Despondency is the crabgrass of the soul. It chokes out joy, generative activity, hope. If you want to get rid of crabgrass you need to dig down deep enough to tear it up by the roots. The conviction of our own ineptitude is one of despondency’s observable roots. Its basis is internal to the individual and grounded in the accumulation of the personal experience of the self. (See Despondency as Crabgrass: Fortitude II) Another of despondency’s roots stemming from the internal and grounded in the external is the belief that there is nothing of value to accomplish in the world. Or more precisely, there isn’t anything of value that I, the individual, can personally accomplish in the world. Why would we believe this? Because we alternately cower under task master society’s whip and fall asleep in its seductive arms.
Nowadays we work harder than medieval peasants ever did. Sometimes we get tired, very tired. Sometimes we look at what we do, look at what society expects us to do, and we find ourselves saying, “What’s the point?” Resentful, but resigned to our captivity, phrases like “the rat race” and “the daily grind” and “that’s just the way it is” are flung about like so much excrement by the monkeys in the zoo. With so much of our time and energy being spent on “living to work rather than working to live” who can devote himself to worthwhile activity?
When our legislators, captains of industry, and educators call children “our most precious resource“, and research studies bemoan the billions of dollars lost in economic output due to mental illness, it is hard to ignore the fact that modern society is built on the theory of individual as economic cog. To ameliorate the sting of our lose of personal sovereignty, society encourages us to accept economic viability as the standard for judging what is worthwhile. The measure of success becomes tangible wealth. Those of us securely ensconced in Western cultures have been lapping up this cream like fat tabbies and have been encouraged to do so by a consumption driven economy. The problem with being the comfortable tabby is that it’s hard to get off the couch and do what’s actually in our nature to do: chase mice.
Sometimes worthwhile things seem too hard. That which is worthwhile often entails risk or hardship or sacrifice of a different sort than that which we suffer at the hands of society and its demands for conformity to its economic will. The worthwhile suffers by the comparison. If the Sisyphusian life we lead is unpleasant or demeaning, the wounds to our spirit are salved by creature comforts or ego inflating, if fleeting, accolades. Pursuing the worthwhile seldom results in such seductive rewards. Society oils each economic cog just enough for the machinery of society to trundle along. And as a result, because we’re too busy being busy, too busy being distracted by comfort and amusement, the worthwhile falls by the wayside, sacrificed along with our dignity and generative capabilities.
Even if we do manage against all odds to engage in something that has a value beyond the satisfaction of our own senses or economic outcomes, we often find that the hoops we have to jump through, to get done what we know is right to do, make us wonder if it’s worth it. This defeatist thought is often reinforced by tales of juggernaut society’s crushing victory over and the maligning of anyone not towing the party line. That image itself, evocative of the mules who plodded their way along, pulling the barges along the Erie Canal, says it all.
Too busy, too comfy, too distracted, too small. We can’t because society tells us so. Our despondency drags at our heels, and we become heavier step by step, until, finally, we falter completely. No mammoth could ever escape the La Brea tar pit of our society’s expectations and enticements. Well, all right then, don’t be a mammoth. Hmmm … but how?
Next time, extricating ourselves from despondency’s ooze, and whence fortitude?
(PS. Keep your chin up! There is a path out of this labyrinth. Surely you have some glimmer of hope, some reserve of fortitude left!)
Magdalen
