One of the negative effects of living in modern technological society has been the growing presence of depression among its inhabitants. Depression is a paralyzing mental illness that can lead to withdrawal from social situations, from family and friends, from school and from work. In some extreme situations, it can lead to suicide or conversely violence against others. In terms of national economies, depression can lead to the loss of many man-hours of work, either through loss of efficient performance, or through the number of days of absence of employees. Up until now, psychotherapists have focused on situational depressions, depressions caused by traumatic events or painful frustrating life situations. Psychiatrists have focused a lot on biological depressions. But there is a third kind that in my opinion accounts for a large portion of the depressions that we see today.
So, what is it that is causing a rise in the number of people suffering from depression today. I would submit that it is connected to the increasing loss of organic surfaces upon which to make and preserve organic imprints, as well as, by the same token, living in an experiential vacuum, and the resulting growing amount of numbness and loneliness. In today’s world, it is very hard to plant one’s feet in such a way as to feel grounded, first of all, because of all the sensory distortion that is present. Second, as people today become better at creating and improving upon modern technological devices, they, the devices, become capable of transforming the phenomena in their living environment more and more quickly, which makes it more and more difficult for people today to develop roots. The changes in their living environments occur so quickly, that many people feel completely disoriented as a result, as if they were slipping and sliding on a wet tile floor.
The inability to make or preserve meaningful organic imprints means losing the essence of what it means for a person to feel fully alive as well as losing his capacity to prepare for death with a personal surrogate immortality. So, it is as if modern technology disrupts the bonds that allow him to feel stable enough within the flow of his life narrative. When a person’s life narrative becomes a wobbly floating blob in an endless vacuum, the numbness that the person experiences while taking this groundless journey is translated into a profound depression.
One of the effects of feeling environmentally depressed is losing one’s capacity to bond with the people around him. Loss of one’s capacity to bond with others is fundamentally caused by one’s loss of opportunity to ground in a more traditional natural living environment. The reason that bonding is so important for a person is that it creates the opportunity to make and preserve imprints on the people around him. Actually, one can also make and preserve imprints on pets and other animals, but what makes leaving imprints on humans so important is that, with the gift of language, humans have the ability to remember the imprint using define discrete thought processes that allow it to be transmitted to others more precisely and therefore more easily. And, of course, with language, a person is able to make and preserve imprints on himself, which means, in effect, that he is able to bond with himself more effectively than if he didn’t have language. Tightening one’s psychological bonds with oneself as well as with others is a good way to stave off depression. It doesn’t stave off situational sadness or trauma, both of which require desensitizing oneself to specific events that have occurred outside of one and over which one had no control in terms of the way they were transmitted. Ideally, imprints that one receives from the external world should be at a level of stimulation that one can absorb them more properly. They should be neither overstimulating like tension-pocket experiences nor understimulating like vacuum experiences.
At any rate, environmental depression, the kind if depression that no one talks about is unfortunately likely to increase in today’s world unless and until it is acknowledged and people start finding ways of introducing much more organic stimulation into their living environments and into their life narratives. Unless and until these changes happen, people are going to continue to participate in destructive actions against oneself and against others as a vehicle to pull away from the sensory distortion that by itself is experienced as so hurtful in modern technological society.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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