Depression leads to HEDONISM (Kid Cudi)

Amber Larson, Ashley Wells, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly; Complex News

(KidCudiVEVO) Depressed Kid Cudi sings the hit "Pursuit Of Happiness" featuring MGMT

What does "hedonism" mean? - It means escapist indulgence in sensuality with clinging.

(Complex News) On Tuesday night, Kid Cudi posted on Facebook that he has checked himself into "rehab for depression and suicidal urges." He told fans that "anxiety and depression have ruled my life for as long as I can remember and I never leave the house because of it...I don't trust anyone because of it and I'm tired of being held back in my life. I deserve to have peace. I deserve to be happy and smiling." (See crisistextline.org).

F#@king sh*t, life sucks! I'm miserable!

What is depression? It is an ongoing sadness/low out of proportion with external circumstances, sometimes accompanied by anxiety, sometimes with listlessness. What is hedonism? It is holding PLEASURE as the highest good, the goal of life, the best way to spend our energy.

There is path and not-path to freedom-and-happiness.

The Buddha explained that most humans (and devas/"angels") know nothing better, higher, more gratifying than the gratification of the senses. Knowing no better gratification, the goal becomes more and more pleasure -- clinging.

The inevitable and inescapable result? Apart from the short lived good times, disappointment (dukkha).

So on account of dukkha, things being disappointing, we seek something sure to disappoint. An illustration is given of a man with a terrible itch, a kind of psoriasis with open, oozing sores who will -- on account of that unbearable suffering -- stick his arm into the flames and called the cauterization "relief."

One pain displaces the other or puts it into false-perspective, maybe the way cutting (self-mutilation) does.

(Steve Aoki) Hedonism? "Pursuit of Happiness" (Project X version)

Kid Cudi is suffering from major depression and has been for years. But Kid Cudi wrote and performed one of greatest odes to hedonism ever, the lynch pin of the sexy teen movie "Project X."

(Complex News) Kanye West replies to Kid Cudi

Alone even in a crowd of "friends" (Ziggy)

How would a depressed person write a song titled "Pursuit of Happiness"? Who else would? It is on account of our psychological and physical pain that we seek ESCAPE.

But escape is not to be found through the sense pleasure. That is a mouse trap that leads back here, a kind of prison exit that actually leads to a worse part of the prison.

Pleasure is good, pleasure is great. Get pleasure. But escapism -- using pleasure in an attempt to ease the pain -- is SURE to be disappointing. It can't be otherwise.

What did the Buddha say? The universal characteristics of existence, here as in countless other worlds living beings are reborn in on account of "the continued wandering on" that is samsara are:

1. impermanence (instability, things hurtling toward destruction)
2. disappointment (unsatisfactoriness, lack of fulfillment)
3. impersonality (not self, emptiness).

Help! I don't see any way out but death.

What, then, is the solution? The Buddha showed the way to the END OF ALL SUFFERING, release, freedom, deliverance, emancipation, real escape. That is nirvana. What is the way, the path-of-practice, that leads to nirvana?

If hedonism -- the indulgence of the senses -- were the way, the Buddha would have practiced that and advocated it. If extreme penitence/asceticism were the way, he would have practiced and advocated that. The Buddha, the "Awakened One," did NOT practice or advocate these; Prince Siddhartha did, and he could not "awaken" until he realized both extremes were wrong.

The Buddha, which is who Siddhartha became at the fulfillment of his spiritual quest, advocated THE MIDDLE WAY that avoids two extremes, the path of sensuality (hedonism) and the path of self-mortification (self-torture). What is the "Middle Way," the "Path," the majjhima magga? There is "purification by wisdom [insight] of what is path and what is not-path" (one of the Seven Stages of Purification).

(Zeitgeist) Dr. Mate starts at Minute 31:15, "Zeitgeist 3: Moving Forward"

Now poor Kid Cudi, raised in a society that stressed and traumatized him early on (later leading very predictably to these woeful psychological states, as Dr. Gabor Mate explains so well in the movie "Zeitgeist 3") and then told that sensual pleasure/hedonism was the way  to satisfaction, the way out of these feelings. It's a lie. The world/our society lies to us. Hollywood, rappers, and TV lie to us, all the time. 

Why's the Buddha always smiling?

The historical Buddha Gautama often emphasized that he only really taught two things, suffering/pain (dukkha) and "the end of all suffering" (nirvana), bondage and freedom.

• VIDEO: Dr. Gabor Maté on ADHD, Bullying, and the Destruction of American Childhood