I know very little about modern folk psychology and self help literature. But I always thought that the problem with those is that they over-emphasis that women are from Venus and men are from Mars =) Also, I have a vague feeling that there is a whole breed of "nowadays-men-have-problems-because-they-cannot-be-real-men-anymore" literature, like Iron John by Robert Bly. But since I haven't read any of that and I don't know the scene, I won't go into the details.

Maybe gender and sex differences deserve a blog entry or two - I'll see if I feel writing more about them later on. Today I'll just say that I agree that there is a point to consider here. For example, watching sheep and ram makes it clear that there might be some differences in their psychological build. So why not in human species too. Only that personally I feel uneasy with statements like "All men are like A" or "this thing B is masculine, so every man has it equally, and no woman has any B."

Actually, I think I didn't get depressed when I failed to repair those tyres - but the other way round. Last summer I failed to repair the tyres because I was depressed. The steps needed to succesfully repairing the tyres were small, and in my rational mind I always knew that. But somehow I just lacked the energy to try - the whole issue with the tyres felt like a dead-end, a problem with no possible solutions. And why it felt so? I guess because it activated a freeze-reaction already stored in my psyche.

Like, a healthy organism falls into a freeze-reaction only when faced with a life-threatening situation with no possiblity to fight or flee. But a depressed organism has a tendency to slip into a freeze state even when faced with a simple and easy task like repairing tyres.

Couple of years ago it was very hard winter, it was about -30°C for many weeks in a row. And I ran out of firewood in mid-February. Well, I knew that there are simple options available: buying readymade dry firewood, or buying electric heaters. But I decided to face the challenge in a simple physical way. An old man living near me had asked me to take down several dead pines in his forest, near my house. I figured out that those dead pines would make instant dry firewood, so I took my chainsaw and waded in more than knee-deep snow to get to the pines. It was something like 200 metres uphill to get there. I fell down the trees and cut them to smaller blocks. For the rest of the winter I went there once a week, hauling those blocks on my shoulder down a small path in the snow. One weekend after a snowfall there were fresh lynx tracks in the forest, the lynx had used my path to go uphill, then continuing deeper into the forest. Well, heating my house with firewood made of those blocks of pine I felt like a man being able to survive with his physical skills and psychical determination. I guess sometimes physical strain and basic things like warmth of the fire are better medicine than chemical antidepressants =)