'Smiling depression', depressed while appearing happy, a dangerous combination - Sensationalist Headlines

Although those are certainly contributors, I believe a significant part of the issue goes back further and has to do with being superficially connected through social media and our culture of envy. Some --mostly young --people invest a lot of emotion into their activities online but these activities are often not the sort of affection one needs. It's one thing to get a 'Like' on one's Facebook post about a shitty day he or she has had and another to receive comfort from someone in person. In some cases, people continuously (and perhaps subconsciously) compare their life to the perception of another person's life through that person's posts or images. All of this snowballs overall time into something deeper. It's not exclusive to Facebook or Instagram either, one could argue the same about Facepunch if you care about how you're rated or how you are in the community. Another snowball effect is when someone is surrounded by people that don't want to listen to or can't understand the issues one is dealing with. How can you communicate with someone when you feel depressed who doesn't understand or refuses to accept it as "depression?" Modern cultures don't know how to address issues of mental health that well.

"Smiling depression" is just regular depression. The cases where people are unable to function properly are the exceptional ones.

When one is forced day after day to carry on no matter what, to smile so you don't make worry the people you love, to keep fighting no matter what, your dreams and hopes keeps being pushed away "to wait until better times comes" that you completely forget for what are you fighting for. Soon it will be a year since the day I almost cross the point of no return, and even if I have been in therapy since then and improved a bit ( looking to my own feelings and ignoring "orders" as well as dropping the "you gotta be an ideal to be followed by others" line of thinking induced by my parents ), some days I still feeling empty inside, soulless, and with thoughts that I'll never escape from my current life. I don't even wish this never ending nightmare to my worst enemies.

"Eez good thing you came in summer. In winter, it can be very depressink."

This, the essential nature of life and what it means to be a person is changing. No longer are you defined by your job the way you were in the past, and to a point that's a good thing because few jobs are worth identifying by but it also means that a big part of what used to be a person's identity is gone, "real life" experiences are getting fewer and harder to find and being replaced by digital and social media. Corporations are no longer run by people but algorithms and stock markets and meanwhile they're becoming increasingly bigger parts of our lives. It's not strange to me that people are desperately reaching for labels and groups to identify with, wether it be political groups, twitch communities or what have you. As individuals and as a society we are defined by eachother, and we're getting more and more secluded in our own little bubbles while those are getting seemingly bigger and smaller at the same time in a way that makes it difficult to answer the question of "who am I?".

I've been doing this for so long that I have completely lost the ability to validate myself and I rely exclusively on others for any scrap of validation, happiness or self-satisfaction I can feel. Combine that with almost total isolation and loneliness and I have almost no avenues for being able to feel good about anything.