So this one will be different. Different, because I won’t tell you fairy tales of mainstream common sense. I will start with those, though – because we need to begin somewhere.
So the common story goes like this: Depression is a malfunction of your brain. An imbalance of neurotransmitters.
If you have ever in your life been taking antidepressants, I hope you at least read the information and directions for use coming with the product. There you will have noticed that aforementioned idea of depression being an imbalance is an unproven theory. It’s being supposed to be the case.
Now, I have been taking drugs a lot in my life, like shrooms, metamphetamin, varieties of cannabis, tried cocaine once but didn’t like it, and some other rather harmless stuff – and alcohol being the hardest drug so far, of course.
So I know for a fact that chemicals do affect your brain and the working of your brain. This is true. But: depressions are problematic because of other reasons.
If you’re depressed, your work/life balance will be somewhat affected. Maybe you won’t work at all – and that’s bad for capitalism and our society. So it’s mandatory that you resume working again, so that others may live off your useless efforts to make ends meet.
I said that other places already, so I won’t repeat myself unnecessarily. What I want to talk about today is what I believe to be the paramount reasons for depression.
I already became depressed when I was about thirteen years of age. I do believe, that I might have been genetically predisposed to get this. Also, when I was in my twenties I was diagnosed with an EEG typical for people asleep – so maybe my brain works a little more differently than other peoples brains.
But what would depress me, was foremost school, my family, being lonely and a general lack of control in my life – btw. apart from tobacco and alcohol with which I would start when I was 15/16, I wouldn’t use other drugs before the age of nineteen. I say this, because often times we depressed are being accused of being responsible for our depressions. My depressions don’t derive from drug use – I already had them before.
So what I want to do in this article is to discuss my idea, that depressions do not necessarily come from within, but rather from outside.
I really had a hard time in school, a lot of pressure and I would be bullied, simply because I was different, got beaten up and harassed, I was rather haggard and tiny, was the only atheist, metal head and goth around.
My family was very fucked up already when I was a child, a lot of violence there, screaming at each other, mind games – in fact a lot of adverse childhood experiences – I have never been raped, but that’s pretty much the only thing I lack to score 100%. And if you have never heard of adverse childhood experiences: they cost you lifetime.
Of course, not all of my childhood would have been toxic. In fact, I still believe my childhood until the age of thirteen had been rather nice, I had a great latency time, for example. But I would also be sick a lot, I had a lot of allergies, respiratory problems and pretty much all of those childhood diseases. I felt like dying a lot as a child.
I was very sensitive and craved harmony, but that would degrade over the years. I mean, even the most harmless Disney-movies would scare me to death, like the last unicorn ffs.
To draw an intermediate conclusion I’d suppose that both your genes, the basic program of your body shape your mind and your brain, but also what you experience in life.
So that’s that – and all of this would worsen the older I grew. I was losing a lot, I’m a misfit and a lot of shit happened to me in life. But I don’t want to talk about this, right now. What I want to do instead is make you depressed. Because, to prove my theory I have to do this. What I want to do, is to talk about what depressed me most as of the recent years. The good thing is, it’s sheer pessimism, so everybody can relate to this. If it won’t depress you, then I just don’t know what’s wrong with you.
Because actually, I believe this world is utterly depressing.
The most horrible thing ever for example is climate change. I must confess, that until 2018 I wasn’t thinking about this an awful lot, and I was terribly misinformed. I was thinking, for a long time that climate change would be a problem that could be solved, if we put enough effort into this, according to the ozone problem — that we actually solved. Plus, I was so naïve, I really didn’t think about the lies of our politicians very much. It had been pretty easy to not think about all of this. You know, there was Kyoto, later the Paris Accord. In 2012, when in New Zealand, of all places in the world and receiving the total absurdity of the fact me traveling there – I read Al Gore’s “an inconvenient truth”. It’s a bad book, because it’s way too optimistic, feeding you the idea, that indeed, all we had to do was to make a change to our carbon emissions and the problem would be solved. If the kernel of conspiracy theories is the reduction of complex problems to easy solutions – then you might as well call this a stupid notion.
Dating as far back as to the nineties, in school, we were told that a shift to a greener society was on the way. A lot of solar parks were built, in Germany we had a lot of solar tech enterprises, wind parks would be built – hell, when I was in California in 1999, I clearly remember those huge wind parks all over the hills. Our automobile industry would advertise the idea of hydrogen run cars and our arms industry would even build submarines operating on hydrogen fuel cells, being exported all over the world. In 2010 or so Merkel would announce one million e-cars on German Autobahns in 2020, a mantra she would repeat over and over again. It’s twenty twenty now, and only some ten thousands of them actually are on the road.
As I said, it was until a certain point easy to believe all the lies. To me, that point came in 2018 with IPCC’s SR18. Until then I would fly to Norway once each year for a black metal festival, this year I wanted to check out another that would have been in the end of october. Flight had been booked, super cheap, b’n’b and rail tickets. Then I read the SR18 in October and got sober. I knew that this report had been forged by politicians so it would lose a lot of its momentum – still, it’s a horrifying report. Don’t read it, if you want to stay sane. It came up in the media circus, and there it would also vastly be misinterpreted, like, yeah, it’s kinda bad news, right, but we still can do something. I was flabbergasted by this. Second thing happening and leading to me not flying to Norway that year, was a serious flooding event taking place on the very railroad I had to take. I read norwegian news, right. So although the NSB would claim that everything was alright with the route, I wouldn’t take the risk. So this is an actual example for mental depression being transmuted into economic depression. I wouldn’t spend money on my way there and back or in Norway.
This makes my last flight in 2017, I haven’t been taking a metalbird since then. I used to have a car and a driver’s license for 1.5 years in the early 2000s, lost both, but wouldn’t even try to get either of those back. I had been flying around a lot in my life to compensate the fact that I didn’t own a car, so…
I don’t have children. I am flexitarian, eating as little meat as possible, fasting a lot, but still I know this won’t suffice. Because, to be honest – the truth is that we’re all fucked. Everybody who lives in this world right now and is below 70 years of age, is.
Because you know what? Nothing has ever improved. In fact, the climate situation is worsening from decade to decade. Exponentially. Right now, we’re at 417 ppm Co2. That is w/o all the other relevant gases, including water vapor. So what will happen, is in a best case scenario, we’ll be at 440 ppm by 2030. I’d suppose we’ll be at 450. Now the magic number to kill most of life on this planet is 1000 ppm Co2 equivalent. Since methane and N2o, as well as halogenated hydrocarbons and lots of other climate active gases that we are just discovering now are on the increase, too — exponentially, I suppose we will have broken the mark of 1000ppm Co2 equivalent by 2050. Fuck all these 2100-events….
Remember our goal to become carbon neutral by 2050? It‘s just bullshit. Actually Corona-times have shown how insignificant global fossile fuel based transport is – compared to the overall emissions from the energy providers or the insatiable thirst for electricity of everything attached to the internet or supercomputers, f.e.. Already we are way past 1,5 degrees celsius of warming, simply because the bottom line, which was in 1750 when doing the talks and diners in Paris in 2015, have been shifted to 1850-1900. So, we were back at one degree in 2018. That‘s how you do it. Already we are facing serious consequences of our past emissions. They will worsen. But, that‘s no problem, right? I mean we can suck all those gases out of the atmosphere, right? What do you think what kind of infrastructure we‘d need to achieve this, to suck out in decades, what took us centuries to emit? Building this infrastructure alone is an impossibility — and even if it was possible, it would have consequences of its own.
There are ideas of shading the planet off the sunlight. This will happen, I, for as long as we have the economical and intellectual infrastructure to do this, honestly believe that some nut job politician or billionaire will pull this off, as soon as the actual real life consequences start to become really scary and shit hits the fan. How will this affect the global climate system? Unknown. Sadly, I am sure that global civilization will collapse in the thirties, latest.
In the recent years I had been contemplating on what would fuck us up first. Climate change or capitalism. If you, as of now, still believe that this corona-induced global economic crisis will only have little consequences, you’re naïve. It hasn’t even begun, yet.
Now, you might think, okay — maybe climate change might be a problem — but that can still be solved! Don’t underestimate the ingenuity of the human mind and its capacity to solve problems. I agree on that one. But what we‘d actually need to achieve this, was a global eco-fascist regime. Why, it’s simple: we haven’t been doing nearly enough in the past, when it would’ve been actually doable. We’re not doing enough now, so it will become even more of an impossible challenge the longer our corrupt politicians go on with that farce. And if it really was the only problem we‘d be facing, I might even be positive we could achieve this. Anyway: fascism will exacerbate, it will come – simply because there is no way this can be avoided, it needs to come because we are slacking now.
But that brings me to the next problem. Since the seventies already, saving nature has been a big goal of our civilized world. Forests would die off in the eighties, were regrown and mantras of protecting the environment have been repeated ever since. Did you know that nature hasn’t recovered? In fact the exact opposite is the case. We are exterminating hundreds of species every year, with a sobering tendency to that. Forests are no longer regrowing but burning down or drying out. If you think there was hope on the plastics front, wake up. We‘re putting ever more plastic in the environment and like the climate active gases, what took us decades to achieve this, can‘t be solved in years. In fact, since plastic is photo-degrading, it breaks up in ever tinier pieces. It‘s just impossible. Plastics are in our food chain, and even in the air we breathe. Again, no ocean or environmental cleanups will really work: and just assume for a second it was possible: what exactly should we do with all that plastic? Burn it?
But there are also those good old chemicals, poisons, drugs and whatnot everywhere in our food chain. There is nothing such as „organic“ food any longer, if you happen to believe in that bullshit hoax. Still, poisons that have been prohibited decades ago are around, simply because they either degrade very slowly or not at all.
Our aquifiers are full of nitrates, we pollute the seas with our drugs like diclofenac, oil, nature is filled up with glyphosate and PFOS/PFOA…
Since we are at the end of the food-chain, we bioaccumulate all those toxins.
So the chemicals, synthetics and drugs just wont vanish over night. In fact, this situation is going to worsen over the next decade.
The more species and ecosystems we eradicate, the more the consequences will exacerbate. Right now it doesn’t look like the big deal, right. But sooner or later it will start cascading, because species significant for certain ecosystems won’t be there any longer, so whole ecosystems will collapse. Or maybe just the other way round, climate change kills an ecosystem eradicating all its species. Anyway, the reason why you never saw a live dodo is because extinct species don’t return. Just have a look at the Great Barrier Reef, or rainforests or the arctic and antarctic. It’s just really worrying.
I mean I am just scratching surfaces here. The more informed you are, the more obvious this maelstrom becomes.
Okay, lets just say we fix the climate problem, and because we’re so motivated, we also fix the environmental issues while we’re at it.
Did you notice how many people we are on this planet? Right now, we’re almost 8 billion irresponsible, egomaniacal, insatiable naked apes. The very reason why our problems are so huge, is because they correlate with the masses of humans roaming this planet. Speaking of tipping points. I love all this yada-yada about tipping points in the future, when, regardless which graph you look at, the real tipping point was back in the 19th century when humanity exploded.
People still breed like rat-rabbits. I don’t get it. In other words: all those problems will just further exacerbate. Since we (namely you) are too stupid to stop breeding, humanity will be partially exterminated big time. What actually will be the reason is hard to say, most likely it will be a combination of the following: people getting displaced because of inhabitable environments, war, multi-resistant germs, pandemics, hunger or:
Have you noticed how politically fucked up this world has become? Duterte, Erdogan, Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Salvini, Le Pen, Höcke, Orbán, Kaczyński, Putin and what other crazy individuals. Have you ever heard of nuclear power? Atom bombs? Combine this with lunacy and you’re set for catastrophe. We are set for catastrophe.
We still don’t know what to do with all that nuclear waste, actually we still dump it in the oceans, it’s just awesome. About every 30 years on average a nuclear power plant goes off, and this happened in eerily accurate intervals ever since we use that shit.
As soon as global civilization collapses, we’re really fucked, because nobody will look after all that nuclear infrastructure which will lead to total annihilation. Nobody will be safe anywhere.
But first we’ll be fucked, because some autocratic idiot or a combination of multiple autocratic idiots will pull off WWIII.
Already we have more displaced people on this planet than ever before, this economic crisis will exacerbate that, climate change will exacerbate this, and whenever there have been mass migrations in the past, it was the downfall of civilizations. Only that you just cannot compare the romans, to use one of the most famous examples, with how our society works today.
We’re fucked and people seem to be oblivious to that issue and that’s why we’re even more fucked. We will, or better: you will all be going on with all of this shit until it’s too late. In the very moment you’ll realize in what sort of situation you’re in, it’ll be way too late to change a thing. You’ll feel so sorry…
I don’t have hope, how could I. I am depressed, how couldn’t I be. Having to watch all this bullshit playing out day after day and again and again.
To return to the beginning; negative thoughts are a trademark of depression. It’s because of the chemical imbalance in the brains.
Every sane person reacts like this: Apocalypse? Yay! Overkill? What fun! Dire straits? Just another prospect of hope! It’s really bad? It could be even worse!
I’m rather depressed, than braindead.
For further reading and it’s really written super sarcastic I’d recommend Tom Phillips’ “humans: a brief history of how we fucked it all up”. Because even depressed people laugh. It’s a general misconception: we laugh when something is funny. Not like all the other sane mongrels giggling at just about everything, even when it’s not funny.
For even further information on how fucked we are I’d recommend you starting with Paul Beckwith, a climate system scientist at https://paulbeckwith.net – he’s a breeder, so he is very optimistic, but yet very, very honest about things.
If you want to dig even deeper into how fucked we are check out Guy McPherson at https://guymcpherson.com – what he basically suggests is that we come clear of all shit and be nice to each other – because we’re all in the ‘we’re all fucked boat’ together.
There is the doomsday clock, of course. https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/
And if you wanna sniff on the existential overdose I’d suggest visiting VHEMT at http://vhemt.org
Carpe diem et noctem, A.N.E.