Depression

My brush with atheism

https://www.deviantart.com/hg-art/art/Crying-Eye-2-430234058

If you’ve never felt depression in your life, it’s almost impossible to explain. Depression may be the worst feeling a human being can endure. In fact, even people who go through physically painful times will often admit that the worst part was the loneliness and depression of it.

To bring out the point, the image above of a precious tear forming under a beautifully drawn eye is not the proper image for depression. The proper depiction is actually a soulless, tearless, numb, cold, dark eye, which is a million times more horrifying. Maybe something like this:

Get a depressed person to cry and you essentially healed him.

For anyone who hasn’t felt depression in their lives (thank God), I want to share a famous idea from David Foster Wallace:

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

This is quite a moving and powerful piece which really gives an outsider an idea of the mind of the truly depressed. But I want to add something important that Wallace’s piece misses.

It’s not just that death is the lesser of the two evils. That would be like picking between stubbing your toe or getting a paper cut (or his case, the pain of dying through fire vs. dying through falling). That is a choice made between two similar things and one has to choose the one less painful. Depression has something about it, that while still applicable, it has an entirely different aspect which is worth mentioning: depression is where life itself has become death. And a living, enduring, lasting death is qualitatively and quantitatively worse than a short “real” death which ends in escape. I would (with the help of A.I.) add to Wallace’s piece as follows:

The variable here is something quieter and more interior than flames: a steady attrition, a slow, remorseless erosion of the felt value of one’s life, an inward pressure - emptiness, loneliness, the pallid weight of meaninglessness - that grinds away all the reasons for staying until life itself is a constant death, whereby the cessation of such painful, living death becomes the quicker terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s the longing for relief from that unbearable nothingness.

And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling “Don’t!” and “Hang on!”, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been hollowed out and felt that slow, interior terror of living on to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Thank God I’ve never been clinically depressed, but as Wallace says, “You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” So how am I able to understand this terror?

The answer is because I have felt this real feeling of depression twice in my life, and although it was short-lived (though not unrepeated), and bH I have a healthy background and I want to focus on one of them:

It was when I got my atheism “aha! moment.”

The simple truth is that an atheistic worldview has to grapple with the truth of the fact that there is no such thing as eternity. There is no such as true purpose. There is no such thing as actual importance. There is no real “real.”

(This is slightly related to my theory of morality, and those who think there is objective morality borne definitionally out of emergent consciousness, may disagree here too to a certain extent. But I stand strong in my position, from an atheistic perspective.)

I’m curious if fellow atheists/doubters experienced this, and how they deal/dealt with it.

Of course, this doesn’t prove atheism wrong. It may even be a reason to think a religious perspective is biased.

But, good grief almighty, it’s so unbearably depressing!