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[ The Black Page ] - Depression and ennui :-(
(Okay, I know ALL these pages are coloured black - it is a side-effect of thematically matching the spacescape background on the Impact pages)
I am one of those people who suffer chronic depression. Somewhat cyclic - over weeks I drift between ennui and chronic depression. I do have medication which takes the edge off the neuro-chemical side, but that is about all. People often don't realise this as I have a quite happy-go-lucky day-to-day persona which while not actually 'put on' is really just a thin veneer. Not so much to hide the inner me from them, but to spare them from me - nothing annoys me more than people who constantly wallow in self-pity and want everyone to be constantly aware of how hard-done-by they feel. True depression isn't a status symbol - it's a living death.
My life is largely empty. I spend most of my time in a state of acute ennui with absolutely no life direction. I live from short burst to short burst of motivation. I have no drives beyond the reptilian-based ones for hunger, warmth and sex and don't really enjoy any of those things so much as prefer the absence of the need-signals once the drive is - for the time - sated. Even the primate acquisitiveness instinct is largely burned out: I occasionally get urges to shop, but they invariably end up in disappointment as I find nothing worth buying (that could, of course, be a function of modern commercial society and not wholly internal to me). I used to desire love, but either age or neglect has atrophied my emotions in that direction. I am cold, and I intellectually recognise the problem as existing but have no idea what to do about it. Or motivation to do anything anyway.
The bits of my brain that are supposed to make me want to cling to life at all costs seem to be dysfunctional, though I am not actually suicidal - while I can rationalise no adequate reason to bother living, nor can I see any reason not to, so I just keep going. I have no problem with death - though the life-death transition is something I would prefer to be quick. Death for me is just a state of not-being, and I have not-been before: the first um-teen billion years of the universe before I was born didn't bother me at all, so I doubt the however-long of not-being after I am dead will either. I guess my ego might be a bit sub-normal too, since I have no problem with the concept of a universe without me in it and hence have no intrinsic need to invent an afterlife (or buy into a pre-packaged version of someone else's).
I was, for a while, justifying my life by supplying bits of my body (ie: blood, plasma, and - if needed - bone marrow) to the medical system for people in need of such, but my second ex- took that away by exposing me to a rather nasty disease. While I was lucky and avoided actual infection (very lucky - I am one of the 5% of the population for whom the vaccine for this disease won't stick), there were enough trace antigens in my blood to disqualify me as a tissue donor. That sucks!
Other than that, my life is technically pretty good. I live in a relatively free and open country, have a job (and access to an adequate social welfare system if I need it), more than enough food to eat, a place to live that has quite reasonable rent (in a country of exorbitant housing costs). But though I know at an intellectual level that I am amongst the most fortunate 20% of the human race, my life feels empty.
Some things that give me a short-term lift (though distraction might be a better word) are:
I also enjoy the company of friends, of course - both RL- and VR-side. Though I could count people I like being around on my fingers, I really enjoy their company.
Having an unusually acute grasp of the scale of the universe across space and time relative to my own size and influence (and the size and influence of current humanity as a whole) probably doesn't help my state of mind! In the end, the entire works of man will be subducted from the geological record without a trace of having ever happened. I don't believe humanity has what it takes to permanently leave this world, or outlast a single geological epoch, no matter how much we pat ourselves on the back for being oh-so-clever within the minuscule timeframes of our cultural histories. The individual humans that could provide such capability are orders of magnitude too few for such achievement: the willfully ignorant masses that are little more than talking animals will prevail. Obviously I care about this (since I can go on so about it), but have long since given up on any hope that such things can be changed in any lasting way.
I generally work in the IT field. Unfortunately - unlike many in and out of the field today - I know far too much* about IT to see the bulk of the consumer IT and CE spaces as anything but complete second-rate junk compared to what could be available if people knew (and cared) what was really possible. Nothing frustrates me more than having to muck around fixing stuff that shouldn't be broken in the first place if people with ten times my qualifications knew (and cared) what they were doing. Of course there is no reason to care since the bulk of the consumer base will go on spending money on the crap technology happily oblivious to what they are missing out on.
* Unlike most modem IT people who only know how to manipulate the "magic box" for the desired results, I have a fairly good grasp of the inner workings right down to transistor and wire-protocol levels. And know enough IT history to spot a tired old idea dusted off with new buzz-words, as well as supposedly "only recently possible" feats of IT that were being done routinely in labs back in the 70's.
While I don't get a choice at work, I use GNU/Linux at home. Not because I think it is that great*, but if I must use a tired old 1970's OS-App-Data model with a dinky 1980's GUI crudely nailed over it, I am sure as hell not going to pay some faceless multinational (ie Microsoft or Apple) for the "privilege". And I certainly won't put up with cynically artificial limitations on functionality on top of the archaic design.
* Actually the Linux Kernel is quite good, though I prefer the HURD model, in theory at least. But the GUI stuff heaped on it tends, these days, to suffer from trying far too hard to be like the rubbish commercial OSes and copying all their "user experience" crap. I'm happy to admit my computer is a device in its own right, not a proxy for a desk or a piece of paper. My computer is for doing stuff, not for fawning over the pretty window-closing effects or impressing strangers with! It's an appliance!