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Kawoomba comments on Three more ways identity can be a curse - Less Wrong
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You can't make decisions based on what your future self would value, any more than you can make decisions based on what your past self valued. Even with TDT.
"Be yourself" means "do not suppress your identity". It involves avoiding the trap of thinking e.g. that because your knowledge of Asian adult film stars is low-status, you should conceal it even at the cost of added stress. If you are playing status games, you don't want to be yourself- you want to be high status. If you are not playing status games, your status is irrelevant and you should act accordingly.
Depression (a chemical state of the brain) is not laziness, nor lack of motivation, nor akrasia, nor lack of motivation. If you are referring to something other than a chemical state, try using 'melancholy'.
Personally, I have found that tying performance to ability to self-image is helpful at improving both, provided I also make careful use of cognitive dissonance: I deny that poor performance is the result of poor ability, breaking the negative feedback, while associating good performance with high ability and good identity. It's often uncomfortable identifying how my forced perception of high ability is compatible with focusing effort on improving my ability to meet standards, but I prefer it to the possibility of having high ability and high performance but low self-image (imposter state).
Basically, I explicitly prefer high self-image to low self-image regardless of ability or performance, and doublethink well enough that the mutual boosts dominate the exchange.
Are you a non-reductionist? Is 'melancholy' not also based on the chemical/physical (potatoe/potahto) configuration of your brain?
When it can be determined with reasonable accuracy whether someone was melancholic by performing an autopsy, you can call the two comparable.
Not that it really matters regarding the grandparent (autopsies aren't arbiters of what's based on a chemical state and what isn't, and what else but a chemical state would melancholy be based on? I would agree that the chemical changes associated with melancholy are certainly more subtle, but what does that matter?), but I'd like to know more:
Where did you get the impression that it can be determined with reasonable accuracy whether someone was depressed by performing an autopsy? Do you mean hypothetically, at some future point in time? I've never heard of such a thing being done. If you mean at some future point in time, then presumably the same holds true for melancholy.
Finding some abnormalities in some patients who have previously been diagnosed with depression and tagged for an autopsy upon death, yes, that's been done. But given a dead patient of unknown depression status, diagnose depression based on the brain, with reasonable accuracy? Tell me more.
I can't find the specific reference to a controlled "is this person depressed" study, so I may have false memories about that. It's trivial to find at least one reference to non-blind studies where a major difference was found between depressed individuals and those who died suddenly of natural causes.