Depression Is A Natural Response To The World
James and Joe were making a pilgramage to worship a small town on the other side of the mountain. Joe was leaving three days before James. They said their goodbyes and arranged to meet at the hotel they were staying in.
Joe had grown up in the same small village all his life and people had always nodded to the mountain when talking about the town on the other side. He’d often wanted to visit it, but was put off by the mountain in the way. But he had decided now was the time for him to make the expedition and prepared all his gear for the trek.
photo credit: anne_jimenez
For four days he walked and climbed. Eventually, drained from the experience, he arrived at the hotel too late for dinner. His feet were so sore that when he dipped them in the bath the sting almost made him hit the roof. He slept soundly that night and in the morning went downstairs looking forward to a hearty breakfast.
As he sat down though, he was astonished to see James two tables away reading a newspaper. He walked over and, after greeting him, enquired why he had changed his mind and come earlier.
‘I didn’t’ said James, ‘I got the train yesterday’.
The moral of the story is that there are easy and difficult ways to do things. Life can be a struggle or it can flow.
It depends whether you want to climb the mountain or go around it. When I say, you can be happy or you can be right, it is another way of asking if you want to climb the mountain or take the train to go around the mountain.
In our little story, Joe didn’t realise that he had a choice and so his journey was much harder than it had to be.
What We Can Learn From Depressed People
My last post on the root cause of stress and depression angered at least one person, who saw it as a personal attack on them. It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t written for depressed people. It was written because the way to understand the subtle things that we do most clearly is to look at extreme examples and observe the same dynamics that we have, but in a much more exaggerated fashion. Depressed people are at the extreme of choosing being right over being happy. And so every day they climb the mountain, rather than take the train around the mountain.
First though, let me explain the dynamics that I have noticed. Then hopefully you can relate these to your own life and see where you make the same mistake.
We all have access to a range of emotions from depressed to joyous. And for most of us we visit them all, or most of them, at some point. It is part of the cycle of life to go through them all. However some people live much, or most, of their life in depression.
Feeling depressed or despairing can be great. But only in small doses. Being able to look at a situation from all sides allows us to make much better judgements. Because then all options are open to you.
A well rounded person has lived and seen from each perspective. Someone who only ever looks from a joyous point of view, lives in a Pollyanna world of peeking out and pretending everything is hunky dory, when it clearly isn’t.
When I was starting out and finding my feet writing, I used to write about happiness. I got labelled in with the ‘think positive’ bunch. And there are so many people who have jumped on that bandwagon and are going about getting people to clap and sing and laugh to artificially make themselves happy that quite frankly, I was embarrassed by it.
The World Sucks And We Are The Children Of Barbarians
The fact is the world sucks.
Buddha gave us the first noble truth, that all living is suffering. And it is. As King Midas discovered, there is really nothing in this world that you really want.
Honestly look at nature. It is utterly barbaric. I used to have this mousemat that reminded me of that fact every day. Every animal wakes up each morning and has to run and/or kill to survive.
photo credit: Shahrokh Dabiri
Our society is the result of those who were the most aggressive, the quickest to react most violently to threat and those who were the best at killing. The peace loving civilisations got conquered and destroyed. The gentlefolk were butchered.
And every day you can see the same dynamics in business, politics, financial markets and in our inner city gangs. A fool and his money cannot walk safely through much of this world.
Even in our homes, many people live with abuse in it’s many forms. In our workplaces we work amongst deceit and political maneouvering.
In the day and age when we can almost colonise other planets, when we can destroy much of the world with a push of a button, we still would rather squander money on a futile military arms race than feed the starving in Africa.
There is no way that all the clapping and singing can disguise these facts for long.
However whilst being aware of these facts, I still want to spend as much of my time in the more positive emotional zones as I can. Yet I must do it in spite of so much being wrong in the world.
All of life, though it appears in many different forms, boils down to a journey. I am here and want to be there. Our emotions are determined by whether we tackle the journey by going over the mountain or by going around it.
The Four Basic Emotional Zones
I see there being four basic emotional zones in life.
Depressed and despairing.
Stressed and frustrated.
Finding your purpose and meaning.
Following your bliss.
My time is devoted to helping people move through these more quickly. Because the natural resting place is in following your bliss, unless you get stuck in an earlier part of the cycle.
The only stage I typically have nothing to do with is the depressed state. The reason is that I’ve found I can’t relate to depressed people. There is too much of a gap between them and I. We have entirely different goals and ways of looking at the world. I find it too uncomfortable. And they are looking for something that I can’t give them.
And critically, it is hard for them to deal with brutal honesty.
Now if you look back through the comments of the last post, you’ll see a number of people relate how they hit hard times and became depressed. And some explained how they found a route out. That is the key differential I’m talking about here.
Everyone can get depressed, but some people get stuck there and refuse to believe there is any other reasonable response they could have to the world. If you really want to overcome depression or anything else than you can. But you have to want it so badly that you are willing to give up any notions you hold on being right.
Depression As A Badge
I will happily admit that I am no expert on depression. However I have noticed some patterns with depressed people. And lacking the ability to be able to keep quiet, I have to share the truth as I see it regardless of the consequences. It’s certain things that those labelled depressed say that made me wonder what was at the cause. Things like;
“I wish I had physical symptoms, so people could see how I suffer”.
“I fight so hard, harder than anyone else, but it’s so much harder for me”.
“People don’t understand that it’s a disease”.
Now I noticed these patterns and they baffled me. Why would so many people use exactly the same terminology? And more to the point, why are they more bothered about other people recognising their pain, than actually dealing with the pain?
If I have a mantra it is,
you can be happy or right, but not both.
What this really means is that your internal model of how the world should work, fits with what you believe is right.
Accepting the way the world is and adapting your model around that, is what leads to being happy.
Now some of the time the world will coincide with how you believe it should be. Sometimes you will win. Sometimes you will get the girl (or boy). Sometimes things will work out the way you want them to.
And in these times everyone is happy.
But the real test of life, that determines whether you will live happily or be depressed, is what do you do, when life is not how you want it to be?
When it seems to be all wrong, the first thing that people do is try to change it.
A natural response.
But you can only change circumstances in maybe 5-15% of the time. The rest of the time you can burn yourself out trying to swim against the tide.
And that’s what depressed people do.
They bash against brick walls, burn themselves out and give up in despair.
We all go through despair and it can give birth to greater insight or to ingenuity. But you then have to change your perspective to find the way out. But for some they are stuck there waiting for the mirror to smile before they will.
Happier or more successful people adapt their model of the world to fit in with the reality they see. In contrast, depressed people get furious at anyone or anything that challenges their model of the world and take it as a personal affront.
Despite the pain it brings them, they hold on to their model for dear life. They look at others and convince themselves that their situation is just bad luck, or persecution, and there’s nothing they could possibly do to make it different. Others, they believe, got the good cards. ’It’s easy for them,’ they say. And so they play at being the victim.
That is why they want others to recognise their suffering. Because if they suffer, then life must be harder for them. Life is picking on them. Making them a victim. And so if they are being picked on, they must be special. And so actually they are the better ones.
To these depression is not an emotional state. It is a badge that marks them out as special and gives them the value and recognition they sought from the world in vain. It’s as if they haven’t learned to wrap themselves around the world and instead are trying to wrap the world around them.
Depression Is The Natural Response To The World. Happiness Is A Creative Response.
That is why I say that happiness comes when your focus is on ideas or people beyond your sense of self. Because when you go beyond yourself, you go beyond needing to be right and in harmony with the flow of life, you become happy.
Examine when you are happy or unhappy for yourself. You’ll find that when you are happy, it is because you have lost all sense of yourself in the pursuit of a goal or in exploration.
Think about the first throes of a romance. The excitement is all in discovering about someone.
The bits before the breakdown are all related to how what they are doing, affects you.
No-one is ever happy, when they look at situations through the eyes of ‘how does this affect me’.
Depression is NOT a disease in the medical sense. Sure, some people are naturally more inclined to a depressive reaction, but they are not without choice. It is not having learned to lose your attachment to your sense of self that causes chronic depression.
Depression is a natural response to the world. To be happy is a developed skill.
Tto live joyously, is to adapt to this monstrous environment that we are in and to still love life. That comes by creating your own world. This is an advanced skill.
As Jesus said ‘be in this world, but not of it’.
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