Joe:
I have just finished reading your essay "The Audacity of Depression" and I want say thanks for helping me put a new and uplifting slant on the visceral unease I've been feeling. Your comments on the state of the world, particularly the USA, align closely with my own thoughts.
I'm struggling, recently, with trying to offer my three grown children some hope for their future -- and I find that I can't. Hope for the future is something I can't honestly offer them. Does that make me depressed? You bet it does! Being 64 and recently retired from a 30-year nursing career, my instincts are to "make it all better". But, I can't. Any information or education I send my kids ends up sounding like a condemnation of their lives, which are very successful and deeply rooted in the current delusion.
So, the days roll on and I'm getting more comfortable with being depressed. I think depression only makes you crazy or kills you if you can't understand there might be a reason for it and you have a right to those feelings, given the current picture.
Thanks, again, for the thoughts. I'm just getting acquainted with your work, but feel like I've found a friend. Being Buddhist, I try to stick close to my cushion and practice. It helps.
Peace,
Bob
Tennessee
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Bob,
I've come to realize that the "depression" we suffer as Western people is simply that part of the nature of the world we have managed to avoid. Billions wake each day in the full understanding that there is no universal promise of a better life, either for them or their children. While they by no means are free of the pain that accompanies human existence, they are not affluent or self-deluding enough to suffer depression as we know it.
In my humble opinion, our current depression is simply the shadow cart by our national mass hallucination. Like you, I have come to be as comfortable in that shadow as in the light of what is good in this world. It's rather like walking a wooded path, partly shaded and partly sunlit. But mostly it's just walking forward on the path before us, with no illusions about where it ultimately ends.
Joe
