I was recently going through a period of severe depression. This is, as far as I can remember, the first time in my life that this happened. On the main stage, there was me going playing the main part in a soul-crushing breakup drama. Side stages played: my friend getting really sick, my grandma landing in a hospital in a state of pre-stroke, and my paper getting rejected. The whole festival happened over a span of a week. (I'm oversharing, but for some reason, I feel the need to justify myself when writing about those things.)
Now, an oft-said piece of advice one hears in those situations is:
Time heals the wounds.
This is, I think, shit advice. I was getting tired of hearing it, from a person after person after book after blogpost, and I was getting angry. Why is it shit advice? Well, obviously, because there is nothing one can do about it! There is no way I can
There are paths-that-look-like-shortcuts, though. One of them is alcohol. Mixed with Zolpidem (not a medical advice!), and with those long Netflix series, computer games and porn, it approximates, to a degree, travelling through time faster than one second per second. The problem is, it doesn't work that well. I wake up and do all of those things and stay in my room and go to sleep and repeat ad nauseam, but nothing improves.
This is when I had two insights.
First: true, there is no way of producing objective time -- but there is an important distinction between objective and subjective time, and what really matters is the latter. Second: the subjective experience is a very strange object - since it lives in the psyche, it can be hacked in a multitude of ways.
How to hack it? One way is to use a well-known fact from neuropsychology, that people experience more subjective time the more novel experiences they have. Break-up advice columns indeed often talk about things like meeting new people, having casual sex, going outside, travelling, having casual sex, starting a new project at work, taking up a new hobby and also having casual sex.
If we take the time-heals-the-wounds as univocally true, then those (more actionable) pieces of advice can usually be derived from that first principle. But there are cases when some of them are inconsistent with it. For example, if we take someone who is regularly travelling and meeting new people, then maybe for them the correct instantiation of our general principle would be to meet less of them, and spend more time alone.
In my case, this was the advice of "taking up a new hobby". A long time ago I used to play computer games, but then stopped. After the breakup, I bought myself a new gaming computer, along with Battlefield 2042, Cyberpunk 2077, and Femalebot 2069. But it turned out that the gaming (and otherwise) time was actually shrinking, not expanding, my subjective time, and thus was actively harmful! I had followed the object-level advice, but didn't understand the principle - I thought the underlying mechanism was to distract myself, and let more (objective) time pass.
There is a sense in which one should not hack their way through intense feelings. Suppressed emotions supposedly always resurface later on. But I do not think that any of what I wrote leads to their suppression - indeed, I think that in principle, it leads to them being processed more fully than otherwise. I do, however, still have a moderate amount of uncertainty over that conclusion.
This all leaves open the question of: why is it the case that the instinctive way of going through a depressive period is to curl up in a ball and stay in the room doing nothing? I have some semi-reasonable neuro-evo-psych arguments I heard from a friendly doctor over a coffee (mechanistically: dopamine modulation changes, psychologically: saving resources and strength to deal with other possible immediate dangers), but I am not really satisfied with those.
Another possible attack surface is, I think, to use the distinction between remembering self and experiencing self. There is a well-known experiment by Kahneman, when he asked people to put their hands in a bucket of extremely unpleasantly cold water. One group had to keep it there for 60 seconds. Another group had to keep it there for 90 seconds, but during the last thirty of those, slightly warmer (but still unpleasantly cold) water flowed to the bucket. As it turned out, the second group had better memories of the event than the first group - even though, in absolute terms, they had experienced more unpleasantness. How to apply that to a depressive period? Maybe the correct thing is to stash some euphoria-inducing drugs, and then take them through The Talk? This touches on a different, so far unexplored, question: what are the benefits of the pain in a traumatic event? I might try to write about that in one of the future instalments.
In summary: we have established the fundamental principle of going through a breakup. We have re-derived some of the popular pieces of advice and pointed out some examples where the non-qualified version of those pieces can be misleading or harmful. Applying it to novel situations is left as an exercise for a (temporarily) depressed reader. Finding more attack surfaces, and explaining why the mechanism of creating more time has to be consciously employed and goes in the opposite (rather than e.g. simply orthogonal) direction to the instinctive behaviour are posed as open problems.