Søren Kierkegaard made the famous argument that despair is the “sickness unto death”. That is, the implications of mans existential crisis are such that despair becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, clouding out the possibility of ever escaping one’s own overwhelming sadness. Simply put, depression is a hole and the longer one wallows in it the harder it is to escape.
Dostoyevsky, in Death of Ivan Ilych, shows a man who, when faced with death, re-evaluates his life choices. A “successful” man by the measures of his society, he finds that he his life choices were not made on the values he wished to live by, but as a means to a material end. His existential crisis is living with the decisions he made, and facing death alone.
There is truth in that: All of us will have to suffer the event of our own mortality, and when we do so it will be our own lonely experience, or rather end of experience, depending on one’s belief system. Perhaps this is why loneliness is such a painful thing, even when it isn’t directly connected to death or dying.
Standing on a street corner knowing that a companionship that had once defined your very person has been cut off, severed for reasons partially understood and partially in mystery, one is overwhelmed by the pervasive sensation of loneliness. It soaks through even the toughest façade, spilling out at inappropriate moments. One must keep moving, one foot in front of the other, to avoid collapsing onto the brick sidewalk, laying in the drifts of dirty snow in a physical manifestation of the intense feeling of helplessness.
Routine helps: having a reason to get out of bed in the morning, running on a treadmill to exhaustion in the hopes of a dreamless easy sleep. There are infinite ways in which things could be worse.
Maybe it’s the season, but the days are now tinged with grey. Can you imagine a world where the worker dreads the weekend? Spreadsheets, emails and the ringing of phones is usually enough to drown out the noise of festering despair, but come Friday: leisure holds no pleasure.
What then, is a plan of action? Trying to outrun one’s own emotion by staying too busy to think? Brief escapes into a world of unconsciousness thanks to various distilled liquids? Is anything recoupable? Could any of the pieces of an old life be picked up, superglued together in an imitation of its prior form?
I'm at risk of running on, so I won't.
Sometimes, things just suddenly end
