Coming Up For Air: finding a way through depression in the modern world

Depression is something I’ve struggled with since I was six. It’s still not easy to admit that especially in a public forum. I may talk a big game about vulnerability but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared of writing so openly about it. Even though there’s less stigma now, I still have reservations about how I might be judged or perceived. If you skim through this blog, you can find glimpses of things I’ve dealt with. One day I may go into more detail there, but let’s just say I grew up in a pretty bleak environment. Trauma has become a buzzword, but for lack of a better word that is what I dealt with day in and day out. Love, fun, meaning, and purpose all felt out of reach. That despair took over my whole experience, corrupting even the good parts of life. Being that close to the edge every day takes a toll over time, it’s hard for me to remember much beyond that emptiness. Somehow though in that blur of sadness and survival, I excelled in school. It wasn’t my favorite thing, you can read my piece on the education system to understand how I feel about it, but it gave me options. It allowed me to get out of my environment.  

In College, I leaned into the academic experience further because it was the only path forward. By just looking at the exterior, you’d have no idea what I had dealt with and was dealing with on the inside. I was a student leader and the top of my classes. My environment for the most part had drastically improved, and a future was materializing. Yet, I still felt empty. That didn’t register as depression because the lows were nowhere near what I had experienced in the past. I had yet to experience real happiness, so I didn’t know what was missing. The past was so painful for me that I tried to separate myself from it. I thought I could just achieve my way to happiness and outrun all that pain. This led to diving deep into the “hustle culture” world, where I tried to absorb all of these bullshit lessons on how to “succeed”. Which if you know me, stands against almost everything I believe and write about now. Back then though, I was vulnerable and thought that what I had gone through made me weak. So I gravitated to things like stoicism, trying to push my emotions and the past aside. Luckily, that wasn’t all I did. Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, and popular psychology books were also huge influences that helped me find some peace. I was at least able to gain some emotional intelligence, but I was still removed from what I was going through. Everything I was doing was just a bandaid. I wasn’t working on healing my pain and the roots of it, which caused more pain and missing out on life. Outside of my success at school and work, I didn’t have any energy left to pursue anything else. In a lot of ways, that success was a crutch for me to avoid the other parts of my life.  Eventually, those crutches would disappear with the pandemic, and I couldn’t avoid myself anymore. Like many, I struggled early on but then I came across a book. That book, “The Hilarious World of Depression”, opened my eyes to the fact that I was still dealing with depression and needed to do something about it. 

“The Hilarious World of Depression” started me on a journey I’ll be forever grateful for. In the past four years, I’ve done an incredible amount of work, both on my own and with the help of others, to heal. It hasn’t been easy but I’m happy to say that I’m in a good place and have been for a while. When I first started Breakdowns & Breakdowns, I thought that journey would be something I talked about more. The whole concept of Breakdowns & Breakthroughs came from that journey of doing the work and healing. As I started writing though I found my stride in covering a broad range of topics and themes which I found more interesting and relevant than my own story. I left the name unchanged even though the focus changed because it meant so much to me. It’s a reminder of how far I’ve come.

When you deal with depression you need those reminders. Depression feeds on itself making you not only believe that you’re stuck but there’s no way out. It’s like drowning, where the more water you take in, the harder it is to get air. There’s an old saying about how life is the color you dye it. When you’re stuck underwater you don’t have a choice in color, that melancholy dyes everything. Like I said I’m in a good place now but from time to time I still notice those colors on the fringes. Even if we’ve done all the work, that doesn’t mean we’re immune. That’s why we need reminders that it’s possible to make it out. We also need to understand depression so that we can help ourselves or others when it rears its head in our lives. This was an incredibly long intro but I wanted to write a piece looking at depression and as I was writing it I realized I couldn’t act like a removed observer. This is a personal subject for me and I needed to add my story to the mix. It’s tough but the point of this blog is about navigating the human condition in the modern world, and depression is an undeniable part of the human condition.

The first thing to know about depression is that it’s isolating. It has a way of cutting you off from the people you care about, preventing their warmth and support from reaching you. When you're in the midst of depression the world feels so dark that their words feel empty. It’s a terrible place to be where you can’t accept that you’re not alone. This causes you to retreat even further, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of loneliness. Unfortunately, this is made worse by the fact that the world has only become more isolated in recent years. Everyone is trapped in one sense or another in their own digital world. For those suffering from depression, it can lock them further into a solitary existence. Social media and other attention-seeking apps may distract from the pain but also prevent people from doing the work. When I was a teenager I did exactly that. I didn’t know how to deal with what I was going through or change my circumstances so I tried to lose myself in distractions. Even though phones are meant to offer communication it’s become easier than ever to block others out. It’s also harder to notice when others are suffering if we’re all buried in our phones. I don’t intend to be fatalistic here. We can’t give up on people who are stuck behind these walls of negativity, sadness, and despair. If we keep trying, there’s a chance we can reach them when a crack opens up. Just because things are harder now doesn’t mean it’s impossible to help others or ourselves to heal. We do need to know though, that all of this progress does have a downside, especially for those struggling. 

Our culture’s trend toward digital isolation also leaves all of us vulnerable. Living our lives solely on our phones makes all of us more prone to depression because we’re not connecting with others in the same way we once did. We’re biologically attuned to being social. Without those social bonds, we can’t live happy and healthy lives. Being social means a lot more than just liking a post, it means having meaningful connections with people we care about. If we don’t have meaningful connections then it’s easy to feel despair about facing all the problems in life alone. Even if things are going well, it doesn’t mean much if you don’t have anyone to share it with. I’ve written before about the loneliness epidemic in America, and it’s no surprise that this coincides with a rise in depression. Now, it’s true that we need to find love and meaning within ourselves. More people would be better off if they learned to spend time alone and explore their inner lives. We not only need to do that to find out what it is we want out of life but also to heal from things like depression. Healing though, also requires meaningful relationships, and so does living a good life. The Harvard study on happiness is one of the most famous studies looking at what it means to live a happy and healthy life. It follows people throughout their entire lives to see what leads to the best outcomes. Relationships and meaningful connections are the number one thing that makes people healthy and happy. Without those, people become depressed and don’t live the lives they want. So, to combat depression, we need to make sure that people make the time to cultivate relationships and connections. 

We’re also losing meaning beyond our connections with others. The world today can feel quite empty, and a lot of depression stems from that emptiness. Again, we live most of our lives on digital devices scrolling away our time. It’d be one thing if that time was spent connecting with people or making art, but we’re not. We’re spending that time on apps designed to steal our time and attention. The only thing that feels good about that is a fleeting artificially engineered dopamine hit. To feel fulfilled and joyful, we need robust experiences out in the world. We lost those during the pandemic, leading to even the most well-adjusted people struggling with mental health challenges. It was even worse for those who were already dealing with depression. As more of our time was spent staring at pieces of glass and metal, our lived experience became abstracted behind the screens. Joy is hard to find when that’s all your days consist of. This is why I think travel has become so popular in the post-pandemic era. We’re all seeking new experiences where we can get away from the emptiness. Not all of us can travel though, and most of us who can can’t do it frequently. So we need to find other experiences that make life feel fulfilling instead of draining and depressive. The need for real experiences is even more dire considering that many of our careers lack meaning too. When you don’t feel like what you do for a living means anything it also drains you. Without meaning in our lives it can feel like there is no bigger picture. It feels like that emptiness is all there is and we’re just moving from one pointless activity to the next. There’s a paradox here because we shouldn’t have to produce anything or do anything to make them meaningful. Life itself is meaningful, but that’s why wasting it away on our screens can make it so depressing. There’s so much beauty out there and we’ve traded it away for tapping away on our devices. 

Dealing with depression is one of the hardest things there is, and the modern world isn’t making it any easier. Aside from the influences of technology, the state of the world isn’t helping matters. Things are rough right now for people and we’re all just trying to make it through. We can’t fix the world’s problems or change how it works. There is hope though. Hope that we can make our own lives better. I know how depression works. It denies you hope but that doesn’t mean hope doesn’t exist. People have spent a lot of time designing tools and practices to help people with depression. Whether it’s support groups, mental health apps, therapists, meditation, journaling, or countless other methods, it’s worth trying something. It won’t always be perfect, but trying makes a difference. We’re also all dealing with different shit. I’m not under the illusion that all depression is the same. Some people have work problems, others have family, while some just generally feel sad all the time. Tools and treatments can’t fix those circumstances. I wish they could. What they can do though is change how you view your circumstances and how you approach them. Tools can teach you how to swim. It just takes some experimenting to see what works for you. I understand that some of the most effective ones like therapy aren’t affordable or realistic for many people. Again, that’s something I wish I could change. Still though just talking to someone can make a difference. I spent far too long not directly addressing my issues and tip-toeing around them. All that did was keep me stuck. So please just ask someone for help. 

One of the worst things about depression is that it makes you feel lost. Lost inside yourself and lost in the world. There’s no distinction between you and your suffering. Without any boundaries, that suffering is overwhelming. I don’t blame anyone for feeling like there’s nothing they can do about it. The only thing I can offer is how I found space between the emptiness and despair. This is annoyingly cliche, I know, but I had to find myself. That process wasn’t easy. I tried everything in the book, including three different therapists. At times I felt even more lost than I already did. I realized that the core of finding yourself is just figuring out what it is you like in life and who you like. Suffering and the modern world can take that from us. We’re surrounded not just by depression but all of these digital distractions. Our inner world gets flooded by feelings of despair and distracted by doom scrolling. By exploring both the outer world and our inner world, we can build up what we’ve been missing. We can find experiences, hobbies, and connections that can bring back the light that depression robs from us. I can say all of that but know that I’m not perfect. I’m in a great place in my life but still struggle with that feeling of being lost at times. When you know what happiness feels like that lost feeling hits harder because you know what you’re missing. We may always deal with it, but that doesn’t mean it has to control our lives. I worked too hard for that. All of us who have dealt with depression have. Just remember that it’s never too late to come up for air.