Depressions
The truth is, for twenty years I’ve gone in and out of depressions. It seems appropriate, given the circumstances. The rest days are much needed, although sometimes unwanted. In this essay, I examine the benefits that I’ve experienced from depressions, why people get stuck in a depression, and ways out of short and long term depressions.
Sneezing is not a cause of illness, it’s an effect. Imagine four people are sneezing — one has the flu, one has a coronavirus, one has allergies and one has a bacterial infection. Now imagine they all get diagnosed with the same label: sneezing. “You have Major Sneezing Disorder,” says the doctor. This would not only be dumb, but also harmful because it is a misdiagnosis of the root cause. Nonexplanatory labeling is the standard of care in psychiatric diagnosing. Psychiatric labels are names for symptoms instead of root causes, to the detriment of the person and all of society. “I have depression,” is a popular root-cause misdiagnosis. In some cases, “depression” is a pathologization of a natural human process. Depressions are multi-functional. They can serve as opportunities for rest, reconfiguration, and integration.
Thank God for sneezing and thank God for depressions. They are part of the human experience. Every roller coaster needs depressions. Every bear needs hibernation. But it seems that people are increasingly getting stuck in such a low-energy state.
What brings life vitality?
The need to gather food and survive.
Meaningful work and relationships.
A healthy gut microbiome.
Bonfires with singing and dancing.
Hands in the dirt.
Looking up at the night sky, peering into the starry infinite.
Pretty quickly it’s clear why many modernites are getting stuck in a depression when it rolls around. The usual forcing functions are missing that would roll a person out of an otherwise interim low-energy reconfiguration. A human in an industrial-digital environment has over-abundances in some areas and under-abundances in others. The activities, life, and freedom are missing for otherwise well-functioning depressions to come to a timely end.
True Causes
There are many causes for sneezing and many causes for depressions. A person could have various combinations of microbial, chemical, and memetic causes that trigger, re-trigger, and hold them in a depression.
Chemicals and microbes:
Endemic pathogens
Microbiome dysbiosis
Various poisons in the food and water
The standard American diet and lifestyle wearing down major systems: endo, gastro, neuro, fascial, nervous and liver.
Memetic
Unprocessed stuff — emotions, energies, experiences — that want to be completed and integrated
The perception of loss — deaths, big changes, traumas and injuries
The perception of inadequacy from egoic comparison and expectations
Fake food, fake sex, fake friends — widespread inauthenticity
Ugliness
Loneliness
A boring life devoid of what it usually means to be human
A caged animal naturally gets depressed
It’s so common for animals in captivity to get anxiety and depression that someone invented the label: “zoochosis.” It must be zoochosis causing the depression instead of, ya know, the zoo. Why hasn’t the lion moved in three weeks? He has “zoochosis.” Are you sure he doesn’t have a zoo?
Freedom is the absence of lies and dissonance. What is a zoo but lies and dissonance? It’s a fake unnatural habitat. Across from the lions are the polar bears. They both must be thinking “What the hell is this?”
Why hasn’t she moved in five days? She has depression. Are you sure she doesn’t have… no children? No tribe? No mission? No freedom?
“An animal caught in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to escape, what will you do?”
The Primordial Habitat
An unwanted long-term depression, like six months, would not be possible in any kind of primordial habitat. You would die. When a person gets hungry, like haven't-eaten-in-three-days hungry, biochemistry changes. After days of fasting, when you hunt with your tribe, catch, cook, and bite into fresh meat, the rush of brain chemicals launches the system away from a depression. It involves cardio, sun exposure, group activity, reward response, and nutritious food.
What’s more, the primordial habitat was flush with vitamins, minerals, and microbes. And sex — I feel like there was a lot more sex. At least more hugging and cuddling.
Nothing focuses on the mind like love and survival.
In the primordial habitat, the addiction selection was limited. If there was any alcohol at all, it was a low percentage. Really, there was no alcohol, scrolling, pills, cars, porn, videogames and so on. Moving around doing stuff outside with your tribe was the only game around.
Must we really embrace every new technology?
Happiness is for children. Ego death is for adults.
Getting Out
One way to increase the likelihood of a timely exit from a depression is to let go and lean into it upon entry into the valley. Easy in, easy out.
Don’t want to eat? Don’t eat until you really, really want to.
Don’t want to go to work? Then don’t.
“But I’ll lose my job.”
Perhaps that’s not the right job for you. No change without sacrifice.
A depression is an opportunity to sacrifice. A depression is a window of reconfiguration. If you don’t take advantage of it, it will hang around and revisit until you do.
Someone might think “depression” and think “bad.” Low energy could not be good, right? The industrial machine wants you to be high-energy, but not too high, just high enough to work, consume and believe. That’s how numbers go up — and numbers, must, go, up. Pharma sales, must go up.
The solution to a nonproblem is nondoing. But that’s not an easy thing to not do. Ego loves problems. There’s safety and certainty in problems. There’s identity in problems. The conception of “Depression” as a pathology is an egoic grasp to hold on and avert sacrifice.
Nondoing, lying down, is to go inward, release and reconfigure. It happens of its own accord. A person might fear doing nothing and going inward, so they plow through and everything becomes a chore. Fear causes a person to resist the process. They might force themselves to eat, “work” and fake laugh.
That’s not what I did for my most recent depression — I leaned into it. I laid down and let ego fall away. I didn’t eat until I felt like eating. I ended up fasting for 32 hours before I went to a seafood restaurant with my mother and ate salmon. Then I fasted for another 15 hours. At that point, I’d been enjoying the depression for four days, which felt like the right amount. So, I ate a microdose of a psilocybin mushroom and went on an e-bike ride under a sunny sky. Rolling across the pedestrian bridge and into the forest, I thought to myself, “Wow, this is one of the best days ever.” That weekend, two friends visited my home state of New Hampshire. We went hiking and swimming. We summited three mountains and plunged into five different cold-water swim spots. We ate at delicious restaurants. I cooked breakfast for my friends.
It’s difficult to stay in a depression in these kinds of circumstances.
During the 4-5 day depression, the “I” that would want to get out wasn’t there anymore. After rest, reconfiguration, and insight, the inertia of my pre-depression life swept me out of the valley and back into the mountains of doing mode. By some people’s standards, this acute depression could not be pleasant experience, but reduced-ego “I” enjoyed the depression. Not eating for a few days wasn’t a problem, whereas outside of a depression, that would be torment.
Sometimes the most productive thing to do is nothing. Sometimes the biggest gain is to give up.
Or not. Depressions are heterogeneous and circumstances are different.
There once was a time when I acted like a loser and a victim. I started to ask myself, “Are you Mr. Poopypants?” This inquiry helped me stop being a loser. If you are being Mr. Poopypants, perhaps it is time to end the pity party. Your healing is your responsibility.
This shit is not supposed to be easy. Heroes beg to be born in such a time. Sometimes, ya just claw out of the valley like a bat outta hell going batshit crazy. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Rip and tear and don’t stop until it’s done. This looks like long cardio exercise, fervent prayer, and something akin to convulsing, like Osho’s Dynamic Meditation.
If you have been stuck in a depression for a long time, like months or years, well, this should be obvious but I know that it’s not — to get out is to radically change your life. Totally different. A deep depression calls for a deep reconfiguration. Really, it calls for rebirth. It’s not as fun as it might sound. Imagine how scared an infant is while exiting birth. The only way out is through. Take the plunge into new self.
The cost of not doing so is brain damage. Long-term depression causes brain damage. “Depression” is presented as an early manifestation of “schizophrenia.” But really, schizophrenia (a very messy system) can be a later manifestation of long-term depression. Stuck in a depression damages the brain and so too does daily drugging to mask it.
Ego
Weeks of traveling, falling in and out of love, physical injury, and losing something I thought was irreplaceable, set the stage for a healthy depression. After the trip of a lifetime, I was back in boring tech land, working mostly alone. I lost my ability to focus and feel OK. I sat down on my computer and typed a blog post about how I shall transcend a post-traveling depression by doing cold water exposure, kundalini yoga, and long cardio, because that’s what always works. I didn’t post it. Instead, I closed the laptop, walked upstairs to my bedroom, threw some things, laid down, and gave up. It was 11 am. My eyes closed I let myself go into a depression, deep enough to release Maya's grasp. Maya is the illusion of separateness. She cannot grasp you if there’s no energy left to grasp back. The need to do anything dissappeard. In this sense, depression was a get-out-jail-free card. It’s not a problem, it’s a solution.
I was able to see the egoic veil of all my thoughts in the time it was being lifted. When it’s down, there’s no veil, when it’s up, there’s no person to see it. What we are is the same thing as everything and egos game is to pretend that we’re separate. Every now and then, the goggles fall off.
In the past I would be terrified to plunge into nondoing, immobilization and nonbeing. During the entrance into this depression, Jed McKenna quotes bubbled up. These passages increased my conviction to comfortably give up.
“Beliefs are candles that man uses to ward off the surrounding darkness. They are the charms we use to hold infinity at bay. To dispel the black cloud that hovers over every head. Your moments of blackest despair are really your most honest moments, your most lucid moments. That’s when you’re seeing without your protective lenses. That’s when you pull back the curtain and see things as they are.” From Spiritual Enlightenment, The Damndest Thing.
“Fear,” I say. “It’s all about fear. Your fear, her fear. She’s afraid, so she keeps struggling to stay afloat. You’re afraid of losing her, so you keep encouraging her to struggle. Don’t you get tired of being afraid? Of struggling?” Barry doesn’t reply. No one moves. “The answer is to stop struggling, to go into the fear. Let her go. The cause of the unhappiness isn’t the situation, but the resistance. You’re making disease and decay and death evil, but they’re not evil, they just are. The clinging is the cause of the unhappiness. Release is the answer. Let her sink.” From Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment.
The egoic perspective is the concoction of a separate self that can win and lose. Ego is poor-little-me. This is the internal/external illusion. Living deep in the egoic gravity well is childish and can contribute to all kinds of neurosis.
The weird reality is that people often prefer to have their problems instead of not have their problems. Problems are less scary than nothingness. Climate, patriarchy, the globalists, mental illness, addiction, rape, relationship issues and employment struggles. We lean into them and they shape us. They define poor-little-me. Ego structures like definition. Problems, beliefs, desires and emotions mold egoic structures and create a secure sense of self. An egoic structure doesn’t want to die, so it avoids rebirth.
A woman wrote to me online, “My suffering is a prerequisite for my being here.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I replied. “It sounds like you like some suffering, in which case, it’s not a problem. It’s only a problem if it’s said that it’s a problem. The prescribers love problems.”
Mike Ma wrote in Gothic Violence, “A lot of bitches want rape like they want a mental illness.”
“All is vanity. All.” wrote Jed McKenna. “This is Vanity in the biblical sense: I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. We must constantly project the illusion of self because if we don’t, we aren’t.”
I meditated on these lines.
Do you really want to solve our problems? That would be to abandon them. For everybody, an egoic structure runs the show, and ego loves problems.
“Depression is fear with hope removed. It arises as we discover that something we thought could be ours will never be ours. Unhappiness is when we worry about not having something, depression is when we realize we’ll never have it, and freedom is when we realize that nothing is ours and nothing can be ours, so that, in effect, nothing isn’t ours.”
“What might be the case with your friend, and anyone else who seems about to succumb to morbid despair, is actually the onset of human adulthood.” . . . “That despair is most often a sign that one is breaking away from the fairy-tale version of life, where good little boys and girls live happily ever after, and moving into adulthood.”
Depression Conclusion
The Bhagavad Gita is a story from ancient India. The main character, Arjuna, is in a depression, lying in despair between his army and an opposing army that includes his kin. Krishna, who represents truth, converses with Arjuna. McKenna writes, “Krishna tells Arjuna he must rise up, free from hope, and throw himself into the battle.”
The way out is through. I have felt that depressions have evolutionary utilities, such as recovery, reconfigurations and system reboot. Depressions can be triggered by memetics, traumas, chemicals, microbes, and the onset of human adulthood. The modern habitat, combined with fear of rebirth can keep us stuck in a depression valley, or worse, ping ponging between depression and anxiety.
There are times when “mental illness” is a natural life process that gets pathologized. Ironically the pharma treatment of a nonproblem can cause problems. For example, after traveling, a person could enter a depression, resist the process, get stuck there, get more sad, get labeled “depressed,” then they “have depression” and it more mass in the egoic gravity well. A victim mindset may arise and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — Mr. Poopypants.
The recipe for a successful depression is to lean into it to the point where there’s no one left to do the leaning. This is freedom. It’s not possible, nor would it be healthy, to maintain this kind of no-self. No-self is what there is when you’re dead. A healthy depression is a temporary get-out-of-jail-free card. Only after a proper plunge into rest and reconfiguration is it timely to accelerate back into the mountainous doing-mode.
Rise up, free from hope. Throw yourself into battle.
Afterword
It’s hard to do things in a depression. So you ask for help. The doctor offers pharma drugs and talk therapy — because that’s what insurance covers. So you take the drugs, whose side effects are varied and can include more depression, and you go to a talk therapist, who is financially incentivized to create a dependency by dragging you into the sewer of shitty things that have happened. With questionable pharma drugs and unresolved sewer missions, you’re more depressed and waiting idly for these treatments to make things better.
Hey mama, when you leave
Don't leave a thing behind
I don't want nothin'
I can't use nothin'
Take care into the hall
And if you see my friends
Tell them I'm fine
Not using nothin'
Almost burned out my eyes
Threw my ears down to the floor
I didn't see nothin'
I didn't hear nothin'
I stood there like a block of stone
Knowin' all I had to know
And nothin' more
Man, that's nothin'
As brothers our troubles are
Locked in each others arms
And you better pray
They never find you
Your back ain't strong enough
For burdens doublefold
They'd crush you down
Down into nothin'
Being born is going blind
And bowing down a thousand times
To echoes strung
On pure temptation
Sorrow and solitude
These are the precious things
And the only words
That are worth remembering
Nothin’ by Townes Van Zandt
Excerpts from Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine
“If we are highly activated and terrified upon entering the immobility state, we will move out of it in a similar manner. "As they go in, so they come out" is an expression that Army medics use when speaking of injured soldiers.”
“The duration of the immobility response in animals is normally time-limited; they go in and they come out. The human immobility response does not easily resolve itself because the supercharged energy locked in the nervous system is imprisoned by the emotions of fear and terror. The result is that a vicious cycle of fear and immobility takes over, preventing the response from completing naturally.”
“Why don't humans just move into and out of these different responses as naturally as animals do? One reason is that our highly evolved neo-cortex (rational brain) is so complex and powerful that through fear and over-control it can interfere with the subtle restorative instinctual impulses and responses generated by the reptilian core.”
“In post-traumatic anxiety, immobility is maintained primarily from within. The impulse towards intense aggression is so frightening that the traumatized person often turns it inward on themselves rather than allow it external expression. This imploded anger takes the form of anxious depression and the varied symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Like the pigeon that tries frantically to escape, but is recaptured and held prisoner once more, trauma victims beginning to exit immobility are often trapped by their own fear of abrupt activation and their potential for violence. They remain in a vicious cycle of terror, rage, and immobility. They are primed for full-out escape or raging counter-attack, but remain inhibited because of fear of violence to themselves and others.”
“The physiology of the immobilized animal acts as though it were dead. Animals can actually die from "immobility response overdose." The reptilian brain has ultimate control over life and death. If it receives repeated messages that the animal is dead, it may comply.”
“Remember, though it may seem interminably long, the time it takes to move through immobility is relatively short.”
“If we allow ourselves to experience the death-like sensation of being frozen, and at the same time, uncouple the fear that accompanies it, we would be able to move through immobility. Unfortunately, these are not experiences that yield to a "grit your teeth and bear it" approach. The organism takes its cues regarding danger from its internal experience as readily as its external one. As the freezing response develops into terror, rage, or a death experience, we respond emotionally, just as we did when the event happened. The way out of immobility is to experience it gradually, in relative safety,”
“The key to moving through trauma is in uncoupling the immobility (which is normally time-limited) from the fear associated with it.”
Thanks for reading
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Have a pleasant rest of your day.
Really good.