Anxiety & Depression Are Defense Mechanisms, Not Diseases
Our inherent connection to the ether of the universe is warning us about the path we are on. The powers that be don't want you to warn others about the demise that awaits us.
To follow up on my last post, I would like to expand the discussion about two common mental illnesses that I don’t think are signs something is wrong with you. Our society is sick. If you are healthy in this depraved system of oppression and exploitation, masked in a veneer of meritocracy by those who have rigged the game, then you are the unhealthy one.
It is impossible to read the headlines curated for us by big tech algorithms, whoever your master is (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and not see a myriad of articles on how to cure yourself of anxiety or depression. There are tons of self-help books, seminars, and therapy that attempt to cure you of this scourge of anxiety and depression, not to mention tons of drugs that will numb you as well.
None of these methods can ever truly work. To cure you of something that is a natural warning sign of the imbalance in society and the impending future is impossible. Our bodies and our minds are warning us about the dystopian future that awaits us if we continue down this path.
Both depression and anxiety are categorized as mental illnesses. Plenty of people suffer from an extreme case of these, myself included, and find it difficult to function in society. I don’t think these emotions or perspectives on the world are necessarily faulty. Instead, these feelings of fear about the future (anxiety) or regret about decisions made in the past (depression) are natural defense mechanisms against our winner take all society.
While I recovered at an outpatient facility after a stint locked away in a mental institution (self-committed, as I had attempted suicide), one of the counselors put up an old Buddhist saying on the whiteboard that has stuck with me:
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past, if you are anxious, you are living in the future, if you are happy, you are living in the present.”
Author unknown
While simplistic, as most aphorisms are, it does hold a lot of truth.
Depression is when we take a rearward lens into the past and get stuck on decisions made or not made. We dwell on regret and lose the ability to function in the present.
Anxiety is when we take a forward looking glance into the future and become overwhelmed by the potential storm clouds on the horizon. Fear of the unknown that paralyzes us from action in the present.
What I will attempt to do is explain why I think these emotions are natural, and contrary to what modern therapists say, they are healthy. These emotions become unhealthy when you dwell on them or let them control your actions in the present. Extreme cases should warrant treatment, but I think a vast majority of those labeled as mentally diseased are not.
Society is sick, it is healthy to reject sickness as a default way of life.
In this post I will attempt to give you why anxiety and depression are nothing to be shamed to experience. We have been trained to lie about anything that would make us seem flawed, or less of a perfect being.
Our attempts to deny our insight, due to societal and internal pressures, exacerbate our fears and feed into uncontrollable depression and anxiety. Add onto that, we are categorized as flawed by the collective of humanity if we admit to our trepidations about the path we have taken.
We, as a species, continue to barrel towards our own extinction unabashed.
The reality is that the metrics that have been configured to determine what makes a good citizen in society are the polar opposite of what is healthy for your soul, both spiritually and physically.
Not everyone suffers from depression and anxiety to cope with the ills of modern life. Lots of people simply fill up all their free time and keep themselves as busy as possible to avoid any mental self-reflection, another coping mechanism.
If you are lucky enough to not suffer from any form of depression or anxiety, congratulations. Still, I am sure you know people close to you who suffer from these maladies and could learn a thing or two from this post.
We are all stuck on this rock we call Earth together. The more we communicate what works and what doesn’t work to each other, the better chance we have at righting this ship before we sink into the depths of the sea of history as a footnote.
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Society is Diseased, Not You
Despite what all the high-payed professionals who are the gatekeepers to the good narcotics say, you do not have faulty wiring inside your brain. This is why their attempt to diagnose the cure at an individual level is doomed for failure. The problems are not within individuals, society is structurally deficient.
We homo sapiens have created a world in which we over-consume, destroy, exploit, and ravage ecosystems. In the modern game of Monopoly, we hoard unprecedented amounts of disposable junk. This is modernity: a never-ending pursuit of things to validate to those around you that you are worthy.
Despite what they tell you about how advanced society is, that is a joke. We have fancy technology, but we are less evolved socially than prior iterations of our ancestors. Unless you are Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Bill Gates, your lifestyle has degraded over time not improved.
Access to fancier things does not equate progress, it’s just shinier junk.
Even in feudalism, the economic system that capitalism saved us from, peasants and serfs worked less hours and had more security in addition to greater access for the necessities of food and shelter. Those who ruled used to take care of their vassals, but those days are long gone.
Before the commodification of land, the owners of property had a duty to the public that lived, worked, and traveled through their lands. While there was less likelihood of surpassing your station (you were born and died a peasant), the upper-class elites, lords, that ruled had a duty to those beneath them.
In modern civilized society that duty to take care of the masses has been outsourced to governments. The wealthy rulers no longer have any obligation to those who they rule. Since every single government around the world is beholden to those wealthy rulers, we have experienced an erosion of all communal goods for the last fifty plus years.
Everything has been commodified, including your mental well-being.
Please understand, this is not a pro-communism screed. I am simply pointing out the current disconnect between how society frames itself and our economic reality.
This post is not here to place the blame on one single individual or ideology. All of those who are in power, were in power, or aspire to power have their hands dirty. All of the ills of the United States, or any other country for that matter, cannot be solved by the removal of one political faction or another.
We sold off our future for plastic junk and fancy distractions. This has a psychic toll. Anxiety and depression are symptoms of a societal decay. They are warning signals to the body politic, but we have chosen to ignore them and misdiagnose them as individual anomalies instead of what they are: signs of a greater rot at the core of our way of life.
Both major parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are complicit in this race towards societal collapse.
Reagan may have ushered in the hatred for government, but Carter before him and Clinton after him were lockstep in subservience to corporate power. Privatization and a curbing of communal benefits (parks, libraries, clubs, and other shared resources), commonly referred to as third places, have been eradicated from communal life.
Every aspect of your day has somebody reaching into your pocket for a fee, a toll, or a vig to exist in their fiefdom.
There is nowhere left to go unless you are willing to spend money. If you don’t have money, tough luck. We have set barriers to the basics of existing as a human being, and that has a collective mental toll on the whole of society that we are now grasping with.
If you fall through the cracks, society will erase your presence from daily life. It is tough to see homeless people on the street and not think about how one or two mistakes could put you there as well. Better to ship them off to camps or places on the fringes of society so that the masses don’t have to be confronted with the failures of the system they are beholden to.
We live with a scythe hanging over our head from the moment we become adults until the moment we die, an ever-present need to pay bills just to live and not be abandoned by the zeitgeist. We don’t want to slip through the cracks and be forgotten.
Now, children are left to deal with a foreboding fear about the future before they have even matured and understand what their anxiety derives from. It doesn’t help that we collectively gaslight our children that everything will be fine, when we most definitely aren’t headed in a good direction.
The solution is not to massively drug society. We can’t numb ourselves to the pain of our fellow brethren. Rather, we need to confront the broken system and reform it before it is too late, but those in power have no desire to admit that the system is failing as they benefit from it.
Nobody can save us but ourselves. It will take much more immiseration before the masses coalesce against the powerful. Those who try to sell you revolution delude themselves as much as those who try to tell you that there is nothing structurally wrong with society.
The wheels haven’t come off completely, yet, but we removed all the screws from the wheels on this vehicle and it will only take one small curve to derail us.
Depression is Normal
The clinical definition of depression is depressive disorder. Here is the World Health Organization’s definition:
“During a depressive episode, a person experiences a depressed mood (feeling sad, irritable, empty). They may feel a loss of pleasure or interest in activities.
A depressive episode is different from regular mood fluctuations. They last most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks.”
According to that article, 5% of all adults are depressed. This seems like a real lowball to me, but I believe they make this diagnosis intentionally strict (saying that depressive episodes last at least two weeks) to avoid the reality that most people are not satisfied with modern life.
In our winner takes all system of capitalism, where there are myriads more losers than winners, it is natural for all of us losers to look back at the past and try and pine over a time when we still believed we could be a winner.
Extreme cases of depression lead to suicidal ideation, a fancy way to say you think about killing yourself rather than dealing with the harshness of existence in the modern world. Not everyone who is depressed is suicidal, but everyone who is suicidal is depressed.
For the record, I have suffered from depression my entire life. I have also dealt with suicidal ideation since I was teenager. Not the occasional thought, but almost every day of my life I have contemplated killing myself. Not just in the abstract, but I’ve gone through an extensive thought process on how to accomplish it on a regular basis.
The first urges probably came when I learned how to drive. Many a times I thought about just driving my car into a wall or off a cliff. Once when I was sixteen, I stood at the end of a diving board above our empty community pool and thought about diving head first onto the concrete twelve feet below. Fear of not succeeding and being left paralyzed stopped me, not a desire to live.
At one point, I was clinically diagnosed with severe depression. I thought that I was bipolar and had sought help as my grandfather had suffered from bipolar disorder. My psychologist told me that I was definitely not bipolar, but due to how severe my depression was, when I was in a normal mood it felt like a manic episode.
While that seems horrible, it was actually an epiphany for me. It all made sense from that moment on. Needless to say, less than two years later I left the United States and went on a journey overseas to find myself or kill myself, whichever came first.
Thankfully, I found myself and righted my ship. It wasn’t medication that saved me, but rather I found my purpose. What that purpose is, well that is my secret.
Without purpose we drift through life a listless vessel. Finding purpose is the hardest thing to do in a world where the only thing you get venerated for is wealth. But, if you want to endure the hardships of life you need to find your purpose, a purpose, or a reason to push through the morass of life.
I am not alone in my struggle with depression. I think a larger percentage of people deal with depression than the clinicians say. Ignoring the problem is also a natural phenomenon. It is survival 101.
Most people know that you can’t admit you have a weakness or fault in modern society. If you are flawed, specifically stamped as such by doctors, it gives everyone else leverage over you in this winner takes all system.
Once you are diagnosed with any mental illness, you are shunned by potential employers, friends, and social circles. Keeping your pain a secret is still the best path to try and secure a comfortable position in the hierarchy.
Still, don’t delude yourself that being successful or rich will lead to happiness.
My entire life I did what many people do to deal with the sadness, I self-medicated. Marijuana was my drug of choice, but I’ve tried most of them. Irony is that I smoked weed my whole life while it was illegal and now that it is legal I do not consume it anymore.
I also consumed alcohol on a regular basis, which only contributed more to my depression. If you are depressed, I highly recommend you don’t binge drink like I did. It only exacerbates things as it is a depressant.
Psychedelics probably were the only drugs that that were long term therapeutic, specifically psilocybin and LSD. I would suggest everyone try magic mushrooms and nobody try LSD. I saw plenty of other people unable to deal with the darkness inside themselves that acid unveils. Magic mushrooms, on the other hand, can help connect you to the world around us.
I was born in the darkness and live best surrounded by it. Most people are afraid of their inner demons, while my inner demons are afraid of me. The darkness is a scary place, so don’t try and dabble with the nightmarish monsters I call my compatriots.
Antidepressants didn’t work for me. I had already found a better illegal alternative in pot in high school. All they ever did was make me not feel anything. Now it appears that more research is disproving benzodiazepines as an effective treatment for depression.
Even though we have known since 2012 that antidepressants (SSRI’s) are not effective treatments for depression, they are still the go to method doctors prescribe. If they work for you, great, but meditation could also work (and it is free).
This is my favorite line from the NHS website about SSRI’s, the most common form of antidepressants.
“It's not known exactly how antidepressants work.”
Think about that for a minute. Doctors had no idea how or why (or if) the drugs that they have prescribed for depression since the 1970’s work. That is pure insanity. Take this drug, it will make you feel better, hopefully, how or why I don’t know. The company that made this pill told me, and I believe them.
I don’t want you to lose trust in doctors. Modern science performs miracles on a daily basis. This fact is only used to further my point that they are trying to diagnose a structural problem in society on an individual basis, and they don’t know how to accomplish that properly.
Substances that could actually treat depression are illegal (MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine for example). Doctors can’t prescribe what could really help you because we have made those drugs illegal.
Why are those drugs illegal? My assumption is that they make people feel more for the collective than the individual. Anything that breaks the atomization and isolation of consumerist capitalism is not allowed. Drugs that open our minds to how out of step we are as a species are too dangerous for those in charge. They want us to keep our heads down and grind the gears of the machine designed to chew us up and spit us out when it is done with us so that they can lap up the luxury we provide for them.
The funniest thing is that the elites, the millionaires, the class rulers are the ones who suffer from depression and anxiety the most. The more they have, the more they want. The true disease is money hoarding, but we have extolled that as a virtue and not a vice. They have it all, but yet they still don’t feel at peace.
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul.”
Mark 8:36 (King James Version)
That’s right, I just put a Bible verse in this post. Despite my hatred of modern Christianity, there are still some truths in the scriptures buried in a pack of lies designed to keep the masses subservient to the elites.
While that verse was meant to make poor people be happy in their plight, it actually applies to those who want for nothing.
The things you own will eventually own you.
You can’t fix a natural response to a sick society. Depression is a warning sign to the body politic that we’ve detoured off of the right path at some time in the past. It is a way to try and course correct. Those who pretend that things are only getting better are lying to you and themselves.
Depression is not an individual failing. It is a way to cope with the false promises of consumerism and the hierarchical structures of society. Those who suffer from it are not flawed or broken no more than the low fuel warning on your car is at fault for the engine failing when it runs out of gas. It tried to warn you, that is all.
Those who are depressed know how bad things are. At least they are honest, no matter how painful that may be.
The only way to not let depression take over you is to stay afloat. Think of it as riding a wave in the ocean. While in your depression, you are at the bottom of the swell. The only thing you need to do is keep yourself on top of the water. Don’t let the ocean bury you. Tread water, keep breathing what little air you can gasp for, and let the wave pull you back up when it is time.
Survive one day. That is all you can do. The next day will bring different obstacles. Tackle them one at a time as they come at you.
But don’t forget to breathe when you get a chance, as this ocean we live in is tumultuous.
Anxiety is Sensing the Future
So while fewer people suffer from depression, I would posit that the vast majority of people out there suffer from some anxiety or another. It is impossible to live in the modern world and not feel anxious about something in the future.
What if I lose my job? What if my car breaks down? Will my relationship end and I end up alone? Will the world become inhabitable for humans? If I get sick, will I be able to pay the bills? Will this building collapse on me? What if…
On and on the what if’s can pile up, some more benign than others. In the end, the fear of negative events happening to us in the future is the crux of anxiety. Some anxiety is a natural survival mechanism, such as being cautious about a stick on the ground being a snake, and some is due to a society that has made life precarious for the vast majority.
I will completely ignore the survival anxiety, such as being afraid to walk out into the hot desert without water, as that is unambiguously healthy and not part of the clinical diagnosis of anxiety disorder.
In fact, the American Psychiatric Association has a very good opening paragraph in their definition of anxiety disorders.
“Anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. Mild levels of anxiety can be beneficial in some situations. It can alert us to dangers and help us prepare and pay attention. Anxiety disorders differ from normal feelings of nervousness or anxiousness and involve excessive fear or anxiety. Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental disorders. They affect nearly 30% of adults at some point in their lives.”
I cut out the end of the paragraph that talks about treatment. Everything is a commodity being sold to you, even your mental illnesses, and everyone wants to find an angle to make a buck off of you. The APA wants to sell you drugs or psychiatrists who get paid to talk to you, a noble commodity in a sea of predatory consumerism.
Most people who suffer from anxiety never have a full blown panic attack or get diagnosed with a mental illness, but that doesn’t make any sort of acute anxiety less dangerous. Be grateful if you haven’t experienced a panic attack. I had one in my life and it started my descent away from civilized society.
If you are still reading, I might as well do a small digression into a personal anecdote. Looking back on how everything played out to get me where I am today, that panic attack that I had after I got into an argument with my boss precipitated my downfall and eventual awakening.
I went to the hospital as I had lost control of my breathing and emotions. My heart was beating at a dangerous rate, I was hyperventilating, and I began crying and laughing uncontrollably for a few minutes. Once the paramedics arrived and put me into the back of the ambulance, I calmed down before they even put whatever tranquilizer they used into my veins.
What struck me the most about my panic attack was a complete loss of control. I have always had a temper, but it always felt like there was a modicum of control where I knew what lines I wanted to cross and was able to stop myself before things got too far out of hand.
A panic attack is not only physically debilitating, but it is also mentally frightening.
I tried to patch things up at my work and made the mistake of being honest with them. Without going into details, due to my settlement including a NDA (non-disclosure agreement), I never worked for them again and haven’t held a corporate job since.
My faith in the systemic structures of society were shattered by my panic attack.
Don’t get me wrong, I was always an outsider and a rebel, but that incident soured me on any belief that the ills of the world can be rectified. Call me a cynic, a doomer, or a pessimist all you like, but I consider myself a realist.
Less than three years after my panic attack I found myself selling everything I owned and leaving the United States. My last post explains that in more detail, go read it if you haven’t already.
Needless to say, anxiety took a toll on me and I lost everything that I’d worked towards for my entire adult life due to it. I lost my job, I lost my relationship, and I lost what little hope I had in a prosperous future.
While those times were tough, it woke me from my slumber. I stopped going through the motions. No longer would I try and fit in a broken society. No longer would I accept that I was the one who was sick and that everyone else who just takes the abuse were the healthy ones.
You are not diseased for having fear or anxiety about the future. The future we are headed towards as human beings is absolute disaster on unimaginable levels. Mad Max, 1984, and A Brave New World are optimistic visions of the future that we are headed towards.
If you are feeling a little anxious about the future, specifically the myriad of possible bad outcomes that could afflict you, that is not an illness. Rather, is a healthy reaction to the reality that most of us exist in.
Perhaps, you have a psychic connection to the future. I am of the firm belief that people are smarter than we give them credit for, and that includes emotional and spiritual intelligence. Believe your gut, because you have a greater connection to the web of existence than you understand.
Part of what makes our society sick is a worship of the opinions or beliefs of a select handful. This doesn’t mean that the crazy conspiracy theorists are correct, but it also doesn’t mean you should discount everyone else’s fears because they aren’t accredited properly.
Nuance has been lost to a tribal mentality, and the powers that be use that against all of us. Fear of being ostracized, victimized, and abandoned by the machine keeps us all in line in one form or another.
Naturally, this would lead us to have some anxiety and fear about what might befall us. You can follow the rules, do everything by the book, and still end up discarded as a deplorable to be ignored and forgotten.
Nobody wants to be forgotten, but our society is designed to snuff out the memory of the vast majority of us.
You are not damaged because you are worried that a car accident could ruin everything. I had one shouting match with my boss over some stupid “why didn’t you fill out the TPS report” type of work argument and my entire life changed.
We are not as secure in our comfortable lifestyles that the media and society likes to portray. Things are far more precarious than those who lord over us would ever admit, as that would only expose their incompetence.
Anxiety in a dying empire, on a dying planet, with a multitude of black swans waiting to strike is not sick, it is self-preservation. You are not flawed for sensing the calamities that await us in the future.
Don’t let your fear overtake you, but don’t let the naysayers convince you that there is nothing to worry about. There is less to not worry about in reality.
Anxiety can be useful to keep you alive, but it also can be debilitating. Use your fear as a tool to prepare you, but don’t let fear consume you.
Be prepared, but don’t be afraid.
Conclusions
We are in the Kali Yuga. We are not in an age on enlightenment. As a society, we try to pretend that a few snazzy gadgets, like the smart phone you are probably reading this on, are a sign of our advanced maturation as a species.
Scientific and technological advancement does not equal evolution. Shiny things distract us from the miserable conditions subjected upon us by the those who rule us. We are not in a new renaissance, we are in a new dark ages.
These breakthroughs in tech have not made our lives easier or less stressful, but rather more burdensome. They have made the world a non-stop surveillance state, they have forced us to work longer hours, and they have given us more things to keep track of to survive in society.
Technology has not freed us, it has given us invisible chains that enslaved us with our buy-in. We checked the box and agreed to the terms and services of our own servitude. They claim we are complicit and happy with the state of societal decay, but did we really have a choice or were we led to our individualized cells unknowingly?
Feeling anxiety about the near to long-term future or depression about how things were better before is not unhealthy. It is our prescience warning us that if we follow the twisted dictates of societal norms and go along with this insanity that we will not survive.
We are collectively walking our species of homo sapiens into extinction. Furthermore, we are being gaslit about what is happening in front of our own eyes. We are told to ignore reality and just put our faith in the corrupt leaders who brought us here to save us. Absolute insanity.
If you don’t feel anxious about the future, you are in a daze. Things are falling apart all around us. We have ignored maintenance of society for decades to line the pockets of a wealthy minority, and the problems are only starting to rear their ugly head.
Things are about to get a lot worse in the second half of this decade, the 2020’s. Mark my words, you will look back in five years (if you are still alive) and pine for the good old innocent times of 2024.
Don’t let society gaslight you into thinking that you are unhealthy for having some anxiety about the future or depressed wishing for the good old days. The future looks bleak. Anxiety is a form of prescient foresight. Depression is defense mechanism.
Don’t let the atheist hatred of anything more than mathematical formulas dilute your connection to the oneness of the universe.
Time is not a straight line simply because we experience it that way. The past and the future coexist with us, albeit in an awkward way. How to explain that is not something that any human mind can fathom let alone distill into layman’s terminology.
True Detective said it poetically:
“Time is a flat circle.”
Everything is cyclical, and the more you study history the more you will realize that we have been here before as a species. We will be here again, but we are not living in utopian times, we are living in dystopian times.
In the end, we all die alone. That’s pretty depressing and anxiety inducing.