Reddit is filled with memes, posts, subs about several types of "mental illness" such as depression, ADHD, anxiety, social anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc.
In most discussion in these subs, the horizon of debate is closed: you have a chemical disorder in your brain. This is the general opinion of society as well. For example: any person who is depressed is not "in their right mind" sort to speak, and feeling unmotivated, hopeless and defeated are "bad attitudes" towards life. Even if we took the "chemical imbalance" theory to be true: what would justify that chemical balance or state of things? As far as I understand it, humanity is narcissistical and psychopathic to some degree.
This existential inquiry doesn't appear because people in general remain content, and "only" get unmotivated, anxious about work or sad after a breakup (not downplaying this issues, but they can be remedied). They don't dwell further. Once they "get better" and "no longer suffer from depression" they take on business as usual, and their opinions don't go much deeper than reflections on handling their "mental illness", seeking good therapists, taking the right medication. Existence, social life, their own desires and ideologies mostly undisturbed.
Having these subs appear the first whenever you feel something's wrong, prevents many people from inquiring deeper issues with existence, or the need for existence at all. And counting on the fact you don't encounter someone who thinks himself or herself virtuous for sharing some useless hotline number, of course... Every social system has deployed mental regulatory mechanisms, be they religions, ideologies, psychological and psychiatric treatment, common-sense, philosophies like stoicism or confucianism, etc. that "keep people in their place", reinforce mental biases, improve contentment or alienate people further.
How many people then can really inquire at an existential level? Even philosophers like Camus said "we should imagine Sisyphus happy", but why? He writes:
Even when getting to existential philosophical problems, thinking about existence requires honesty, honesty which we rarely have; clarity we certainly lack. Was Camus aware of the implications of his paragraph about Sisyphus? Was he aware he was pointing not at a reason to go on, but at the evil mechanism of delusion, or maybe that which Nietzsche called "the worst evil", that which prolongs the torments of men?
Can we blame people for not taking into account their own biases? I don't know, it ties into the debate about determinism. It's clear some of us appear to have "cracked the code" and taken the ruthless implications of nihilism to the end with respects to life. Once life loses it's aura, it reveals itself to be a vessel for suffering. Once society loses it's aura of justice and we overcome the just-world fallacy, we see the corruption and inequality inherent to it. Once nature becomes "a bitch", we can no longer think about living "in accordance" to it. It just seems logical to assume pessimism lifts a veil. Most people, then, still have a veil in front of them.
The mere fact that people have to constantly satisfy needs, be they basic or about self-actualization, should be enough to see life is, at best, a temporal situation of experiencing insatisfaction and relations both to people and objects to satisfy this craving, and in reality, incorporating other forms of suffering. Think about a capitalist having to accumulate capital in an autopoietic process, never stopping to understand why this process continues or why our lives are attached to that constant increment. As Julio Cabrera argues, life is a negative and every human action is a reaction to this negative loss that's always happening. Why then continue the process, why then birth more children, why then continue on with activities we now know produce suffering?
We are a minority who just can't be content. Trapped in a game we know is rigged. Like Marx would say about bourgeois economists: people are still trapped inside a Camera Obscura. They debate with scientific vocabulary, inmersed in common sense, about the despair present in a life, and they gain the appearance of an expert. In the end the purpose of psychology is still a mystery for many, what is the goal? To adjust the individual to the social body? To stabilize the individual, to make him or her enter a better hedonic setpoint? To avoid suicide? To teach the individual to gain awareness over his or her actions to function better and accomplish more (i.e. avoiding bad states like panic attacks)? Our collective thought process is very much still in the superficial level, never inquiring deeper about why we need to stabilize our being to suit a system we don't find ethically justifiable, or find a new hedonic setpoint at the cost of awareness (I've yet to find a "happy" person who is not in some way neurotic or psychotic, and this coming at the expense of other humans or life forms). No existence is moral. "Finding meaning", preaching some form of stoicism and meditation is the deepest Reddit goes, and the deepest most academics and philosophers go as well, often citing existentialist philosophers. Basically "do your duty, become a successful neurotic, attach to something (your 'meaning')" or "enter a mental state of total detachment to stop feeling bad about things, to replace emotion with observation". Escapism. We are always running away from our neutral state, our problems, our thoughts. Even positive thinking is a simple technique that promotes affirmative action to avoid suffering. It's obvious.
And I for one can't but feel helpless and alone. There's no easy way out, and the ways to "solve" suffering our societal structures and communities offer us are bleak, have existed for thousands of years without ending it, and don't allow for critical thinking to have a positive quality. There's basically no value in complaining, there's no value in critique. We are all inmersed in a hedonistic calculation. Thought is bad when not used for productive endeavours or distraction (thought as sublimation). "Don't think so much!", "enjoy life", "life is filled with good things!", "stop thinking and live"... It's as if people recognized their own need to delude themselves, again.
We have to keep this in mind, and I'm certain a lot of us here do, when talking to others. I've received the platitudes, the "life is a gift", the faces of worry, pity. This condescension hurts, and can mislead one further into the rabbit hole of society's "remedies", feeling one is truly flawed and wrong. Falling into pits of despair, self-hatred, wasting the potential for change and reduction of suffering for ourselves and others. Don't mistake seeing the truth for seeing what society wants us to think is the truth. What a way to prove depression is taboo and even when it's "openly talked about" it's still from a viewpoint of rejection. Depressive realism? Doesn't even appear in the vocabulary. Rejection of common-held beliefs will never be the norm. And I hope those of you who are reading don't fall for these traps. I wish none of you embrace suffering either. You do what you have to do, but go higher than the usual level of debate, and focus on existence. If we are for diminishing suffering, reproduction of suffering, and against the supression of states of anguish, despair and hatred towards the world, that could lead us to act positively... We need to change the status quo on this matter, the matter of so-called "mental health". If we don't do this, societal and cognitive mechanisms will go on unchallenged, undisputed, in molding our own lives, our thoughts and our bodies to suffer, as they are doing now in most cases, to keep reproducing the state of being and society.
If one becomes free from these societal constrictions to inquiry, and allows oneself to overcome many biases in their thinking, one then sees the world a far different place. Suffering becomes unjustifiable because it doesn't need to arise, ideologies become mechanisms of control, anchoring (like religion being "the opium of the people", enchanting a disenchanted reality), relationships between people become pathetic, naive, held by strings, a primitive need for company and adoration. People themselves become children with varying degrees of consciousness, the normal being no better than your average 10 years old. What else can explain our ridiculous warrying history of competition, exploitation, manipulation, nationalism, racism? Most sources of meaning are neurotic anchoring, and alienation runs rampant. Common-sense appears naive in extremis. You no longer tolerate people telling you what to do, how to do things, why to do things, or wanting you to adjust to a sick society or come to terms with life because you can see the ramifications of doing so, and you are just skeptic. Life is then a soulless, careless process of endless adaptation and reproduction, where sentience arose, to give the space to suffering and displeasant states. With sentience, comes problems. No sentience, no problem. There are no cries on Mars. Even so, people think of themselves as heroes when bringing a new sentience into this world, instead of despicable manipulators. Everything is upside down.
What is there to do? Well, you can always end your life, but the damage of birth is already done. The last thing I'd do is tell you some platitude to uphold the myth that suicide is always wrong. I wouldn't say I'm pro-mortalist though, as dying could imply more suffering. When I say we're trapped, I mean it. That's why the common question, "if you hate life so much why don't you kill yourself?" is not only as insensitive as the average human, but wrong in its logic. Of course making the process of death better would encourage more people to end their suffering (like with euthanasia), but it's still a process of loss, abandonment, that few people can tolerate. Just see how Jehovah witnesses easily bank on this sense on loss and fear of death. Humanity's demise wouldn't even solve "the problem", though. It of course can put an end to specific forms of human suffering, but suffering will still go on in other forms of life, and maybe give rise to new forms of intelligence. Our voluntary extintion will do no other favour to living beings, but that of guaranteeing the reproduction of suffering for hundreds of millions of years more. This only taking into account terrestrial life as unique in the Universe.
In the end, we're alone and condemned. There's no clear answer, and that's the crude reality of things. That's the simplest answer too. Thousands of years trying to solve our "condition", and we never got anywhere close to sparing suffering for us, less avoiding creating more suffering. Even in the most dire of situations, childbirth becomes a ray of hope instead of a tragedy, a proof we're still incredibly pathetic. From this condition we shouldn't derive the simple "create your own meaning!" like it were a bulletproof solution. If we know sources of meaning to be false, aparent, illusions to which we anchor, the process will become unconscious, and we will never be content. The problem of need, desire, never dissapears, as it structures the whole of sentient life. "My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him", writes Cioran. He was aware of the insatisfactory nature of our reality. Even in the utmost satisfaction we know "this is not it", and we are only circling, grasping surplus-enjoyment as a capitalist grasps surplus-value out of the also autopoietic process of capitalist accumulation. We're condemned to suffer, and most of us can't manage to stop this suffering, with reason.
The only real solution is that which can never occur once you're "here": that of never having been born. Birth creates an insourmountable fracture: creates both a being and a conciousness. Gives rise to suffering by creating a vessel for it, prolongs it and extends it. We're fucked.
In a honest reflection on the history of mankind, on the relations present in nature, of the nature of suffering, on our society past and present, what else could really arise but discouragement, pessimism, disenchantment, desilussion, resentment, hatred?
"What good does pessimism do? It makes me sad..." That question is already part of the problem. Why do we need to keep moving on like nothing's happening, answering only to our need to satisfy ourselves? Why do we need to "solve" depression? On another topic, why do we need to create more need? Why do we keep creating more attachments, more desire, more objects, and we think this process of accruing is good?
What good can pessimism, antinatalism, skepticism, existential inquiry and rejection of the status quo over issues like "mental health" bring to our own condemnation we call life? Once we are out of the cycle, sort to speak, we can not only reconfigure our lives to best suit our needs, but we can prevent justifying suffering for ourselves and for others. This is turn makes others aware of the fact that they can ease their predicament. We can stop pursuing certain goals in favour of others, and in turn reduce our suffering, which is what we are after in any case. It's paradoxical, in a way. Of course, avoiding reproduction is key, but everyone agreeing with this post most probably is already an antinatalist. Coming to terms with life's pathetic, grotesque, somber, harmful nature can, ironically, be the best way to actually make a conscious change and reduce suffering significantly for all sentient life, despite common-sense advice would like to tell us. "You have to think positive to do stuff". Well, maybe that's not the case.
In most discussion in these subs, the horizon of debate is closed: you have a chemical disorder in your brain. This is the general opinion of society as well. For example: any person who is depressed is not "in their right mind" sort to speak, and feeling unmotivated, hopeless and defeated are "bad attitudes" towards life. Even if we took the "chemical imbalance" theory to be true: what would justify that chemical balance or state of things? As far as I understand it, humanity is narcissistical and psychopathic to some degree.
This existential inquiry doesn't appear because people in general remain content, and "only" get unmotivated, anxious about work or sad after a breakup (not downplaying this issues, but they can be remedied). They don't dwell further. Once they "get better" and "no longer suffer from depression" they take on business as usual, and their opinions don't go much deeper than reflections on handling their "mental illness", seeking good therapists, taking the right medication. Existence, social life, their own desires and ideologies mostly undisturbed.
Having these subs appear the first whenever you feel something's wrong, prevents many people from inquiring deeper issues with existence, or the need for existence at all. And counting on the fact you don't encounter someone who thinks himself or herself virtuous for sharing some useless hotline number, of course... Every social system has deployed mental regulatory mechanisms, be they religions, ideologies, psychological and psychiatric treatment, common-sense, philosophies like stoicism or confucianism, etc. that "keep people in their place", reinforce mental biases, improve contentment or alienate people further.
How many people then can really inquire at an existential level? Even philosophers like Camus said "we should imagine Sisyphus happy", but why? He writes:
And in a sense, it's true. Even the most pathetic stuff can fill a person's life and keep them anchored and motivated. Even wondered how our modern Sisyphean wage slaves can feel "happy"? But this isn't a real refulation of suicide nor the pointless nature of life, I'd argue. If anything, it highlights the magnitude of our symbolic delusions, our abstraction and our biases.
Even when getting to existential philosophical problems, thinking about existence requires honesty, honesty which we rarely have; clarity we certainly lack. Was Camus aware of the implications of his paragraph about Sisyphus? Was he aware he was pointing not at a reason to go on, but at the evil mechanism of delusion, or maybe that which Nietzsche called "the worst evil", that which prolongs the torments of men?
Can we blame people for not taking into account their own biases? I don't know, it ties into the debate about determinism. It's clear some of us appear to have "cracked the code" and taken the ruthless implications of nihilism to the end with respects to life. Once life loses it's aura, it reveals itself to be a vessel for suffering. Once society loses it's aura of justice and we overcome the just-world fallacy, we see the corruption and inequality inherent to it. Once nature becomes "a bitch", we can no longer think about living "in accordance" to it. It just seems logical to assume pessimism lifts a veil. Most people, then, still have a veil in front of them.
The mere fact that people have to constantly satisfy needs, be they basic or about self-actualization, should be enough to see life is, at best, a temporal situation of experiencing insatisfaction and relations both to people and objects to satisfy this craving, and in reality, incorporating other forms of suffering. Think about a capitalist having to accumulate capital in an autopoietic process, never stopping to understand why this process continues or why our lives are attached to that constant increment. As Julio Cabrera argues, life is a negative and every human action is a reaction to this negative loss that's always happening. Why then continue the process, why then birth more children, why then continue on with activities we now know produce suffering?
We are a minority who just can't be content. Trapped in a game we know is rigged. Like Marx would say about bourgeois economists: people are still trapped inside a Camera Obscura. They debate with scientific vocabulary, inmersed in common sense, about the despair present in a life, and they gain the appearance of an expert. In the end the purpose of psychology is still a mystery for many, what is the goal? To adjust the individual to the social body? To stabilize the individual, to make him or her enter a better hedonic setpoint? To avoid suicide? To teach the individual to gain awareness over his or her actions to function better and accomplish more (i.e. avoiding bad states like panic attacks)? Our collective thought process is very much still in the superficial level, never inquiring deeper about why we need to stabilize our being to suit a system we don't find ethically justifiable, or find a new hedonic setpoint at the cost of awareness (I've yet to find a "happy" person who is not in some way neurotic or psychotic, and this coming at the expense of other humans or life forms). No existence is moral. "Finding meaning", preaching some form of stoicism and meditation is the deepest Reddit goes, and the deepest most academics and philosophers go as well, often citing existentialist philosophers. Basically "do your duty, become a successful neurotic, attach to something (your 'meaning')" or "enter a mental state of total detachment to stop feeling bad about things, to replace emotion with observation". Escapism. We are always running away from our neutral state, our problems, our thoughts. Even positive thinking is a simple technique that promotes affirmative action to avoid suffering. It's obvious.
And I for one can't but feel helpless and alone. There's no easy way out, and the ways to "solve" suffering our societal structures and communities offer us are bleak, have existed for thousands of years without ending it, and don't allow for critical thinking to have a positive quality. There's basically no value in complaining, there's no value in critique. We are all inmersed in a hedonistic calculation. Thought is bad when not used for productive endeavours or distraction (thought as sublimation). "Don't think so much!", "enjoy life", "life is filled with good things!", "stop thinking and live"... It's as if people recognized their own need to delude themselves, again.
We have to keep this in mind, and I'm certain a lot of us here do, when talking to others. I've received the platitudes, the "life is a gift", the faces of worry, pity. This condescension hurts, and can mislead one further into the rabbit hole of society's "remedies", feeling one is truly flawed and wrong. Falling into pits of despair, self-hatred, wasting the potential for change and reduction of suffering for ourselves and others. Don't mistake seeing the truth for seeing what society wants us to think is the truth. What a way to prove depression is taboo and even when it's "openly talked about" it's still from a viewpoint of rejection. Depressive realism? Doesn't even appear in the vocabulary. Rejection of common-held beliefs will never be the norm. And I hope those of you who are reading don't fall for these traps. I wish none of you embrace suffering either. You do what you have to do, but go higher than the usual level of debate, and focus on existence. If we are for diminishing suffering, reproduction of suffering, and against the supression of states of anguish, despair and hatred towards the world, that could lead us to act positively... We need to change the status quo on this matter, the matter of so-called "mental health". If we don't do this, societal and cognitive mechanisms will go on unchallenged, undisputed, in molding our own lives, our thoughts and our bodies to suffer, as they are doing now in most cases, to keep reproducing the state of being and society.
If one becomes free from these societal constrictions to inquiry, and allows oneself to overcome many biases in their thinking, one then sees the world a far different place. Suffering becomes unjustifiable because it doesn't need to arise, ideologies become mechanisms of control, anchoring (like religion being "the opium of the people", enchanting a disenchanted reality), relationships between people become pathetic, naive, held by strings, a primitive need for company and adoration. People themselves become children with varying degrees of consciousness, the normal being no better than your average 10 years old. What else can explain our ridiculous warrying history of competition, exploitation, manipulation, nationalism, racism? Most sources of meaning are neurotic anchoring, and alienation runs rampant. Common-sense appears naive in extremis. You no longer tolerate people telling you what to do, how to do things, why to do things, or wanting you to adjust to a sick society or come to terms with life because you can see the ramifications of doing so, and you are just skeptic. Life is then a soulless, careless process of endless adaptation and reproduction, where sentience arose, to give the space to suffering and displeasant states. With sentience, comes problems. No sentience, no problem. There are no cries on Mars. Even so, people think of themselves as heroes when bringing a new sentience into this world, instead of despicable manipulators. Everything is upside down.
What is there to do? Well, you can always end your life, but the damage of birth is already done. The last thing I'd do is tell you some platitude to uphold the myth that suicide is always wrong. I wouldn't say I'm pro-mortalist though, as dying could imply more suffering. When I say we're trapped, I mean it. That's why the common question, "if you hate life so much why don't you kill yourself?" is not only as insensitive as the average human, but wrong in its logic. Of course making the process of death better would encourage more people to end their suffering (like with euthanasia), but it's still a process of loss, abandonment, that few people can tolerate. Just see how Jehovah witnesses easily bank on this sense on loss and fear of death. Humanity's demise wouldn't even solve "the problem", though. It of course can put an end to specific forms of human suffering, but suffering will still go on in other forms of life, and maybe give rise to new forms of intelligence. Our voluntary extintion will do no other favour to living beings, but that of guaranteeing the reproduction of suffering for hundreds of millions of years more. This only taking into account terrestrial life as unique in the Universe.
In the end, we're alone and condemned. There's no clear answer, and that's the crude reality of things. That's the simplest answer too. Thousands of years trying to solve our "condition", and we never got anywhere close to sparing suffering for us, less avoiding creating more suffering. Even in the most dire of situations, childbirth becomes a ray of hope instead of a tragedy, a proof we're still incredibly pathetic. From this condition we shouldn't derive the simple "create your own meaning!" like it were a bulletproof solution. If we know sources of meaning to be false, aparent, illusions to which we anchor, the process will become unconscious, and we will never be content. The problem of need, desire, never dissapears, as it structures the whole of sentient life. "My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him", writes Cioran. He was aware of the insatisfactory nature of our reality. Even in the utmost satisfaction we know "this is not it", and we are only circling, grasping surplus-enjoyment as a capitalist grasps surplus-value out of the also autopoietic process of capitalist accumulation. We're condemned to suffer, and most of us can't manage to stop this suffering, with reason.
The only real solution is that which can never occur once you're "here": that of never having been born. Birth creates an insourmountable fracture: creates both a being and a conciousness. Gives rise to suffering by creating a vessel for it, prolongs it and extends it. We're fucked.
In a honest reflection on the history of mankind, on the relations present in nature, of the nature of suffering, on our society past and present, what else could really arise but discouragement, pessimism, disenchantment, desilussion, resentment, hatred?
"What good does pessimism do? It makes me sad..." That question is already part of the problem. Why do we need to keep moving on like nothing's happening, answering only to our need to satisfy ourselves? Why do we need to "solve" depression? On another topic, why do we need to create more need? Why do we keep creating more attachments, more desire, more objects, and we think this process of accruing is good?
What good can pessimism, antinatalism, skepticism, existential inquiry and rejection of the status quo over issues like "mental health" bring to our own condemnation we call life? Once we are out of the cycle, sort to speak, we can not only reconfigure our lives to best suit our needs, but we can prevent justifying suffering for ourselves and for others. This is turn makes others aware of the fact that they can ease their predicament. We can stop pursuing certain goals in favour of others, and in turn reduce our suffering, which is what we are after in any case. It's paradoxical, in a way. Of course, avoiding reproduction is key, but everyone agreeing with this post most probably is already an antinatalist. Coming to terms with life's pathetic, grotesque, somber, harmful nature can, ironically, be the best way to actually make a conscious change and reduce suffering significantly for all sentient life, despite common-sense advice would like to tell us. "You have to think positive to do stuff". Well, maybe that's not the case.
- Schopenhauer.
