How about these premises: 1. Happiness/pleasure ought to be increased. 2. Suffering ought to be decreased. 3. The type of being experiencing these is immaterial. Why stop at humans?
That is nice until you observe what actually happens in the raw nature itself - I had a "joy" observing two crows killing a sparrow with the utmost cruelty, prolonging its suffering as much as they could, and then leaving it there without "eating" it.
We simply have to transcend nature if we want to feel good about ourselves. Maybe once we master technology, we can reprogram the mess of this Universe (at some point we will be dealing with pure computer science instead of physics, which will be just a consequence of some mathematical structures and algorithms running on top of them). I never understood why so many humans worship nature - nature is broken, it's like a fairly balanced pathological system, showing some wonders (Moon-Earth distance allowing total eclipses) as well as atrocities (basically all what is nasty about life itself).
I don't recommend giving this advice to people who are seriously depressed. Speaking as someone who went through that for two years, it's more of a disease than a lifestyle problem. I could have done all these things and still have been miserably depressed.
What helped me was talk therapy, medication (the biggest factor), and having really supportive friends.
What is the process of talk therapy? Isn't it just asking questions? Did I actually give any advice there?
For sure friends are best. But if someone vents online, how are we to know whether this person will go elsewhere or not for support? I'm not offering to take the place of a professional but I wonder if it really hurts to converse with a depressed person online by asking questions. Silence certainly isn't helpful. And if everyone just says, seek professional help, is that really empathetic? Sounds a bit robotic to me.
