Recent research has implicated chemical imbalances in the nucleus accumbens in the occurrence of depression. This makes sense, as the nucleus accumbens is the seat of motivation in the mammalian brain. Depression, after all, is essentially a lack of motivation.
But depression is also a disease of affluent Western civilizations and is less common in archaic societies, so there is clearly an environmental component. A person seeking shelter from the cold rain, or someone longing for shade and water in a desert, doesn't face debilitating questions about the meaning of life, as does someone in a heated apartment with a full refrigerator. A person standing in the cold rain or lost in a desert feels very directly what they want: shelter from immediate discomfort. Their motivation is directed toward a short-term improvement of their condition.
Motivation beyond the immediate escape from discomfort is more complex. Motivation in a long-term strategy isn't so much about avoiding a negative condition but rather about pursuing a positive one.
Nature has equipped every one of us with a long-term positive motivation: the drive for sexual satisfaction.
This drive is encoded very deeply in all animal life. It also explains why we should choose to be alive rather than dead. It does so not logically, but emotionally.
I have never discovered a logical reason why I should choose to be alive rather than dead. But I still hope for the best sex ever. And that answers the question.
I have always found depressed people in modern societies to be overly domesticated. But a lot of things in modern societies are irrational and outright negative. I cannot identify with their value systems, and I don't mind if intercultural warfare destroys Western civilization. I am a rebel, and I have a cause, and it protects me from depression, in spite of all logic that tells me that life is terribly useless nonsense.
Modern attempts to interpret the brain receive the most attention when they come from the perspective of computer programmers. While it is true that information storage, information retrieval, and information processing in the cerebral cortex have similarities to how computers work, and while it is furthermore true that computers defeat average humans in intellectual tasks ranging from arithmetic to playing chess, all of this touches the essence of life no more than the ability to lift a 100 kg barbell.
Foolish transhumanists may dream of downloading their brains onto a computer hard drive. For what? Go ahead and press the Reformat button.
Because our lives and our brains are not essentially in the domain of cybernetics, but in the domain of biochemistry.
At the very beginning of life, long before any consciousness appears, and long before the first neuron with an electrical action potential makes its appearance, there is already an unconscious motivation for replication, which, if more complex, is termed reproduction.
And this heritage is still at the core of human existence. If you want to understand life, and what you are, focus not on schemes that explain the brain as a computer, but familiarize yourself with the neurochemical pudding that your subcortical brain is, with the thalamus, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the amygdala, and, most importantly, the nucleus accumbens.
Computer scientists will have a hard time tackling depression, which, more than anything else, is a lack of motivation, especially sexual motivation. Neuropharmacologists can deal with it. To them, it's all just a matter of chemical neurotransmitters. But the action of serotonin reuptake inhibitors is crude. And reward circuit-focused dopaminergics are disappointing if motivation isn't there in the first place. Hormonal interventions, on the other hand, have wide-ranging systemic implications, are subject to negative feedback regulation, and are therefore prone to diminishing in effectiveness over time.
Hormonal modulators, such as Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia), have the potential to increase sexual motivation, and thereby not only ameliorate depression but also give users a stronger sense of what life is about: optimal sexual experience.
