The medical community claims the right to identify and define depression, adding another quiver to the convenient container of mental illness, for good reason. But I am going to challenge them a bit.
Created Sick
I challenge the clinical definition and root cause of depression in the same way I challenge the many variants of ADHD, a supposed disease in many cases not caused by some unfortunate DNA predisposition but by the lack of parental attention in the development of children. We shun that responsibility and instead submit to the stated illness as many of us are, after all, descendants of believers in religion, who, according to Christianity’s Original Sin, are created sick and commanded to be well.
In the United States, you can get a hall pass to no longer search for root-cause of undesirable behavior by simply calling it a disease. The notion of being sick is now a socially acceptable norm from which most undesirable behavior is forgiven. Special needs are assigned to those poised to harm themselves, and reduced sentences are awarded to those bound to hurt others. But by all means, multiply. The rest of the world is following in our footsteps.
We make up diseases for anything under the sun so as not to be held responsible for the theory, in the words of Albert Einstein, that determines what can be discovered. Using that excuse, we can sell copious amounts of medicine and services to those who suffer from the supposed disease, leaving us wondering why we pay more for health insurance than any other developed country. Our compounding self-induced malaise gives new meaning to what it means to be a developed country.
Misfit
Many feel depressed and disassociated from society to the point of feeling like an alien, according to a reader I responded to five years ago. Root cause analysis reveals a higher normalization of causation than the medical community can wrap its brain around.
I spent more than twice the ten thousand hours Malcolm Gladwell recommends investigating the workings of our operating systems of humanity, crossing the boundaries of policy, capital, and innovation. I discovered in my research that, in the words of renowned comedian John Cleese, “Nobody really knows what they are talking about.”
Our leaders pretend to know what they are talking about. Without any verifiable knowledge of evolutionary principles to earn leadership status, we give former actors, lawyers, peanut growers, and community organizers the power to develop constructs that violate every conceivable first-principle of nature to which humanity remains beholden until the end of our days.
For example, Einstein’s discovery of relativity adds a whole new dimension to how humanity evaluates and manages itself. Yet we ignored that discovery, and one hundred years later, the round world of human development remains held hostage by a pageantry of flat-world dogmas promulgated by the overlords of our democracy.
None of the current systems of humanity are systems of relativity. In simple terms, we have developed the wrong vector for humanity.
And it shows:
When you understand the impact of the foundational errors we have made, the misfits in society are not the depressed people but the people who designed, fit in, and promulgate that status quo downstream, unwilling to be challenged for the sake of preserving their jobs. To not fit into the world we have created for ourselves is an asset, not a liability, to the renewal of humanity.
The Real Patient
I talk with many people from different walks of life and make them think about the foregone conclusions they built their life around. Without conceit, numerous times, my rant about the current operating systems of humanity and the explanation of what must change has been called the most exciting conversation they have ever had.
The people who fit in and promulgate the dysfunctional constructs depicted above are the ignoramuses who cannot imagine challenging the social constructs our discoveries of nature have proven so fundamentally wrong. Some people storm out when I declare their baby-ish beliefs ugly. They are unwilling or incapable of being challenged and are the ones who should be medically evaluated as sick.
Thankfully, many people respond surprisingly well when triggered to think different.
When I explain the evolutionary fallacies of our current constructs, people begin to question their allegiance to them. For example, they never bothered to question why the sum of human wants solidified in a democracy does not serve human needs. This question should be asked and answered, for it defines how we manage ourselves.
Diving deeper, many admit to not wanting to participate in a hollow and lonely game of uncalibrated selfishness and consumerism that ultimately comes back to haunt them and drowns the renewable excellence of humanity’s future. Yet the quest for survival in a country so proud of its ill-defined freedom forces them to play along, becoming comfortably numb, leading them to question if change is even possible.
Indeed, the so-called freest country in the world, in actuality, is one of the most enslaved. Enslaved to a pageantry of dysfunctional constructs we spread worldwide, incompatible with the first-principles of nature to which humanity is beholden.
Becoming Well
From my observations, depression is caused by the intuitive or intellectual unwillingness to be held hostage by our dysfunctional constructs and not knowing how to escape and become inspired. It is caused by damaging constructs of artificial freedom that systemically suppress humanity’s proximal development into an ever-narrowing and subprime shoe-horn of merit feigning to promote excellence. Simply put, depression is caused by the unwillingness to be suppressed by nonsense.
Depression is independent of age and social status; it stems from the yearning desire that your life ought to have more meaning than to pass the time. You want your life to have more meaning than the temporal suspension of disbelief you experience at a pay-to-play rollercoaster ride at Disney World. A feeling that can only be resolved when correlated to the principles of nature that prove your contributions deserve attention.
We can eradicate depression by implementing humanity’s first-ever theory. A theory based on nature’s first-principles we, in The United States, must first and successfully apply to ourselves. And as the theory widens the standard deviation of merit, more people with different skill sets will be inspired to participate in creating a more renewable future for humanity.
Depression is not a bad thing. To succumb to it is. Depression is not a bug but a feature that lurks in all of us and can easily be converted into a powerful motivator of change we so desperately need to improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy.
We can make it so.
