Dr. Heuschrecke: Please have a chair, Mr. Sneak. No, not the couch, please. I am not a psychiatrist.
Sneak: Well, that makes a nice change, at any rate. What are you, then?
H: […] I am a physician of philosophy. I try to cure the philosophical maladies of my patients. You have been sent to me because my psychiatric colleagues have been able to find nothing whatever wrong with you psychologically.
S: But if that is so, why am I in such a depressed state? I thought my condition had been diagnosed by your colleagues as melancholia.
H: That was an early provisional diagnosis, to be sure, but it has proved to be incorrect. You are not a melancholic. You are simply melancholy.
S: Do you mean to say there is nothing seriously wrong with me?
H: I mean to say there is nothing clinically wrong with you at all.
S: Then there is something wrong with me?
H: There is.
S: Tell me what it is, Dr. Heuschrecke, for God’s sake!
H: You are suffering from a logical fallacy. […] They wisely, and I must say surprisingly, concluded that your problem was not psychological but logical, and so they sent you along to me.

— Bernard Suits 1978, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia

Lately, I’ve been struggling with depression and existential dread.

To be specific, I have been grappling with deep, paralyzing fear. I’m scared that my two beautiful rescue dogs will get sick and die. I’m scared that my loving relationship with my beautiful wife will end. I’m scared that my work advocating for farmed animals will be ultimately unsuccessful, and those animals will continue to suffer.

Recently, it occurred to me: I’m anxious and depressed because I care so much. I have so much love for my dogs, my wife, the billions of farmed animals around the world. My despair is a reflection of my care.

In fact, my dogs will definitely die. My relationship with my wife will definitely end, one way or another. My animal advocacy might bear some fruit, but it will definitely fail to end all animal suffering.

The reason is that we are finite creatures living in an incomprehensibly vast and complex universe. To be sure, the combination of technological capabilities, scientific knowledge of the world around us, and participatory political systems has granted us a power inaccessible to all previous generations of humans, at least for those people today with sufficient resources and privilege to exercise that power. I can influence animal welfare legislation in Denmark or Uganda from my desk in Australia.

[E]very moment of a human existence is completely shot through with the fact of what Heidegger calls our ‘finitude’. Our limited time isn’t just one among various things we have to cope with; rather, it’s the thing that defines us, as humans, before we start coping with anything at all. […] In this situation, any decision I make, to do anything at all with my time, is already radically limited.

— Oliver Burkeman 2021, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

But even with this astonishing power, when we consider the age of humanity (let alone Earth), the scale of the universe, the limited scale of our lives — our eighty odd years, if we’re blessed with a long life, out of the 13.8 billion years of the universe so far — is a joke.

We will always fail at almost everything. When you (the reader) and I are both dead and buried, animals will continue to suffer and die at the hands of industrial-scale abuse, children will continue to suffer and die in poverty, loving families will continue to be torn apart by state violence. If I work hard, I might be able to curb some of the excessive violence inflicted on, say, fish farmed in Uganda — but this will come at the expense of helping the hens in China or supporting the queer youth in sub-saharan Africa, let alone adopting rescue pigeons, or improving my goalkeeping skills, or opening my own funeral home, or getting all the tattoos I want.

Even if one adopts the tenets of effective altruism, which I do, and one aims to use their life to do the most good, “the most good” will still only ever be a drop in the ocean.

This is a guarantee, one of the precious few guarantees we get. (Burkeman: “[M]issing out on something – indeed, on almost everything – is basically guaranteed.”)

The world, in essence, is a joke — and moreover, a joke that cannot be solved by you or me.

Under this view, depression is not a symptom of a mood disorder, like major depressive disorder. Rather, depression arises from caring very much, having so much love to give, in a world built for neither care nor love.

And to be honest, I find this highly liberating. I am guaranteed to fail at most of the things I care most about. When I die, whether that is sooner or later, the world will keep on spinning, the universe will continue to expand, political systems will remain imperfect, animals will continue to suffer, people will continue to discriminate. In this realization, I feel a freedom. One can “be an observer”, as my tattoo artist likes to say, because one can only ever observe (as opposed to influence) 99.9999% of reality.

It seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That’s why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.

— Haruki Murakami 2017, Killing Commendatore

I want to pause here to note an important caveat. I’ve written at length about my deep Christian faith. So, doesn’t this nihilism contradict the views at the heart of Christianity — that there is a God, that He is loving and all-powerful, that humans have an important role in the story of the universe?

Yes, there is a tension there. And I think that’s okay — “to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time”, and all that. Kelly M. Kapic’s 2022 book You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News explores this tension in detail, and Kapic comes to the conclusion that limitations and dependency are a gift from God and are good. I explore Kapic’s view in greater depth in my recent blog article here. Moreover, many books of the Bible — Ecclesiastes, Job, and more than a few Psalms — give us a written record of previous generations grappling with this exact tension.

The universe isn’t simply incomprehensibly vast — it is also incomprehensibly complex, as will be obvious to anybody who has studied international relations, or engaged in political science, or read history, or raised a child. At every level of organization — the international community, the nation state, the ecosystem, the family or friendship group, individual mind and physiology, cell biology, chemistry, particle physics — cause and effect rapidly decay into absolute cluelessness.

In the past, I’ve fallen into the trap of searching for a “general theory” that will, once and for all, explain my mental anguish and my neurodivergence and my behavior. Recently, it has dawned on me that there is no general theory — just countless facets of an infinitely complex gemstone (84,000 dharma doors, or ways to enter into the practice, as the Buddhists say). We can chip away at the gemstone and polish individual facets — and indeed, this is a highly worthy task — but there will never be a point where I sort my life out (another hat tip to Burkeman).

In terms of mental health, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a facet. Internal family systems (IFS) therapy is a facet. Antidepressant medication is a facet. Mindfulness meditation is a facet. The upward spiral is a facet (see Alex Korb 2015, The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time). None of them are a general theory, or a single idea that will, say, cure my mental illness. But they’re all worth practicing and pursuing.

For who knows what is good for mortals while they live the few days of their vain life, which they pass like a shadow?

— Ecclesiastes 6:12 NRSVUE

So, how should one live? Hell if I know.

But there are some directions that speak to me:

  • Effective altruism — using empirical evidence to do the most good for sentient beings around the world, while knowing I will fail to actually fix things.
  • Religion — living in relationship with my God and, perhaps just as important, participating in the traditions of my ancestors, while knowing I may never have answers to the biggest questions.
  • Hedonism — not drinking and partying and going wild, but the bread, pot of cheese, and good company of Epicurus.
  • Games — unnecessary contests staged purely for our enjoyment and pleasure, games we play for their own sake (see Steffen Borge 2019, The Philosophy of Football), while knowing I will never become a flawless goalkeeper.
  • Art — similar to games, a practice done for its own sake. Reading lets me enjoy the fruits of other people’s imagination (fiction) or deep expertise and research (non-fiction). For me, art also takes the form of receiving tattoos — a way to represent my stories on my skin, which offers a “refuge of stability” in an age of liquid modernity (Chris William Martin 2018, The Social Semiotics of Tattoos: Skin and Self).

Again, no one of these things is the only important thing. There is no general theory — these are all facets of a gem, doors into a meaningful life.

“… the math doesn’t matter, because you love it, and because it’s our way.”

— Becky Chambers 2018, Record of a Spaceborn Few