Feeling Blue, Balancing Meaning and Relationships
I remember being much younger and hearing the term depression bandied about. It broke into the public consciousness as I've grown up and I've never understood it. Until I had to.
Depression flirts with my consciousness. An unwelcome and persistent buzzing. I’m not depressed, far from it, though from time to time I fall into a malaise. A foggy hue. I still go about my day to day. I laugh, I joke, I smile, but there’s a filter on my life, all the colours are a bit more muted. I feel it regularly. I think about how other people think about it, and how other people think about depression. I look around me and wonder who is depressed, who has been depressed and what form it takes for different people.
Malaise flirts with every consciousness. Quite frankly, I don’t really care about the malaise. I’m in that period now. I’m spiralling somewhat. Not caring seeps into every aspect of your life. I’ve reached a point where I don’t even care about my indifference.
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." - Victor Frankl
I read about the spiral to break the spiral. The literature on depression is in a weird place. By a weird place I mean all over the place. It doesn’t really make sense. So I think of the people in my life that aren’t down and how they fight their own grey goblins..
I think for a lot of people depression is always there. Looming on the horizon. Not because people are predisposed to being depressed, but because I think society is structured in such a way that being glum or flirting with depressive tendencies is the norm.
We have so much, we have, what appears to us, a superabundance. An overflowing cornucopia of goods. A nirvana to the ancient man. Especially the select few that have rolled a bit better on the ‘born into wealth’ dice. We have enough to not know what enough is. So we over consume. Overcompensate. Then feel bad when this consumption doesn't fill the void.
It’s a delicate balancing act. A lot of the things that have traditionally made people happy have been perverted by profit seeking actors. In a capital driven society those actors set the rules. These rules are twisted and perverted by these actors.
So if we live in a society, this all encompassing social structure that is inherently biassed to upset, then how do we end that. How do we ensure that the life we lead is not one that is contorted by the powers that be. Not a marionette on a string to the hyper stimulants available at our every whim. It’s quite difficult.
I was having a conversation with a few friends a week or so ago about overweight kids. Do you blame the parents or the kids? One of my friends quipped, I blame society. We all laughed, but then I thought about it.
Do I blame the kid, the parent, or the multi billion dollar consumer industrial complex that churns out highly addictive fructose corn syrup monstrosity stimulating your brain in a way that it wasn't designed to. Those hyper stimulations and commodification of things has extended beyond the realm of sugar snacks and has encroached upon every arena of personal life.
Friendships with social media, love and dating apps, even the bloody property market is taunting us nowadays with its unattainability as homes are repurposed to Airbnbs for profiteering landlords. Everything feels unattainable. So how do you find meaning in this.
I’ve pondered on this a lot because I’ve struggled with this. I would say that like any person I’ve had my depressive episodes. Times when I would have thought that life on this earth is better led when you aren’t on this earth. Not in a, I hate my life way, rather in a, everything is long and I kind of just want to turn it off. So I rummaged through the mental banks. I read books, articles, videos and spoke to a few people I really love. I came to my own conclusions. I had the luxury to, no other responsibilities weighing me down. I had the comfort to do that kind of soul searching. I feel for people that have gone through similar episodes when the humdrum of life is banging at your door also asking for an answer.
Like most things in life I try to come up with an easily repeatable and readily explainable formula. I’ve distilled it into two sections. Meaning and relationships. The meaning in the things I do, and the relationships I’ve got around me. Anytime I slip into a depressive episode I look into these two things and things. How am I faring? If the answer is poor then I will be in a state of melancholy.
One of the things that you hear about is people in poorer places never really getting depressed. I think that’s primarily a strategy to ‘otherise’ poor people, but there’s a truth to it. You don’t have the luxury of having a meaningless life, devoid of relationships. When surviving is more difficult your mind is more preoccupied with the survival motive. When you have less, you need more, and part of that is needing the support of other people. Part of the curse of our blighted superabundance is that it’s eroding our own minds and we can see it happening to everyone around us and we’re too weak to stop.
So I lean on my formula, like an old man on a crutch. I wave my stick and shout it at anyone who’s bored enough to stop by and listen. It works for me, keeps the evils at bay, maybe it will work for you two.