On The Vanity Of Existence: A Splintered Mind

"The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Why is life so complicated?

Where are the answers?

Why doesn't anyone just reach down?

Who's listening anyways?

Is it just my twisted perception?

Where does it come from?

My soul?

Yes.

These questions have a force and a momentum all their own, but they do not anticipate the unlikeliest of reactions: that depression isn't some evil that needs to be extirpated from the mind or some disease that needs to be palliated by drugs; that it might be an embodiment of philosophical pessimism, a natural reaction to one's social surroundings and situation. Imagine if the term were defined non-pejoratively, even positively:

"Depression, in most of its manifestations, is the healthy suspicion that 1) there may not be an aim or point to existence, and/or 2) that the life people have actually created, the 'structure of society,' is not one worth participating in. The objective should not be to kill this suspicion, but to tame it and work with it."

Depression can sometimes occupy the same intersection of the psyche as genius. Philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, William James, and Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the worst throes of depression. A host of other artists and writers suffered the same fate, including Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, Mark Twain, Wolfgang Mozart, Charles Dickens, Vincent Van Gogh, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath.

What is the practical import of this? That the best and truest therapy may consist in examining the condition or state itself, with understanding being the chief goal, not any simple fixes or meliorative expediencies; in locating the etiology somewhere in the ebb and flow of social relationships, realizing that some of the most brilliant people who ever lived were depressed, and that no super drug is effective enough to eradicate the ills of culture and modern society. Philosphy and Depression