The Freedom-Sucking Daemon
The practice of freedom involves exercising available choices. When some choices seem unavailable, for whatever reason, we lose freedom.
Professional trickcyclery took it upon itself to define normal psychology by cataloging its deviations and tasking itself to manage them. I prefer not to countenance that power grab by using its terminology to talk about what seems to me like every day life but I feel compelled by the force of common usage because “depression” is the word that, for good or ill, most people I know use for what I intend to write about. I tried in my head for quite a while to compose with various substitutions and discovered that I’d be making syncopated rhythms with my skull on the drywall if I kept the effort up much longer. So let’s get on with it, with depression, the word.
Anyone with experience of it, personally or with a friend or loved one, knows how the sufferer often feels that things she might otherwise, absent depression, do are somehow beyond reach. These things might be the simple pleasures of life, like taking a walk in the park, or preparing and enjoying a good meal, or calling a friend for a chat, or practicing a hobby, as though the choice to do these things were not really available.
In this kind of situation the reason the activity beyond reach can vary. It might be that when our depressed friend actually does these things, he feels no pleasure in them. That’s a tough one.
Or it might be a hesitance related to a kind of social anxiety. A depressed person would not be entirely lacking insight if they would say that depressed people are no fun at parties. Or when considering making a one-to-one social proposal, your depressed friend might worry that she puts your relationship at risk by demanding too much of you.
Perhaps the depression is bad enough that it’s really hard not to burst into tears or something when trying to talk. When my mother was being treated with steroids to manage lymphoma she was given also the horrible anti-psychotic drug seroquel to manage the roid-rage, and the seroquel made her depressed. (Maybe the lymphoma did too but I blame the seroquel.) At the same time I was, if my notes from the time are to be trusted, going through some of the worst bouts of depression I’ve ever experienced. When I telephoned her from across the Atlantic each weekend we could get hopelessly stuck, unable to find words, even failing to make small talk, and I’d find myself in more pain after the call than before. I guess that might have been the case for her too so I take seriously anyone’s hesitance to reach out socially.
But of course social isolation is bad for depression. We cope with the stress, disappointment, and anxiety of every day life by talking about it with others, a problem shared and all that. Conversely, I find it much easier to catastrophize when I’m on my own and talking only to myself.
Unfortunately the choices that our depressed subject feels are beyond reach could be more fundamental to sustaining life, like adequately feeding oneself, or taking an ailment to the doctor when needed, or getting outside for some fresh air and daylight, or avoiding medications that make matters worse. The choices I’m talking about here range from the most trivial to the most consequential, regardless if we or our friends and loved ones believe themselves free to make those choices or not.
My point is that the depressed me believes it has fewer choices than the not-depressed me. The depressed me is therefore, and by definition, less free. Depression has stolen some of my freedom.
Let’s elaborate this metaphor of theft by inventing a perpetrator of this crime: The Freedom-Sucking Daemon. The aforementioned trickcyclists reify depression in lots of ways so I think we can allow ourselves the luxury pf personifying it as a daemon if doing so proves useful. The cartoon shoulder angel and devil might be a useful visual stimulus to imagining what I mean but we need to get rid of the angel and think of the daemon as a supremely needy, unshakable vampire cum fuck-up as William Burroughs warned us against in his Advice for Young People. But it would probably be for the best if everyone who cares to try would ink the details and shade the colors of their own images of Freedom-Sucking Daemons. Use your imagination, not mine.
The point is to think of the depression as a daemon that sucks up your freedom by robbing you of your choices using the dastardly trick of persuading you that you don’t really have them. It’s too hard, or you’re not strong enough, or you wouldn’t enjoy it, or shut up I’m watching TV, or whatever insidious logic it thinks you’re susceptible to.
(Obviously this not a useful therapeutic concept in general. It’s just an interesting idea. What do I know? But I’ve been running my own unlicensed trials and so far my anecdata are plural and good enough to brag about.)
The Freedom-Sucking Daemon invades your domain to steal your choices and freedom. As an anarchist I’d prefer not to call the cops to drag the Freedom-Sucking Daemon off my property. Guard dogs might be good but the Freedom-Sucking Daemon can probably make friends with my dogs. Let’s scratch this defense of the domain nonsense. There must be better ways to build resistance to daemons.
It’s unfortunate that some of the most important truths are trite and extremely banal. “Count your blessings!” That’s actually a good one but it’s so banal, so dated and stupid sounding. How can we bring it up to date and make it fit with the feeling of being in an empire that’s long past its peak, going down fast, managed by a class of tryhard courtiers who clearly intend to abscond with as much loot as possible before the visibly in-rushing economic, social, and environmental collapses?
The world is uncaring, dangerous and often actively hostile. Given the chance it would use your body as compost sooner rather than later. Without wealth or good connections you’ll need skills, resources and determination to win against nature. What’s the life expectancy of a wild or feral dog? Or even a junkyard or pariah dog? And how does that compare to a pet dog in a safe home with sufficient nutrition, exercise, love and visits to the vet? So if you’re still alive at age 30, that’s already pretty good going.
I don’t know if remote lifeless planets are better or worse than this one. On the one hand they present all sorts of life-threatening dangers, like, for a start, nothing to eat, drink or breath but on the other the absence of competition from other life makes them somehow more neutral. Those planets don’t need my matter and low entropy. Being alive at all is starting to seem like an accomplishment.
Do you have kids? I don’t. What would it be like for you today if any of your ancestors had, like me, failed to have kids? How many generations does your lineage go back counting each on the mothers’ side? Now let’s say each generation in that line had a 50:50 chance of having kids that grow up to do the same. Now start tossing a coin and see how many 10-generation lineages you can produce. You need a string of ten heads. One tails and you start over. But your lineage back to Mitochondrial Eve is a lot more than 10 generations. So the chance that you are here, now with your specific ancestry is an outrageous fluke. But that’s what really happened.
Next go study and ponder the Deep Field pictures from the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, read about what they represent, what the things in those pictures are, how big, old, and far away each is, and how little of the sky each Deep Field picture captures. Seriously, do that and, only after you’re done, ask yourself: Does it make you feel small? It makes me feel that my existence is ridiculously, absurdly unlikely, laughable really, and completely irrelevant to pretty much everything in this unimaginable expanse of space, time, and matter.
That’s the baseline against which I count my blessings. That hostile, inconceivably vast and old cosmos in which for no reason and against all odds I actually live, briefly. It’s a miracle to find I have any significance at all.
I’m not going to list my blessings here but the truth is that I am not completely irrelevant. Some people and animals care about me, more or less, and I care about some living things back. What I do matters to some of them, more or less, and what I choose to not do can make a difference too. Of course I won’t be remembered for long after I’m gone but that’s okay and I am not completely unknown nor entirely disconnected from everything.
These minor residues are my network of personal connections to other living people, animals and plants and even to our non-biological environment. This little net constitutes the real, finite space in which my freedom exists and becomes concrete when I exercise choices with outcomes that matter. I’m not very important, I know, but neither am I nothing. And I think that’s really something, given the enormity of the context.
The Freedom-Sucking Daemon’s task is to use the most pernicious modes of persuasion, so sly you might even believe it’s your own voice doing it, to deny you your choices, shrink your network of connections, and suck away your freedom. Quality of life lies in defeating the Freedom-Sucking Daemon’s vampiric process one choice at a time and enjoying, deliberately noting and taking pleasure in, each win no matter its magnitude because, if it was a choice the Freedom-Sucking Daemon tried to make you think you didn’t have when really you did, exercising the choice realizes and expands your freedom. Something to celebrate, eh?