I forget what the phenomenon is called when you learn a new word and then in the next few weeks you hear it everywhere. As if it was always there and just hiding beyond your awareness. In much the same fashion, I’ll have some subject on my mind, perhaps the opening line to a new blog, and someone will independently and seemingly randomly say it to me.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about death.”
Incidentally, so have I. Moreover, I’m sort of always thinking about death. I’ve explained as much in the past. Death acts like that new word, just beyond your lips, but constantly hinted at, joked about, or depicted in the media. How awful for them, like your number won’t be called.
It’s in thinking about death that my thoughts have taken on a particular flavor when I consider mental health. What is “mental health?” Even someone faintly acquainted with psychology will have heard about the DSM, which attempts to categorize every “aberrant” behavior as a symptom of some condition. Perhaps less a general waste of time than more an exercise in extreme naivety.
We habitually elevate ourselves, after all. What do you call a retarded dog? A dog. We habituate the language of disorder and unequal capacity in order to keep “the healthiest” at the top. We praise pathological thinking when it’s in service to acquiring wealth. It was The Late Show where an entire segment was dedicated to making Colbert and Kimmel’s agent look funny and acceptable. This man so tanned he could campaign for cancer (a similar joke made by Kimmel). He smoked like a chimney. It was “fun” to offer him a bowl of money next to his bowl of cigarettes. And his capacity to brag about his wealth and memberships, as well as drown himself in cologne, knows no bounds.
This is popular media. This is a form of “health” and “well-being.” This is where the laughs go. This is where the fun resides. YOU should want to laugh at this man. Make his habits and being a light-hearted affair. Make his addiction a celebration of character. Make his skin cancer look beautiful in a tailored suit. He manages the people you love! And don’t you love Stephen Colbert? He’s got the quick wit, humility, childlike excitement in his eye, and even espouses a touch of faith in his appeal to the entire world! Hell, his stage is modeled after a cathedral.
I belabor these descriptions because I want to draw a contrast. Now it’s something I keep bringing it up, because no one ever speaks to the reason it happens, but seemingly everyone I know is “depressed.” I go down the line and I think back to the amount of times someone has told me they contemplated suicide. I think about stories of abuse or general fucked up upbringings. I think about how alone people have felt or how endlessly insecure they feel no matter how many friends they make or accomplishments they achieve. Either I have a penchant for attracting these “types,” or in my view, everyone is capable of the lowest lows or suffering from the same fucked up environment, and in fact most people are suffering.
And I think that environment is the one glorified by things like late night TV. I think it’s obvious it’s not healthy or fun to smoke yourself to death and tan like your skin is to be harvested for a couch. But everyone around you, and oh look! you too, are clapping and laughing about it. It’s obvious that vast amounts of condensed wealth are crippling the world and we’re living in unprecedented times with regard to what greed has done to the environment. In something like a month of shows, 7 of the guests have been billionaires. Someone wants you to know they’re human. Someone wants to keep them relatable, because you could be on the couch one day for your “revolutionary” idea of taking a camera and making it smaller and waterproof. Your “brilliance” can match that of developing an app to mask exploitative labor.
To me, that’s what’s worth being depressed over. I see instead people internalize it. I see people blame themselves as if they created the environment. I see people look for some activity, some profession, some relationship, to help guide them to death. Nothing about their environment suggests they should aspire to something more noble than “getting by” with the true goal of vast wealth. Nothing about their relationships invigorate, challenge, or teach. Of course this certainly isn’t everyone, it’s just popular. It’s just millions of nightly views. It’s just tacit acceptance and conditioning. What’s the harm?
Maybe you’re not clinical. I don’t mean to suggest nobody is, but maybe the problem is largely, significantly, deeper than you. Maybe too much of your relationships reflect the darkest interplays of trying to digest and cope with media. Maybe some important decisions in your life have been hijacked. Maybe your feelings have been played, cut up, and re-packaged like a toxic mortgage-backed security. Maybe in wealth’s desperate and insecure pursuit of immortality, it reduces anything “less” to a depressed, depraved, ever-wanting mock version of the “ideal.”
Death then gets to serve a dual purpose. It “fixes” the perpetual suffering while keeping everyone else afraid. It looks appealing not because you’ve had so much of life you understand it’s time to go, but because you’re anxious so much time has passed without you getting what you’re due. It doesn’t provoke you to live in the moment and pursue truth. It causes you to hide behind the attitude of pretense bestowed from lessons by the elite. A mimicry equally shameful were it not done in bleeding ignorance.
The apparatus of our messaging is more condensed than people believe. It’s not just about a handful of companies owning everything. That plays a role, but none like our willingness and ability to conform. It’s easy to have the same things in common and speak of the familiar. It’s easy to empathize in insecurity and depression. It’s easy to lose the time to our labor, which if we’re lucky and work real hard will get us 5 minutes in the presence of our modern gods. We line up behind the loudest and shiniest. We assume the “most relevant” will make it to our eyes and ears in the “most convenient” ways and think we’re doing the cultivating of our environment because...internet?
It’s related, but not what I wanted to focus on, to speak of fame in this vein. It’s fairly recent in history where it wasn’t considered a disorder to want everyone to look at you. Again the idea of immortality. Again the assumption of value and respect. It’s a drop in the bucket when Billy On The Street introduces Chris Pratt to 10 people who don’t know who he his, but it speaks to a larger truth than you’ll ever see get too popular. Because even voices of humility and “background hearts of the engine” are brought on stage and elevated to equal footing.
For this reason I applaud Don Henley and Raury in their performances in service to bumping the bullshit that is Trump down a peg. Effective? When it comes to defining music as a medium for inclusiveness, expression, and the pursuit of a kind of truth you’ll never get out of Trump, absolutely. The problem remains, they all shared the stage. The meat of public debate and value is subjected to the glitz and glamour first. The small dose of medicine, the hint of fresh air, the fading stars amidst the infinite black void.
Popularity and wealth are no more measures of value and truth than Stephen Colbert is a measure for the consequences of faith. If we’re going to allow ourselves shortcuts, why these ones? If we’re bound by some level of intrinsic, wanting, and naive ideas, how long will we remain stunted in our ability to adopt better ones? And if or when we do, will we be able to accept what comes along with it? Perhaps an insatiable hunger that turns death into a gift. Perhaps an unyielding fear to be defied daily. Perhaps the only time in which the word “truth” will resonate so loud as to disgust you at the tone and prescription of online forums and comment sections, and not just say you are because it’s the cool thing to do.
Notably, I don’t think we’ll change. But you can’t say I wasn’t trying to help in case we might.
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