The Matrix Has You: Materialism and Depression
How a focus on possessions can keep your depression alive and well
WE SPEND huge amounts of our time and energy trying to ease or escape our suffering using things, externals — possessions, relationships, highs, knowledge, experience. We strive our tushies off to acquire the objects of our desire in the hope that when we have them, we’ll feel better and life will be OK.
But you know what happens because it’s happened to you tens of thousands of times. After you get your mitts on the thing du jour, it won’t be long before you tire of it and want something else. Then, X hours or days later, you will weary of that. Then you want the first thing again, or maybe something else, and the cycle begins anew. On and on it goes…
Oh, jeez. Us!
After all that effort, you never really arrive anywhere. It’s just more of the same — desire and fulfillment, desire and fulfillment, desire and fulfillment. The cycle keeps on going … and going and going. Life, thusly, doesn’t deliver the goods, or at least not for long.
Hey! I heard you just landed that fantastic job you’ve been talking about for weeks. Congrats! You worked your butt off to make that happen and damned if it didn’t. First round’s on me!
But … what? Problems? Your boss has borderline personality disorder and the day-to-day tasks include transcribing illegible meeting notes, getting yelled at and fetching the coffee. You’re being abused hourly and the whole thing stinks to high heaven.
And relationship problems, too? Yeah, I do remember you telling me how much you wanted a date with that certain somebody who is so attractive — which, given the way dating has been going at your late stage of life can be rare and precious — and you did get things going! But uh-oh. The object of your desire has been taking more long, hard looks at your 20-something tight-jeans-wearing offspring than at your sorry ass, despite all those CrossFit workouts.
It could be anything. It usually is. Whatever you manage to acquire or achieve, after a while it becomes problematic and you’ll start to look for something else. Then, you’ll tire of that and want yet another something.
Or maybe things have been going really good. I mean, fan-freakin-tastic. You have nary a concern in the world. You’ve got exactly the life you want — wonderful spouse, reasonable kids, money, friends, talents, interests, and vacation opportunities up the yin-yang.
Then one night the unthinkable happens. A drunk at the wheel of a Nissan Armada the size of a small ark rear-ends your Mercedes at 80 mph while you’re stopped at a traffic light. Now, you’re laid out in intensive care at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, your body shattered in pieces.
Wait … What now? You’re having an amazing time in that bed? Indeed, you’re soaring with flocks of huge butterflies over dreamy paint-splashed fields, spellbound by the ineffable beauty of a strange and unfamiliar world. The problem is, there is no such world. It’s all in your head. You’re in a coma.
Whoa … You’ve moved! Now, you’re hovering up at the ceiling looking down at yourself lying in that bed. Your kids are gathered all around you. You can hear them discussing when it will be OK to pull the plug on your life support so they can get to the business of divvying up your loot. Apparently, they thought it was just as important as you did.
What a bitch, eh? It will happen to all of us. The worm will turn. And when it does, you can try to run (i.e., engage any or all of the Holy Three of eat/buy/f*ck), but you won’t be able to keep up the distractions forever. When you return from your high, you’ll be back to cruel reality. And you, like most everyone in that situation, will have a hard time being OK with that.
Or maybe it goes like this: You’re shiny and happy beyond compare, a person who’s been charmed to the nth degree, a true king or queen of the world. You don’t drive the Mercedes, your chauffer does.
Late one evening, you sashay into your bedroom after another glorious day (lunch, sailing, cocktails) to find an unexpected visitor waiting for you there, a rather tall individual in a ragged black cape with a strange, huge hood, his face a dark hole. A chill ascends your spine. You stare at the grim reaper, who is muddying up your snow white carpeting. He’s tapping the tip of his scythe on the door of the closet that holds your travel luggage. How could he know?
As you look on, goggle-eyed, the slight tingling you had felt in your chest while sipping that last vodka martini now feels like a vice grip crushing your ribs. You fall to the floor, banging your head and chipping a tooth somehow on the soft carpeting … Things are getting foggy …
And you thought you had it figured out.
Hey, relax. Nothing is wrong here. It’s been this way since the first Homo habilis bolted across the African plains trying to escape his bratty kids and insistent partner, Grr, and wishing (confusingly, to him) that warmly-lit, convivial drinking establishments weren’t still hundreds of thousands of years in the future.
We are human, which means we will meander, saunter, and dash through our days trying to log experiences that will fill up our tanks and distance us from our feelings of pain and discomfort. Oftentimes, we succeed for a time. We sate ourselves and sit back fat and happy, before — yep, you guessed it — we sense the return of that niggling feeling of lack again. Where is the kettle corn?! The TV! The World Wide Web!
Most of us aren’t aware of this meta-dimension of our experience, the never-ending cycle of desire and fulfillment. We’re too wrapped up in doing to notice it. Plus, seeing it can really suck. But so do colonoscopies, but they can save your life.
But the ultimately unsatisfying circular dynamic is there to be seen if you are open to seeing it. Seeing it — really getting it — is known in certain circles as waking up. Waking up is being able to tell the difference between you and your experience.
If you can get that to happen (more on this shortly), relief from depression and existential angst becomes not only possible but likely. The world will then begin to appear pretty dang different; even possessed of mighty fine qualities. You may even realize that things weren’t quite the way they had seemed prior to this point. That time may very well feel like a dream.
There are many ways to see your addiction to the cycle of desire and fulfillment. One of them is to practice seeing your thoughts.
Adapted from “unGlommed, The Guerrilla Approach to Beating Depression”
