Joy and meaning does not come from our thinking; it is a different faculty

Most people would think that to perceive your life as joyful and meaningful, that this solely comes about through one's way of thinking. This is not the case. You must understand here that all our experiences are produced by our brains. This would even include our ability to perceive our lives as joyful and meaningful. When you are in a state of misery that gets to a certain point, certain areas of the brain become overly active while others turn off. Your ability to function in life will get turned off which means this faculty has been shut down.

But your ability to perceive your life as joyful and meaningful can also get turned off as well when your misery and depression (hopelessness) reach a certain point. So when you go and listen to your favorite song, it will have no more significance whatsoever to it. It will now sound like nothing more than a stream of noise.

Ask any neuroscientist regarding everything that I just said and they will tell you that I am right. They will tell you that our ability to perceive our lives as joyful and meaningful is a faculty of our brains and that this faculty can get shut down during times of severe misery. So joy and meaning in our lives actually comes through a different faculty of our brains and not simply the faculty known as "thought."

When I was in a state of misery and listened to my favorite songs, they were nothing more than an insignificant stream of noise. Despite my efforts in thinking to myself that the song still had significance, this did nothing. It was no different than a blind person trying to give his/herself sight by thinking to his/herself that he/she can still see.

Well, that is not going to work since sight is a completely different perception than our thinking. Sight is the experience of visualizing objects and your thoughts alone cannot give you that experience. So this would also apply to the joy and meaning (significance) in one's life. This too relies on a faculty independent from our thinking alone. It relies on a perception that our thoughts alone cannot give us.

My absence of significance in my life during my time of misery was not due to my way of thinking alone; it was due to the altered state I was in due to my misery which shut down that faculty of my brain that allowed me to perceive my life as significant. When you are in an altered state, your way of thinking alone cannot get you out of it. You instead have to wait until the altered state can restore itself back to normal.

Lastly, I am not the only one here who has had that experience. There are plenty of severely depressed people out there whose joy and meaning has also been taken away from them. However, there are the fortunate types of depressed people out there as well since the faculty that allows them to perceive their lives as joyful and meaningful is still at least functional. But there are severely depressed and miserable people like me out there who are the unfortunate one's with this faculty shut down.

During that time of misery, I tried my best to make my life significant again, but that did absolutely nothing since that faculty that allowed me to perceive my life as significant was turned off. So there was nothing else I could of done but to simply wait it out until that faculty got restored which allowed my life to be joyful and meaningful once again.