Blood, Sweat, and Tears

In this  NYTimes article, evolutionary psychologists try to understand how depression can be adaptive; their belief is that any common trait must be there for some evolutionary reason, and because depression effects up to 7% of people each year, it must have some advantage.

The theory they came up with is called the analytic-rumination hypothesis, and it states that depression forces you to dwell on a problem until you can solve it; once you do, you can put your life in order and you'll be better for it.  The article points out how depressive tendencies have given artists and thinkers the mental focus to create great, historical works; the researchers think this type of focus might also help the common man overcome depressing problems in day-to-day life.

Researcher Paul Andrews says, “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.” 

For some reason, the researchers and the article are fixated on explaining how depression can be adaptive for the average person, but this doesn't seem to mesh with reality; in most cases, depression still seems to be destructive.  Maybe its possible that, despite being maladaptive for most people, depression can indeed be adaptive on the whole because, in rare cases, the ruminative focus might drive an individual to extraordinary evolutionary success.

Take a sample of 20 depression cases from our theoretical evolutionary past:

• 1 kills himself
• 1 withers away and dies due to malnutrition
• 2 end up murdered for acting like assholes
• 3 survive but are utterly unfuckable due to poor hygiene and unappealing personalities
• 12 manage to recover and live normal (dullardly) lives, averaging 1 healthy offspring apiece as opposed to the typical 2 
• 1 is so driven by his anger that he becomes warrior chief, once established, he gets any woman he wants, has 40 healthy kids, and his sons fuck their way across the countryside like Uday and Qusay.

Michael Jordan is considered the most focused and driven athlete of all-time; he's also considered the most successful.  When he gave his Hall of Fame acceptance speech last year, he dwelled almost entirely on petty grievances from his past; this shouldn't have been surprising to anyone, MJ, a notorious asshole, has always been fueled by resentment, most famously after being cut from his high school basketball team.  MJ used this lifelong fixation on negativity to do something extremely positive, and now that he's reached the top, he has the money and status to fuck any woman he wants.

 

 Ghenghis Khan fucked so many women that he's purportedly the direct ancestor of 0.5 % of the world's population; if contemporary social mores were more consistent with those of our evolutionary past, the same might have ultimately been true of MJ. 

The article quotes Aristotle as saying “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.”  Depression produces a small number of great successes and a great number of small failures, but in our evolutionary past, those great successes got all the pussy in the world.  Perhaps in the record-books of our DNA, the losers are forgotten, and its the champions who are really remembered.

 

 He took the term "trophy wife" a little too literally, keep in mind he was never content with just one.