I remember when I started this blog it was kind of as a personal improvement-tracking place, though it had a decidedly dark aspect to it that I'm trying to get away from a bit now... speaking of which I might re-do the design and layout stuff if I get a chance to reflect a newer, better headspace.
But anyway, although I've become exactly like my father, I'm completely addicted to making lists now.
If you make lists, you start to realize the potential of your mind as well as its limitations. Everyday, each of comes up with slews of good ideas that just get lost in the noise of the day. There are so many distractions all around us, such an onslaught of information coming at us all the time that it's hard (damn near impossible really) to keep a clear head.
Meditation is an option, but so far I'm terrible at honing that into a real practice that is showing significant benefits for me yet. I simply don't have the discipline for it developed yet, though I'm trying to push myself into a practice. Even doing it once or twice does help, there's a certain stillness that comes to the mind; in fact, feeling angry or frustrated after you've had a quiet meditation feels very profane, and gives you a working sense-memory of the emotional distance needed to detach from those negative emotions in the moment... all good things.
With these lists, every time some jolt of inspiration comes I can codify it so that it's permanently out of the aether. I've noticed the other huge advantages of writing everything down are twofold:
- Once an idea or 'list item' is out of your head, it frees up mental scratch space my working memory; I can completely release my imagination from processing that task. Once it's on paper, it's been accounted for.
- Secondly, the state of my list (or lists) becomes kind of a direct reflection of my mental health at any given moment.
The second one is really huge, although it's not something that's as easily controlled at the first thing. Just because I see my handwriting is sloppy, there's stuff scribbled out, notes in the margins, etc—sure, that's a reflection of how scattered my mind is, but it's not a solution to it.
The solution to that is all the stuff that requires heavier lifting—namely heavy lifting, exercise, diet, meditation, reading good books to keep the brain alive, and the like.
All of this stuff though reminded me of a post I made a while ago about intention. I got to rethinking about that especially after hearing something that my boss Anna David said in a podcast interview semi-recently:
"Depression hates a moving target."
That might be an aphorism to some of you, but to me I'd never mulled the concept over like that. It helps to think of anxiety and depression as snipers in the bush though, to give them a concept that separates them from yourself.
When I was in the pits of depression and anxiety recently (when I was still living on the beach before moving to Los Feliz), I had really bad writer's block as a result. But this was like megaton-level writer's block, not just not knowing what to write.
I was basically disemboweling myself as to why I'd even chosen to write at all. I started launching an inner moral screed against myself for writing, trying to write, asking deeper level questions about the relative value of various career paths; I'd been leaning closer and closer to writing as a selfish, solipsistic pursuit. Obviously that's not a great conclusion to draw when you want to be a writer (or you think you want to be a writer, sometimes those two positions get confused when you're depressed).
So I decided to apply that same logical, deconstructing mind to the problems my depressive mind was posing as to why I shouldn't write. I tore out a piece of paper and started writing it out like a philosophical essay, an exploration of the ethics/pragmatics of writing. I started with all my objections in an itemized list—I think there were about eight distinct arguments in there.
But once it was on paper, I saw that these were points that could be refuted. I only refuted one of them that day in writing, but that was enough to get the ball rolling again
I don't think I still have everything I wrote that day, nor am I particularly interested in "solving out" the whole document, mostly because my deeper self knows the arguments my depressive mind is making are flimsy; I only need one of them to be broken to have fairly deep faith that the others are equally deceptive and false.
As Common once said, "It don't take a whole day to recognize sunshine."
Final thing on intention—I heard someone else talk recently about momentum in kind of an abstract way, as it applied to "taking action." Taking action and "right action" are pretty big concepts in a lot of different pragmatic philosophies and religions like stoicism, Buddhism, existentialism and so on.
But without getting mired in what constitutes right action—that would be a complete folly at this point in my life—I heard someone say it simply recently: "action begets action." Likewise with inaction.
In the pits of depression, there's this tricky slippage of meaning that goes into throwing "taking action" into question. I'm going to briefly try to pin down that philosophical slippage of meaning here, just for anyone who's interested (and for myself, to drive the knife in the fucker's heart once and for all).
While it's unclear how depression gestates in a person (or as an alternative explanation, what other plane of existence it visits us from), what is somewhat clearer are its methods of action on our psyche and spirit.
The first is a questioning of our basic, foundational assumptions. Is life worth living? Should I even "do" anything? Does anybody need to do anything? Are we meant to be here? Does life have meaning?
Each of these questions are definitely meaningful, no reason to throw them out. But what's tricky is that ONE of these questions requires a looooot of philosophical footwork to get a logical grip on. The depressive mind .would rather string them all together to ensnare us. Fortunately for us, it's a paper chain.
Let's go through some of these questions to get an idea of how to get around this stuff; we can use depression's own philosophical stance against it with a little bit of finagling.
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? — This is almost a meaningless question, which is ironic in that it seems to imply that life itself is meaningless (which it may be, but we'll get to that). "Life" is the thing in question here; we're all living it, and note how's it linked in the language we use to talk about it. We live life; "to live" is an action, "life" is just an abstract object.
When we talk about "life" without including that lived aspect, we take ourselves out of it. That's the beginning of the abjection and alienation depression is so fond of.
But more importantly, you simply can't talk about "life" existing WITHOUT it being "lived" by a "liver," so to speak (and I'm not referring to the human organ that processes poison here, though now that seems a particularly apt metaphor for something).
The second philosophical scaffold into oblivion here is "worth." Because "worth" is a value judgment. Is life worth living... compared to what? Not living?
Actually yes, that's right. That's what depression points us toward. But it's ok; if you're reading this, we can get through this in a fairly satisfying way, I think. Anyway—
The tricky "slippage" part of this is kind of its illogic when you look at it, and I choose to use this (or at least frame it mentally) as evidence that depression is not a part of what I consider "me," at all. It's an "inner demon" in the truest sense; it comes from elsewhere. Here's why:
All the information we get to formulate value judgments, information we could use to answer what the "worth" of a lived life, necessarily comes from a lived life. So the question is totally fucking irrelevant. Or rather, to reframe it: maybe life's central worth is the pursuit of the above question. And how do you pursue such a question? You live life, and determine what moments are worthy of... whatever. Remembrance, feeling, joy, whatever gets you off.
But then depression comes at you with the next link in the paper chain to stop you there:
DOES LIFE HAVE MEANING? — Again, this is a tricky re-approach of the last question, and it's a question that the big guys have asked and written about much more intelligently and at length that I'm about to do here (see Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, et al).
This is a question where you can clearly see how depression, the entity, has your mind in the psychic equivalent of an arm bar. It short-circuits us because you can't use your mind to answer a question like that. Or the last one.
Imagine if someone said, "Yes, it's being happy (i.e., serving yourself)." How selfish does that sound to a depressed mind? There's also: "Yes, it's serving others." But what about yourself? How can you serve others when you're miserable? Plus it also seems largely reductive—this seems kind of important, yeah, but its not the whole enchilada.
So we've now tried out the psycho-philosophical positions of "me" and "you" and closed them both out—meaning doesn't inherently reside there. There's the third option of: "Yes, its serving God," which is sure to be the most contentious of all.
God is dead. Especially to the depressive mind. In our modern age, we're tired of hearing about God on a cloud, giving with one hand while He takes with the other. But let's revisit that third option of "serving God" and what that could or does mean.
Keep in mind that what follows here is not a religious argument; it's a linguistic argument. And it's not a linguistic argument for the existence of a god or God, it's more of a linguistic paradox; a black-hole you might be able to pass through into the wonderful world of meaning again.
What does "god" really mean? Even if we don't believe in a god or God, we can take the concept apart as it's widely understood and then try to find some kind of analogue to it in reality. After all, it would be nice if there were truly an all-loving, all-giving God who looks out for us, who feeds us as we feed back into him. But we know it doesn't really work like that. But still, let's look:
God is omnipotent; he can do anything. An analog to that is the concept of "possibility."
God is omniscient; he knows everything. An analog to that is a "force of nature," which is decidedly less abstract than the first one. Think gravity or electricity; they "know" when and where they need to be applied anywhere in the universe, often simultaneously in different places.
God is omnipresent; he is everywhere. No analog needed here—think of "stuff" or "things." "Everything."
When you back-form that, it's starts to look a little less fraught with moral weight and more just a description of the state of affairs we're in. In my view, putting that triumvirate together we get kind of an apt description of consciousness and how it works. But without losing the thread here:
Basically, those who believe life is meaningful tend to believe that there's something essential at the heart of it, at the heart of everything. It's a Platonic viewpoint, and it tends to imply something approximating what we call "god."
If you believe that, cool, just navigate the structure of meaning around that into the sweet spot and you should be good to go in terms of giving your life meaning.
If you don't believe that, you have to not believe that, fully. Most people get lost between the two poles; that's kind of what depression feels like.
"I believe that I have to make my own meaning in life, but if life doesn't have its own inherent meaning, that means life is meaningless, and that means any meaning I make is inherently meaningless."
Here's the thing: logically, yes, that's true. But there's more to life than logic. Where are we getting these assertions from? All we can really conclude from that above statement is that we don't know. We can't be certain life has inherent meaning. From our viewpoint, it seems likely that it doesn't.
What we can be more certain of is what we find meaningful; though it's hard in depression. Depression forces us into essentialism, but essentialism misses all the good things in life.
Honestly, the best stuff to read for those truly, truly mired in this and who won't be convinced of anything else is some existentialist stuff. I find Kierkegaard personally the most relevant, but to each his own. I'll just give my little parable here and call it good:
Think of a sandcastle. When you were a kid, you would make sandcastles. Why? Because sand could be formed into castles, and they looked cool. They offered aesthetic value. They offered personal value, that we had formed something "alive" out of something inert. And we did so with full knowledge that a kid would come step on it. Or that the tide would come in and wash it away.
But the destruction of a sandcastle is a part of the joy of a sandcastle. We only ever got mad if our sandcastles got wrecked while we were still in the middle of making them. That's where true frustration and regret comes from. No kid sits on the shore puzzling over what the point of making a sandcastle is if it's just going to be destroyed; in fact, it's going to be awesome to see what it can withhold when the wave comes, how long it takes to get destroyed and what that looks like. There's still a fascination there that's in balance with the joy of creation; it's a yin-yang thing.
So what are you going to do? The wave comes for all of us, castle or no.
So go make your fucking sandcastle.
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