Everyone’s a Depressive in Quarantine: A Story About Us

Captain Kirk, video conferencing in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

While isolating, Edgar and I have been doing regular video calls with friends for our writers’ group and various gaming groups. Three times a week, I’ve been teaching class over Zoom and holding office hours twice a week. I’ve gotten a pretty good survey of people’s moods I think and, besides Edgar’s insistence that video conferencing technology hasn’t progressed a whit since they were in online high school (class of ‘08!), I’ve come to realize something.

Everyone, even people with supposedly stable moods, is experiencing something that I recognize as a depressive episode.

My read of things is that we’re basically being required to play-act depression. You’re not allowed to leave your house, you’re likely suffering from disturbed sleep patterns, chances are that you’re running out of interesting things to stream, are regressing in your media consumption to what you enjoyed as a child, your grooming might have fallen to the bottom of your to-do list, and you’re probably trying to learn a new skill like baking bread, and it’s most likely not going well.

I present you here with a clip from Parks and Recreation – the show that we’ve regressed to watching, and which hasn’t held up as much as I was hoping it would – in which the character Ben is suffering from depression. On a scale of 1-10, how relatable is this feeling?

So that’s the name of the feeling. A few people may resist this characterization – after all, depression is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, isn’t it?

To which I have to respond: yes, but – it’s chemically instantiated in the way that poverty is instantiated in one’s bank account: that’s the proximate cause, but not the ultimate cause. Ultimately, the issue lies in the fact that you can’t do anything that makes you happy – you can’t see your friends, you can’t do things that make you feel like you have a real effect on the world, you can’t go out in the sunlight – or rain, or gloom, or whatever weather makes you happy – and it leads to depression.

I read the book in January 2019. It has had a profound effect on me.

I wrote a series a while back, called “Fisher’s Ghosts” that looks back on the work of the late critical theorist Mark Fisher on the tenth anniversary of his book Capitalist Realism. In that book he points out that

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation

The explanation right now is that you’re under lockdown. You’re experiencing many of the same constriction of options as a person who is imprisoned.

I would argue that the experience of depression is characterized by a lack of choice. If you have no choice in anything, then you’re just stuck on a ride waiting to get off – and we’ve built a very long and boring ride.

But it’s a mistake to think that depression is synonymous with extreme sadness. I know at least one person whose depression manifested as extreme recklessness. It led him to make choices with no regard for the outcome, because he was psychologically in a place that didn’t allow him to see the outcomes as mattering.

The flip side of depression, of a lack of meaningful choice, is anxiety, which is paralysis in the face of overwhelming choice. You have to pick the answer right now. The world is a great empty page in front of you that you can scrawl any meaning that you wish, but you have to do it right now.

It’s often characterized by obsession with outcomes, just as depression is characterized by ambivalence towards outcomes, but the two can co-occur.

This is it. This is the board that drove a number of people to leave the shop because it was so overwhelming.

My first significant job in college was at a custard shop, and one thing that happened fairly regularly was that people would come in, look at the board, and become paralyzed by indecision: we had done the math once, and there were something like 3 octillion possibilities, and people often came in and short-circuited as soon as they began weighing their options – even though most of the choices would’ve been terrible. No one wanted to order a Peach-Mint Eggnog with Peanut Butter. (Except that one guy, but we don’t talk about him.)

So it’s possible that, if you’re secure enough, you may be experiencing anxiety. I’m going to guess that many secure people have worked their way past that. This is a situation where anxiety quickly becomes a funnel, leading you in to depression: after a while, you realize that the choices don’t matter, and everything flattens out.

And that flat space, that lies beyond the fractal canyons of anxiety, is the country of depression.

The only saving grace we can really offer is that, despite how alone it might make you feel, it’s a well-mapped country. There are roads that lead through it, and they may seem flippant to suggest, but I’m part of the generation that was told that if we eschew avocado toast (which I’m...look, I’m still unclear what avocado toast is,) we could one day soon afford a house, and now we’re living through our third recession.

Oh, it’s just toast with avocado on it. That’s totally the same price as a house. Picture by wikipedia user Jami430 used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It feels like nothing ever gets better, which is another symptom of depression. Just can’t win, can we?

So, you know what? Find things that make you feel happy, and do those as much as you can stomach. Read. Exercise. Watch television. If you’re quarantined with someone, don’t forget physical intimacy.

But I’d recommend that you don’t allow yourself to become passive, either: one thing that’s been helping me, oddly, is working on things in the kitchen. Not just cooking, though. In mid-morning, after breakfast and classes and everything else, I go into the kitchen, I put on a pair of gloves, and I listen to music or podcasts and I do the dishes.

The reason this helps me is that it’s something that at a glance can be said to be done or not. I may be making less money now that I’m down a job. I may be watching too much television or playing too many video games. I may not be able to bring myself to make any substantive progress on any of my writing projects, the things that I supposedly want to spend my life working on.

But at the very least those dishes are done, and I can tell that just by walking through the kitchen.

In the book Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber makes the point that people like to see that their actions have some kind of substantive effect on the world. Even as infants, we knock things over to feel agency in the world. I may come out against there being some kind of essential human nature quite often, but it seems like we’re wired to want to feel that sense of agency.

Or, I don’t know, tend to your own garden. Voltaire got here first. God dammit.

Put a gun to my head and ask me what I suggest, that’s what I would say: keep tabs on the world, sure, get some endorphins and serotonin flowing, yeah, but don’t let the dishes pile up too much. If nothing else, it’s an action you can take that matters right now.

We need to focus on the future, we need to come up with an answer to the question of “what is to be done” but, in the meantime, you should do your best to do the things that matter in the moment.

And maybe, after this is all done, you should think about depression as something that you, too, have experienced a little bit of.

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