The Other Great Depression

Are you happy with your life? That should be a simple question to answer but for far too many, myself included, the answer is not so simple - not least of all being that the answer is often a dynamic variable rather than a constant. Whether I am happy with my life varies depending on when you ask me, morning, noon, or night, and a whole host of influences in my life that fluctuate with much less rhythm and routine.

I've felt like I am not alone in this view, when I look at my circle of friends there are few that are thriving, most are simply surviving, and at the age of 36 it pains me to admit that I have lost some people who didn't survive. I've written about my own complex relationship with suicide and my past attempts, and of the concept of survivor's guilt that leads me to question why I am still here and others aren't - others I thought stronger than me in almost every regard.

The repetition of life to the point of monotony with the absence of emotion to me is the hallmark of depression - there are many other ways to define it, which I think are also valid depending on the context, but this as much I can say is a sign of depression, when people are still alive but they aren't really living.

I realise that the Holiday Season in all manifestations, Christmas in particular can be a difficult time for many people, in particular those who identify as Queer like myself and my community, but this trend has been something I have observed establish itself over the course of a decade now, maybe just a little bit over.

The say the first step is recognizing you have a problem, that bit is easy, the world is broken, it doesn't take a genius to see that and you don't have to look very far to see that this is endemic, it is often attributed to Capitalism and it is true that Capitalism has decidedly accelerated this breakdown but it isn't the sole factor at play. The Industrial Revolution is arguably the root cause of the problems we face as a society. It marked a turning point in the way we view ourselves and our self worth, productivity became a commodity and the more of it you could muster the more you were rewarded.

This productivity premium lead many to buy into the middle class delusion that if you work hard enough you will be rewarded by amassing wealth, belying the truth that those who amass the most wealth are those who control the means of production because they profit from the productivity of all who contribute to it. This fed into the narrative that amassing more wealth through increased production hinged on the ability to convince those who produce to produce more.

There was a limit to how much an individual could work and produce however which gave way to the conclusion that if you can't make people more productive then to increase productivity you need more people. Before the Industrial Revolution the global population stood at approximately 600 million people in 1600, a figure it had stood at for the better part of the preceding 700 years. In the 400 years that followed we went from 600 million people to 8 billion today.

In the year 2000, global employment stood at 60% - for the last 24 years that figure has steadily fallen. There was a brief rise after a dip caused by the pandemic but the downward trend resumed in 2022 and has now reached 56% and will continue to fall, meanwhile the global population is projected to continue growing, not peaking by some estimates until some time between 2050 and 2100.

The bottom line here is that for the last 24 years, almost a quarter of a century now, employment is declining, and when that happens on a national scale for a prolonged period it's usually a sign of recession, or depression - in the economic sense as opposed to the mental health connotation, although the two are inextricably linked, again thanks in part to the Industrial Revolution rewiring our brains to define our self-worth in terms of how productive we can be.

There's little point talking about AI at this stage either, it's a dead horse argument to herald mass unemployment caused by automation, whether that argument actually holds any truth is ultimately irrelevant, the downward trend is pre-existing, if that prophecy of doom fulfils itself the most it will do is accelerate the process, much the same as Capitalism accelerated the process.

There's no easy solution to this problem, trying to define your self-worth in a way that isn't related to productivity is something that requires a culture shift, something you can't achieve as an individual, it's something that has to happen as a collective but the only way it will is if there is a collective will and that for now at least doesn't seem to exist, at least not at the scale required to enact meaningful change.

Make no mistake, many people see the problem, in fact I would say more people see it now than at any point in the last 400 years, the trouble is that the paradigm shift you would have to enact has to reverse 400 years of institutionalization. The society we live in has been designed around this concept at every level, from the government benefits provided to those who are unemployed to the sanctions system intended to punish those not deemed to be trying hard enough to make themselves more productive.

The fact it costs money to stay alive in itself is part of the problem. You need to work or earn money in some way to meet your basic needs, it's quite sad really when you think about the fact that most of our fictional worlds that we fantasize about depicted in movies, games, and literature, so often feature a society that at its core is designed to meet basic needs first, sobering to think that our dream world is one where we have free food, and drink, and a home to call our own without a mortgage - food, drink, and shelter, three basic needs met for free is a pipe dream.

The world is an exhausting place to live in, when you add to that exhaustion with the constant effort needed just to stay alive, this isn't life. People have realised that and depression sets in when they do. 703,000 people worldwide die to suicide every year, that's almost 3 quarters of a million people, giving up on life completely, because they feel like there's nothing to live for, or that death is a better alternative to what they're living through.

As a survivor of suicide I have the authority to speak on my own reasons for wanting to let go, the reasons others have will vary of course, but I impress my own experience on the world I observe first and foremost until I'm given a reason or a perspective that lets me see it differently.

I've seen the light in peoples' eyes die. It's quite ironic that people often predicted there would be a zombie apocalypse that would be humanity's end - to me that's the world we live in now. I'm surrounded by zombies and at times I feel like I am one of them too. Eat, drink, work, sleep, repeat.