No Value

Glad it helped :)

So your parents are aware of the problem? Is there any way to discuss your problem locally? Message boards aren't really helpful for this kind of thing, IME. For very mild depressions, talking to your school's guidance counselor may be sufficient. If it isn't, he may at least be able to help persuade your parents that you need treatment (should that be the case).

St. John's Wort is relatively cheap, and according to the science I recall reading, is about as effective as prescription antidepressants. If you consider yourself mentally healthy otherwise, psychedelics may help too; they did for me, anyway, and there's at least a few studies that indicate psychedelics can improve mood and outlook in the long-term. (Edit 2: Don't just take psychedelics on my word alone. Read trip reports on Erowid, don't trip if you're not in a good mood, don't trip if you're going to be responsible for anyone or anything for the rest of the day, don't trip without a trip sitter until you have some experience, don't trip if you don't like the shirt you're wearing, etc. etc.)

If you don't have any close friends or significant others, fixing that should be your long-term priority. Since you're here, I'll make the bold guess that you're smarter than most of your peers and relatively introverted, which can be a challenging combination for forming meaningful relationships if your high school is anything like mine was. Still, you're a social creature. Figure out when and where the smart people at your school congregate, and try to get in on that.

Edit 1: People don't seem to like my advice. I'd greatly appreciate it if someone explained what they find objectionable in this post.

Why do you consider it unlikely?

Maybe. I've certainly still got psychological problems. On the other hand, you're going to have better resources, simply because more is known these days than in the 70s and the web exists.

Living with psychologically wearing people can be exhausting. It may be that your problems are related to barriers you put up because not feeling much was a plausible choice around your parents.

even if I change my situation will learned helplessness make me still have a problem?

I recommend reading "Learned Optimism" by Martin E.P. Seligman.

A short introduction: People don't just react to their external environment, but also to their internal environment (memory, habits). Even if you get rid of the bad things outside, some bad habits may stay in your mind, and if they are related to thinking, they reinforce themselves even when their original cause is gone, and you just needlessly hurt yourself, because that's what you consider normal way of thinking. But for other people other ways of thinking are "natural", and they don't hurt themselves. Two people, after receiving the same input, will react differently. They both have congnitive biases, but one has unhappiness-inducing biases, other has happiness-inducing biases.

Everyone fails sometimes, the difference is how you process the feedback. Unhappiness-inducing reactions to failure are: "this is a proof that I will always fail", "this is a proof that I will fail at everything", "this is all my fault". Happiness-inducing reactions to failure are: "this is a unique situation that will not repeat anymore", "this is a very specific situation that has no connection to other parts of my life", "this is a random event or someone else's fault". (Reverse goes for success.) Note for rationalists: depending on specific circumstances, any of these sentences may be right or wrong. However, people have tendency to pick predominantly from one set of beliefs. Both are biases, but one of them are pesimistic and others are optimistic. For both, their preferred bias feels like a rational reaction. If you are a pesimist and you are strongly repulsed by what I wrote here (because you percieve pesimistic explanations as rational truth, and optimistic explanations as a happy death spiral), this may be just your pesimism speaking.

For a pesimist, helplessness and lack of emotions are natural reactions. If there is nothing you can do to improve your utility function, then what is the point of trying or caring? You must first believe that action X can lead to positive outcome Y, and only then it makes sense to do X or dream about Y.

Read the book and try it. (A typical failure mode for many intelligent people is saying "yeah, I understand why he thinks it works" and then doing nothing.)

There's no need to posit some ultimate objective terminal value to explain why you're terrified of choosing the wrong values.

First of all, if by "choosing the wrong values", you mean "choosing the wrong terminal values", then you're just not making sense, or rather it's just not clear what you're trying to communicate. Placing "wrong" next to "terminal values" in a sentence about you choosing what you want your values to be, sounds no different to me than saying, "That ball is square." I'm not in a position interpret either of those sequences of words.

A course of action can be wrong only by reference to a value. Or to taboo the word "wrong", a course of action can be incompetent only if you posit a goal the agent is trying to achieve. Driving into a tree at 70 mph is a bad idea for me only because I don't want to die or get crippled, and I don't want either of those only because X, and X only because Y, etc., until we reach my terminal value(s). Someone else may be different in this respect.

It's not possible to choose your terminal values, or rather it just doesn't even make any sense to say that phrase: "choose your terminal values". Choosing involves valuing. Once you choose something, you're choosing it because you think it's a good way to get something else, but then that something else is by necessity more "terminal" than what you chose. You can't choose your terminal values; you can only discover them.

With that said, I want to echo the others who mentioned that your situation may be the result of some basic physiological problem or whatever. All too often do people chalk their situation up to their personality, or How Things Are, or something like that, when the situation is extremely malleable, and is no more than the routine, methodical outcome of some basic lifestyle consideration or toxin exposure or whatever.

I've been in and out of many states and conditions over my lifetime that felt so urgent, or so profound, or something, but have in the end proven to be nothing more than what I mentioned in the last paragraph: the result of some lame environmental circumstance. For example, depression can be ridiculously severe, and color one's perception of the world in such an insanely pronounced way, that it seems so out of place to tell them, "Maybe it's just because you're not exercising." But sometimes the solution really is that mundane.

Big effects don't necessitate big causes. Or more to the point, intense mental states do not require intense events proceeding. As I started off the previous paragraph with, I've been in and out of so many of these intense mental states that proved to be lame circuitry misfirings (or whatever), that I have come to take my emotions with a serious grain of salt. I know your mental state isn't "intense", so I guess this is starting to sound a little bit centric to my own experiences, but I think the basic message is the same.

Having no values seems like a very boring existence, and Very Boring Existences are undesirable in comparison to exciting ones. This means that you don't actually have no values, and that saying you have no strong values is nothing more than an idiom. You do have values. So what you must do is figure out how to elicit those values, and maybe there's some simple physiological problem to blame. Perhaps try improving your lifestyle (e.g., diet, exercise, sleep, toxin avoidance), and/or try getting some sort of basic medical workup where you mention your lack of zest for life and so on?

Hopefully this was somewhat helpful. Good luck, and I hope you stick around Less Wrong!

There is some part of me that is terrified of choosing the "wrong" values.

Hm. Terror sounds like an emotion to me.

Do you imagine, feel, or fear shame?

because life is less painful for it, presumably. Blunted affect means everything is blunted. Anhedonia is the one that blunts one way.

edit: to illustrate: imagine going through high school. Would you prefer to do it blunted or unblunted?

Raiden doesn't control his life. The "blunted affect" is protectively shutting out the empty horror of his condition while his mind, even without conscious direction, tries to process just what his situation is. He's not even at the stage of formulating a strategic response because he hasn't formed a model of his situation; he doesn't really understand it. All he notices is this ugly absence of feeling.

So what has to happen is that his mind must continue its work. To do this he needs to dwell in that emptiness for as long as he can stand to do so, and as often as circumstances allow, until the job is done.

At least, that is how I surmise things were for him, a few days ago. Obviously I'm making some big guesses.