The Human Condition
Thoughts on getting through life while living with depression.
Why did we create this silly world of credit scores and full-time jobs that strip us away of our love and passion?
We are supposed to always be thinking of the future. Full speed ahead to our “golden years” when we can finally retire and do all the things we wished we could do while we were young!
We created this. We did this to ourselves. With dreams of progress and power we created a world that makes us depressed and jaded with life.
Living in a capitalist’s dream, the everyday person dreams of escape. “Escaping” into nature. Disconnecting during the two days of “freedom” we get a week.
How kind of them to give us that- those two days. Lest we live in a real dystopian world where “they” make us work every single day of our lives.
How kind they are to give us those two days.
I recently learned that a friend lost two of his friends to suicide. I have also lost people this way.
It makes me angry. Knowing that people who are probably really similar to me deciding to end it all in order to escape this hell we have created.
It makes me angry because it’s not their fault they didn’t fit into the box that society tries to force us all into.
Maybe some of us fit nicely into that box. Or at least those people are really good at pretending. They can play the game- look happy on Instagram, get through this life, and come out the other side with a retirement fund and life lived to old age (even if that life often makes them feel dead inside).
But what are the rest of us to do? Kill ourselves because we can’t make rent?
What are the artists or the “crazy homeless” people supposed to do? What are the neurodivergent people who struggle to hold down a steady job supposed to do? Live on the streets and beg for food? Be looked at with sorrow and sometimes terror by all the “normal” people?
I think the biggest joke of all is that there are “normal” people. Most, if not all people have some sort of neurodivergent trait. Sometimes their neurodivergence is so divergent that it makes them incapable of living a “normal” life.
But then there are those of us that are seen to be living a happy and normal life, but inside are crying for an escape. They get through life by being with their children, looking at their fat bank accounts and planning their next vacations. Their vacations with pay. That’s how they get through it.
And then there are those of us that can’t even bear to live like that. The ones in the middle. Not “crazy” enough to live on the streets- “normal” enough to hold down a steady job, but still feel the pull of something missing.
Sometimes, though, people don’t make it through to their retirement. Sometimes the burden of life wears on them so much that they don’t make it through their depression, and they decide to let it all go in hopes that there is something better on the other side.
Can we really blame them?
What is worse- living but feeling dead inside, or letting it all go to see if there is something better out there?
I think we need to take a long hard look at our society. And not just talk about the things we already know. The mental health issues, the problems with our medical system, ou education system, etc. etc. We need to actually make a change. There is a reason homelessness is increasing. There is a reason depression and mental health issues are on the rise. And it’s all connected.
“So it goes.” Kurt Vonnegut wrote often in reference to death. Death of anything. Death of a flat bottle of wine. Death of an animal. Death of a human.
I think humans should stop thinking about death in the sad way that we do. Vonnegut also wrote about time travel. About how we can travel through time to the past, and thus no one is actually dead because we can visit them in those moments. This idea often helps me get through those moments when I find out about the death of someone, or when I miss someone. I travel back in time through my memories of them, or through some journal I wrote about them, and it helps me cope with them being gone.
“We are here to help each other get through this thing … whatever it is,” Vonnegut once said to a group of students. This is all we really need to remember in the end. In order to make it out of this silly world us humans have created, we have to hold each other close and let each other know we are not alone.
