#WrightNews: 22-28 August, 2022
It's (maybe) the end of the world as we know it (and I'm not sure how to feel)
Not with a bang, but with data
“We’re all gonna die!”
Yes, he loved saying this, crying it out, it was wonderfully refreshing, it purified his fear and made it public at the same time–it was weak and sick and cowardly and powerless and pathetic and also noble somehow, a long, loud and feelingly high-pitched cry of grief and pain that had an element of sweet defiance.
—From Underworld, Don DeLillo1
#EnoughIsEnough is trending on Twitter. Following the price cap announcement, it isn’t hard to see why. I’ve had a vague sense of an apocalypse brewing, sort of percolating away, but like so many coffees it gets left, forgotten, on a windowsill or a side-table, and when I find it again it has gone cold. Perhaps that’s modern life now: a benumbed inner yelp of ‘we’re all gonna die!’ that doesn’t seem to make it past the diaphragm.
I wanted this to be an optimistic newsletter. My narrative tendencies are such that I’ll probably try to spin it that way anyway. But you shouldn’t trust me. I don’t know anything. I don’t know whether Umair Haque knows anything, either. He says that we’re not going to make it to 2050. I don’t know if he’s right. His writing is scary, but everything online is scary. There’s not a lot of subtlety anymore, it seems — attention is a commodity, so if you want someone’s attention, you need to squelch your offering right down so it can be swallowed in one gulp.
The trouble is, there is reason to believe he’s right. In 1972, MIT scientists predicted that the global economy would collapse in the mid-21st century. The model, World3 (which is not without criticism) was studied again in 2020. This new study, undertaken by Gaya Herrington, seems to show that we’re ahead of schedule. Naturally, there is a lot more to both of these studies that I’m not able to go into here — and the predictions are just that — but the 2020 study, while ostensibly pessimistic, indicates that we have a narrow window to turn things around. In short, the window is this decade.2
Despite the potential of societal collapse, in this world of individual pleasure it is hard to know what to do when things suddenly don’t seem to be working the way we’re told they should. Reading and thinking about the above, I have the vague sense that I should do something, but I have no idea what.
(It is at this point that I avoid thinking about it at al and instead imagine the final evolutionary form of human beings. I think our final evolutionary form will be a one- eyed tentacle covered in nerve endings, seeking out the next pleasure.)
If we make it that far, and if everything doesn’t burn down first.
I just typed that line as though it was a joke. But maybe it isn’t. It is hard to know what to believe; it is hard to sort through the churning, frothing mudslide of (mis)information every day. I don’t read the news that much. I used to read it a lot. But it makes me sad. This is what I have become; I close my curtains and sit in the glow of a world burning outside.
Depression, the brain, and you
One thing that does seem to be true — though this is partly a gut-feeling, this-is- what-I’ve-observed sort of thing — is that depression seems to be the default. What is depression? In 2009, Robert Sapolsky argued that it’s the worst disease one could get. Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide and Globally, it is estimated that 5% of adults suffer from depression, plus Covid-19 has exacerbated already poor mental health for many. It might be because I spend too much time on Twitter, or because of my own biases, perceptions and preconceptions, but there seems to be a low-grade fug about things, a wispy listlessness to a lot of people. It feels like a world of default anhedonia.
Anhedonia is the inability to take pleasure in the things that would normally bring one pleasure or joy. It is one of most recognisable features of a major depression. This is usually accompanied by psychomotor retardation — extreme lethargy that can represent near-paralysis — and maximal levels of grief and guilt. The problem with these things is their invisibility, but the inner world of the depressive is at odds with the outer world. What appears to be a bit of tiredness or — worse ‘laziness’ — from an external perspective is, in the words of Sapolsky, ‘as serious as juvenile diabetes.’ The key here is to seeing depression as a physical illness: a ‘biochemical disorder genetic component and early experience factors’. It comes down to stress response. In response to threat, the central cortex goes offline. The ‘emotional brain’ — the limbic system and ‘reptilian brain’ kicks in. Trouble is, trauma will damage and degrade the limbic system. Put really simply, depression and trauma involve the brain physically responding as though a real threat is there when none is. Sure, depression can be and is often triggered by external stressors, but for those suffering major depressive episodes, eventually a trigger isn’t needed. The brain is convinced that there is a real threat, as real as a real person breaking into your house and pointing a gun at your family. Biologically, the brain is going through the same thing. The depressive is fighting a real battle inside. The depressive is experiencing abject fear.
This matters, because fear destroys playfulness. Bessel van der Kolk3 writes:
Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. In order to have a healthy society we must raise children who can safely play and learn. There can be no growth without curiosity and no adaptability without being able to explore, through trial and error, who you arew and what matters to you.
If we’re depressed, we’re afraid. If we’re afraid, we can’t play and we can’t be curious. We turn ever-inward. If we aren’t curious and full of desire towards the world, we aren’t going to see it as anything other than mise-en-scene. And if we see it like that, as a consequence we don’t see people as being like us, but as mise-en- scene, too. They lose life in our eyes and become mere background. And when I mention desire, I mean real desire, not the desire that bounces in our chest every time modern consumer relations defines us by lack (saying always, ‘you don’t have this new thing - you must if you are going to be the person you think you are/ should be’). But fear — the root of depression, see The role of stress hormones in depression — is also the root of the dearth of play and curiosity I see today. It’s the fear that needs managing, needs mitigating somehow. Because all the hatred — and there is so much of it now — is fear at its root. If depression is aggression turned inward, perhaps aggression is depression turned outward.
It starts with education. It has to. And I don’t mean schools; perhaps a whole new educational paradigm is on the horizon, one in which the traumatised are able to safely play and learn. Here’s Bessel van der Kolk again:
The greatest hope for traumatized, abused, and neglected children is to receive a good education in schools where they are seen and known, where they learn to regulate themselves, and where they can develop a sense of agency. At their best, schools can function as islands of safety in a chaotic world. They can teach children how their bodies and brains work and how they can understand and deal with their emotions. Schools can play a significant role in instilling the resilience necessary to deal with the traumas of neighborhoods or families.
Schools are a start. But so is starting with one person. So is taking just a moment to reflect outwardly. Nobody is going to save the world from a possible apocalyptic fate. But one gesture outwards — just an attempt — one thing at a time, might, like compound interest, make all the difference. Perhaps take as an example Nick Wood on Twitter, whose morning tweets are a little flash of hope and calm.
All we can do is one little thing at a time, as much as that might be a platitude. Sometimes little things are all we have. Clive Wearing has retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He cannot make new memories and his memory resets every 30 seconds. He meets his wife for the first time every thirty seconds and falls in love with her all over again.
Diversions and distractions
I was going to write about AI, but I ended up writing about depression instead. I picked up a thread when wondering through my notes For me, note-taking is really important — my obsessive need to document everything is only now really bearing fruit. I now go where the notes tell me to go. Here’s a video of me doing it. It’s the second video on my YouTube channel; I have more in the pipeline!
In terms of writing, I have joined Scribophile, a huge online community for writers in which you can critique the work of others and receive critiques there. I posted this piece and those who critiqued were lovely. Highly recommend.
My new Writing Zoom group will meet very soon. We are going to give each other feedback on our newest writing and I am tremendously excited. Let me know by Twitter (@curtaindsleep) if you’d like to get involved. I might also be starting a writing / reading podcast soon. I tend to get too enthusiastic and overcommit, so don’t hold me to this one.
Finally, I have started to read Priestdaddy4 by Patricia Lockwood and it’s hilarious. Her father is a Catholic priest (there’s a loophole) and this is her memoir. I’ll post more about it when I’m done, but for now I’ll close with an excerpt. We can still laugh in the dark:
Pretty much all art in this house is of Jesus reaching out with two fingers and trying to milk things—the air, the clouds, the Cross, a cripple who wants to get blessed but who instead is going to get milked, by Jesus. Jesus stands against a celestial background. He reaches toward a plump, dangling ray of the sun. He is going to milk the hell out of it.
See you next Sunday,
Alex
This part of Underworld concerns a fictional version of Lennie Bruce doing a routine about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
Lockwood, Patricia. Priestdaddy. Penguin Publishing Group, 2017.