “If I had what they have, I wouldn't have any problems. If things were like they are for that person, I wouldn't have any problems either. And if things were like they are for that one, there wouldn't be problems either.” So you put together a combination from everyone and solve all your problems. But this will never let you escape yourself. It only diminishes your perception of yourself. You're running away from yourself. When we talk about depression, one of the extraordinary aspects, perhaps, and one of the mistakes a person doesn't resolve is that they want to get out of depression not to develop themselves, not to get to know themselves, but simply to make the depression disappear. I'm going to give you a key now, the most important key to keeping depression from arising. What can you do, guaranteed, so depression never arises? You may sometimes experience stress, fear, negative emotions, some sense of imbalance, loss, detachment, or pain. But not depression, because depression is a particular state a person enters and stays in for a long time. They fall into it and cannot get out, cannot take the simple actions that would get them out.

They start taking pills, start turning to other people to resolve their depression. But in most cases, what they're actually doing is suppressing the symptoms of what's happening rather than working with the root source. So what is the root source that would keep depression from ever arising, from ever arising at all? By the way, I rarely describe anything as “never.” When you go, for example, to psychotherapy, or for treatment for depression, or generally want to work through depression, you should do it not to remove the depression but to get to know yourself. Suppose you make it your daily task to truly get to know yourself, to know yourself as a person: who you are, how this world works, what its true values are, what the cause-and-effect relationships are, why these events really happen. Without living in illusion, without endlessly listening to television, radio, YouTube, or a huge number of other people, without endlessly reading a social media feed and forgetting that genuine understanding even exists. Recognizing that, for some reason, one country presents history one way and another country presents it another way. Recognizing that someone received a Nobel Prize, and twenty years later it turned out they were wrong. Recognizing that every three years, for some reason, new research emerges that contradicts all the previous evidence.

Doctors plan one thing, and it turns out differently. Scientists plan one thing, and it turns out differently. We live in a society where people casually say things that don't come true, deceive people. I don't understand how anyone can live in this falsehood. Recently, I asked someone a question. I said, “Dima”—he's a close friend of mine—“listen, how is it that people live in a country where those in power constantly deceive them, and they don't really react? Why don't people react?” He answered very simply: “Because they want to do the same thing. They want to do the same thing. They want power that lets them deceive people. They want power that lets them live by profiteering. They want power that lets them steal, take things, make money without working, and install their children and relatives there. They want to live that way. They want to live without responsibility. They'd like to trade places with those leaders. They'd like to trade places with those people themselves.” It's astonishing. It's astonishing how far this brings people down in the modern world. Astonishing. So the fundamental mistake people make is not wanting to work on truly understanding themselves.

When they use words like “personal development” and “self-knowledge,” they're gratifying their ego. You very often gratify your ego and, in doing so, fall into depression. Set yourself a question for every day: “What am I, as a person, doing today—I as Masha, I as Katya, I as Petya, I as Misha, I as Dima, I as Sasha—to really get to know myself, to truly understand myself?” When you listen to this video, go to someone for psychotherapy, work on spiritual development, any kind of development, professional development, or analyze your own relationships, ask: “Am I really getting to know myself, or do I only want to fix a problem? Do I really want to understand myself, or do I just want the depression to go away? Do I really want to learn to make money and understand how this world works when it comes to money? Or do I just want money to appear? Do I really want to work and love my work, or do I want a great job that will automatically give me an amazing emotional state and remove my depression? Or do I want to understand the source of my depression? Why are there people doing the very same job who aren't depressed?”

Why are there people with ten children who aren't depressed, while someone with one child is? Putting this question before yourself every day and observing it will shift the layer of depression incredibly far, incredibly far. If you work on these four mistakes for one week, you will shift your depression enormously from where it is. But what does working on them mean? It doesn't mean recognizing the mistakes at the start of the week and recognizing them again a week later. It means remembering them every day. Print out all four and make a habit of recalling and watching for them every day—for an hour, for example. It's a very simple activity, a very simple assignment, and it will move this forward very significantly. Depression hides in simple things. Don't diagnose yourself. How many diagnoses I see people give children in childhood. How many diagnoses children get from grandmothers, parents, people around them, teachers. Endless diagnoses. Everyone diagnoses all of us. At work, HR people hiring staff, bosses, subordinates—everyone diagnoses everyone else. Everyone in the world diagnoses everyone else. Let go of that for yourself. Say that you can grow a thousandfold. At a thousandfold increase in scale, no depression exists. Never at all.

Even if you start to double your scale, you won't have depression. I guarantee you that every person can grow a thousandfold. Please support the video with a like. I'd be very grateful. Okay, keep holding it, leave it; we'll shoot an extra bit now, and then you'll put it inside, you'll put it somewhere in the video.

After the first or second mistake. We're filming now.