He fails to take action because he is too sorrowful, paralyzed by misery. He believes he will gain capacity for action once he has eradicated cause for sorrow. But he does not realise that the remedy for depressive paralysis IS action, and in his confusion he resolves to deprive himself of a cure precisely because he is still sick.

Those who take action do not have time for depression, but rarely will any depressive person take this fact seriously. The operating impulse is: “I don’t want to have no time for sorrow, I want to have no REASON for sorrow”. But this is misconceived — there is always reason for sorrow. Scratching the itch to escape a duty to action only draws blood. concomitantly, there is always reason for joy, the only people who don’t understand this are those who are not smart enough.

ACTION cures depression: ACTING in the world, MOVING objects around and SQUEEZING things into different shapes, INTERACTING with reality and CONTENDING with obstacles and foes, WALKING to locations, having BUSINESS to attend to.

Depressive people shriek and cover their ears when they are informed of the obvious causal connection between their uselessness and their misery. This is because a person so useless cannot acknowledge their uselessness while also maintaining the sense of entitlement necessary to believe that their misery absolves them of their basic human duty to pursue flourishing. In this way, it can be said that depression is the effect produced when a narcissist is confronted with the incongruity between his narcissistic entitlement and his manifest ineptitude. He is rightly unable to justify his inflated self-regard, and blinded to his complicity in his own suffering.

There is a prevailing mythology that depression makes a person lethargic and listless, but the truth is that depression is the inevitable punishment of a lethargic and listless person — a punishment for uselessness.

It’s worthwhile to reassert that Sloth = Despair = Despondency as the hopelessness of despondency is a more relevant understanding of Sloth than the standard interpretation as mere “laziness,” which the depressed would feel doesn’t apply to them because of their personally rationalized grief. It does. Depression is a sin. Industry is a virtue. Get out of bed.

The above quotation appears in the footnotes of Charlotte Fang’s edifying piece, Gold and Glory in Times of Thought-Chaos

Make no mistake: to abdicate one’s duty by succumbing to the indulgence of depression and sloth is a betrayal of your family both living and dead, as well as any person who might have relied upon you if only you had the courage to live a life of integrity and magnanimous abundance.

Some will find this difficult to incorporate into their model of the world, because it means that laziness leads to depression, which leads to laziness, and so forth — it seems unfair. But nature creates similar power law distributions constantly; they expedite evolution and the manifestation of God’s vision, bolstering natural hierarchy by ensuring that meritless entities die and disappear more quickly, and that virtuous ones succeed.

Failure increases the likelihood of more failure in the near future, and this negative momentum builds exponentially. If you are unable to course-correct fast enough through AGENCY and WILL , you will fail in increasingly damaging ways until you die.