October 6, 2021:
Depression has measurable long-term physiological effects.
Currently in my case there's a long slow steady rise in fasting glucose level attributable to decline in muscle mass accelerated by lockdown.
I was already struggling to force myself to exercise while everything in my brain told me to sit on the couch stuffing myself with cake and potato chips because I want the buzz right now. With lockdown I stopped hitting the gym, started gaining weight, lost muscle mass, lost my helpful practice of writing in cafes, all of which contribute to deepen depression in an ugly downhill spiral where depression feeds sedentarism which feeds depression.
The "rational" course is to somehow force myself to hit the trails for a happy hike up and down hills, followed by some lockdown-compliant push-ups and squats and lunges. But "the rational" is an ideology, which as all ideologies serves to make the obvious invisible, where the invisible obvious in this instance is the gulf between knowing something and having the stamina to act on that knowledge. "The rational" being a subset of the irrational.