You don’t see those happy, perky, know-it-all people inventing new things. They’re simply too happy with the status quo to feel the need to improve their lives. It’s the people who think, “What if life could be better than it is right now?” that get the job done.

I submit that extreme depression is not a natural response. Maybe it’s a Demond Morris-type response (see his books, “The Naked Ape” and “The Human Zoo”). In the state of nature, depression might be a natural reaction to the environment that stimulates innovation and improvement. Furthermore, because survival means chasing one’s food, extreme depression is not possible.

When we exhibit the same response in modern society, the survival imperative does not apply to us, and we have the “luxury” of wallowing in our melancholy. In mild cases, it works in our favor since it still gets us out of bad situations (like the woman who was married to an alcoholic), but extreme cases are allowed to go too far.

It’s similar to Robert Sapolsky’s “Why Zebras Don’t Get Cancer.” The natural response to danger serves us well if we’re being chased by a lion, but when we’re in a modern society, it works against us.