"depressive realism" has a debilitating disadvantage: it entails a view of life that is pessimistic, fatalistic, and absurd. It's to see the world through Edvard Munch's The Scream, with no reprieve. There's a continual self-deprecation and a current of existential resignation, as if life were all a stream of floodwater rushing into the sewer. So "depressive realism" can run so far the other way that it once again becomes a liar.
