Yeah, this is all over the Pali Canon, though it's not framed in modern energy/burnout language obviously.

The most direct concept is the āsavas — usually translated as "taints" or "effluents" or sometimes "fermentations." The literal image is of something leaking or oozing out. Your mental energy is constantly hemorrhaging through these channels of craving, becoming, and ignorance. The arahant (fully awakened person) is specifically described as one whose āsavas have been dried up — and what's described afterward isn't just peace but a quality of being unwearied, tireless, at ease. The energy wasn't missing. It was being drained.

Then there's the five nīvaraṇa (hindrances) — sensory desire, ill-will, sloth-and-torpor, restlessness-and-worry, and doubt. What's interesting is that sloth-and-torpor is listed alongside the others as a hindrance rather than as a root cause. The implication is that your tiredness is often not genuine fatigue but a downstream symptom of the other four running in the background. You're not tired because you need rest. You're tired because wanting, resenting, worrying, and second-guessing are running 24/7 and consuming everything.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is basically a manual for watching this happen in real time. You observe the hindrances arise, persist, and pass. And the repeated experience meditators report is exactly what you're describing — "oh, I'm not actually tired. I was just spending enormous energy on... nothing. On mental fidgeting."

There's also the concept of sankhāra — volitional formations, the constant fabricating activity of the mind. Every moment, you're constructing, maintaining, and defending a self. That construction project never stops and it costs something. The image in some commentaries is of a person carrying a heavy burden who doesn't realize they can set it down. When they do, they don't gain new energy — they just stop wasting it.

Your whole conversation thread today is basically this insight arriving from multiple directions simultaneously. The meditation revealed the unnecessary clenching. The SSRI comparison showed what it feels like when the background noise drops. The Adlerian framework named the specific strategies that consume the energy. And now you're sitting here realizing you can just... not run those loops, and you're not actually tired.

There is so much hate against ssris that really made me not take them until much later than needed -why this happen

4:07 PM

Synthesized cultural stigma surrounding psychiatric medication efficacy

That's a really common and frustrating experience, and I'm sorry it cost you time you could have been feeling better. There are several converging reasons the anti-SSRI narrative got so loud:

Legitimate criticisms that got amplified out of proportion. SSRIs do have real downsides — sexual side effects, emotional blunting for some people, withdrawal symptoms that were historically downplayed by pharma and prescribers. These are valid concerns. But online discourse tends to treat side-effect profiles as indictments of the entire drug class rather than trade-offs to weigh individually.

The Kirsch meta-analysis effect. Irving Kirsch's work suggesting SSRIs barely outperform placebo for mild-to-moderate depression got enormous media traction. What got lost is that his findings were more nuanced than the headlines, and that for moderate-to-severe depression the effect sizes are clinically meaningful. The "SSRIs are just placebo" meme spread far faster than the rebuttals.

Anti-pharma sentiment as identity. Distrust of pharmaceutical companies (often well-earned — the opioid crisis, aggressive SSRI marketing in the '90s) fused with wellness culture, naturalistic fallacy thinking, and sometimes libertarian anti-institutional politics. "Big Pharma is poisoning you" became a tribal marker more than an evidence-based position.

Survivorship bias in online communities. People who take an SSRI, feel better, and get on with life rarely post about it. People who had bad reactions or withdrawals are highly motivated to share their stories. This creates a massively skewed perception of the risk-benefit ratio.

The serotonin hypothesis backlash. When the Moncrieff 2022 paper argued there's no clear evidence for the "chemical imbalance" theory, it got weaponized as "SSRIs are based on a lie." But SSRIs don't need the simple serotonin deficiency hypothesis to be correct in order to work — aspirin worked long before we understood prostaglandin inhibition. The mechanism debate got conflated with the efficacy question.

Cultural discomfort with psychiatric medication. There's a deep, old thread in many cultures that mental suffering should be overcome through willpower, spirituality, or lifestyle, and that medicating it is weakness or avoidance. This gets dressed up in modern language but the underlying attitude is ancient.

The net result is that someone researching SSRIs online encounters a wall of horror stories, conspiratorial framing, and misinterpreted studies — and the quiet majority who benefited aren't there to counterbalance it. It's a real failure of public health communication, and a lot of people like you paid for it with unnecessary suffering.

I mean Chris Masterjohn.. he frames Prozac as different than the others in a good way