I was curious about the Las Vegas shooter’s motivation. I spent the day at work, so as I finished, around 8:30pm, tonight, I did a search and read one article that told a bit about his girlfriend. “She said he would lie in bed, just moaning and screaming, ‘Oh, my God‘“

That sounds like depression. It can be painful. During my 15-minute commute this morning, I heard a short report. Apparently he gambled very quickly, in front of a video-poker machine. And, he’s growing old.

Perhaps he made mistakes, and he thought about some of those at night. His gambling was fast and furious and it sounded like it was his main reason for living. Mistakes could have been very painful. He’s getting older. He might have a brain tumor or some senility creeping up on him- even a debilitating or embarrassing venereal disease. But even without these, at age 64, the shooter was getting old. He could easily be making more mistakes.

Gambling is a soul-sucking pastime. People do it for the reward. And someone who did it as much as the shooter could easily have gotten most of his feeling of worth from it. Other than the gambling, his life could have been pretty empty.

Why would he do something soul-sucking so much? Because he didn’t get valuable rewards elsewhere in life. Perhaps he didn’t know real satisfaction, real peace of mind, real human warmth. If he started losing regularly, it would have been devastating. Even if he was just losing a little, if he was deeply bothered by his mistakes, the reward was soured and he had nothing else to live for.

Winning is too easily the flip-side of others losing. When life turns bad, it’s easy to want to take it out on others. His loss of his one happiness could easily have turned his thoughts dark.

So imagine he was losing more often and racked by the psychological pain of it. He could easily have been mad at the world. He obviously thought about suicide. But suicide takes at least a little bit of courage- courage that he didn’t have. Killing lots of people would have been an emotional rush, plus it would make his suicide necessary, forcing him to overcome his fear. In his depressed state, with no hope of love to bring him hope, it could all have made sense.

Depression makes life look horrible. It hides opportunities and happy alternatives and highlights the dark and hopeless. Clearly, the shooter made a mistake. A good therapist would have said something like, “So you’ve known winning, but not true happiness, right?” And then she would have said, “That’s what depression is hiding from you- that true happiness, the kind you’ve never known, is possible. Let’s work on you finding that.”

As we see in politics these days, lack of ethics and depression, just like narcissism, easily leads to stupid, selfish and immoral decisions.