Hi Laika,
first of all, let me thank you for volunteering to engage me here. Secondly, I hope you can beat your depression and find your center and enjoy life again. I suffered depression in my early to mid twenties and it was aweful. It wasn't solely down to an existential crisis, only partly. From my own subjective reflections, I can say that I have found that a belief in God served as an anchor for me for more than just the existential crisis itself, however, my own life experience is just one story. I hope you don't think I'm being nosey in asking you questions related to your current depression. But before I do, let me tell you why I am asking.
Not at all. RF is one of the few places I can be really open about my experiences with depression, so I'm more than happy to share.
I watched the video, and it shook me up somewhat. A trip down memory lane which I did not enjoy. And I wondered if this existential crisis was typical of atheists, judging by the members who have posted so far - I would say that it is not the norm for them to suffer such - I hope for their sake they were speaking the truth. Depression is truly an hard thing to live with. When I was an atheist, I felt an huge spiritual void in myself, and life was tasteless. Everything was nothing because it meant nothing in the end. Do I make sense? This was the world view I had adopted and being reminded of it was an uncomfortable experience, so much so that I made this thread to see if there were others who were experiencing the same as I had once.
Yeah, you make perfect sense.
I don't think an existential crisis is typical of
all atheists. The responses you get in the thread will show that. However, I do think there is a particular type of atheism, closely associated with nihilism, that simply subtracts from religious belief until there is a great big "nothingness" left. Essentially its too rational to the point of being de-humanising and forgets that human beings have emotional and psychological needs for meaning. Religion can satisfy that, but as it is simply an emotional response to a set of beliefs- its possible that any number of beliefs could make you happy. It's not necessarily going to be one belief system or another. You can be happy as an atheist- but the more radical the atheism, the more complicated it will be. So I certainly agree with you that it is possible and I have definitely had something like that, but its not universal.
With genuine interest and empathy, I ask, is your depression borne of an existential crisis? or something else? or a combination of both - the existential crisis and something else? How long have you been suffering for? and how do you deal with it?
Though you are an atheist, I hope you are not offended by my good will in hoping God heals you soon. Amen.
peace
I'm not offended by that. If god is "up there" and wants to help out, he's very welcome to.
The original cause of depression was rooted probably in religion. I was gay/bisexual and I struggled to come out. I found that I had taken in a lot of ideas of sex as something that is negative and sinful and it dated back to childhood when I was in primary school. My primary school wasn't a religious school but had a Christian ethos, so we learnt bible stories and sang about Jesus. I don't know how the subject of sex came up but it was there. The early period of depression was largely coming out and becoming much more comfortable with my sexuality and over-turning bad ideas and habits coming out of cultural Christianity.
Later on however, yes, there definitely has been an existential crisis and a nihilism of sorts. The problem has been that without a belief in god, it has a domino effect on questioning everything else that is related to god. Questioning whether morality is really consistent with being a "materialist" has been a big problem because there isn't a set of easy answers available or (given that it could feature social darwinism) a set of answers I'd want to accept. The fact that there is no "cosmic" justice in the world and that the "good guys" don't always win is depressing.
As a Communist sympathiser, that has played out particularly in thinking about all the atrocities committed under Stalin, Mao and releasing that if you were in one of those places, you are unlikely to be able to do anything about it and the fear means you probably will go along with it. There is that really horrific moment when it hits you and you realise you probably would have killed people if you had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and it puts those kind of beliefs in a very difficult moral context, but one that is absolutely necessary to face up to. On the one hand its a set of beliefs you invested a great deal of time and effort in, and on the other you have to sort of grow up, take a step back and think really hard whether that is a good enough reason to unthinkingly parrot a party line (and no, it most definitely isn't but it takes time to accept it). Where it gets difficult is the feeling of guilt, shame and fear because you've always been taught "that's wrong", but it gets easier with time and you learn to forgive yourself for being only human. most people when faced with those problems would not do the "right thing" but the fact I have asked those questions and tried to take some responsibility is definitely more exceptional. So I can have a bit of pride in that. It is a rare individual who rebels against their peers as we are social animals and tend to conform even when we shouldn't.
Its a pretty dark area to think about, but the positive effect of it is that you can put everything in perspective and say "well, things aren't that bad". It gives you a standard of evil or pain to judge things by and most things are simply annoying or inconvenient rather than genuinely bad. Of course, if you've thought about this kind of stuff for a long time you are going to have a deeply unconventional way of approaching things and a certain lurking sense of horror is always kind of "there" hanging in the background and you just try to respect it.
The flip side of this has been that, if I am "just an animal", the depression is a conditioned response to external stimuli. Animals aren't naturally depressed and they aren't born depressed, so its something that is learned. The way I have coped with it is to be
less rational and paying much more attention to how I feel. If I feel bad, there is a reason for it and its best not to ignore it. you wouldn't ignore physical pain, so you treat psychological pain the same way. That has created a sort of mental space to question how my beliefs contribute to it and there is usually some form of ignorance or absolutism that gives me a false confidence in pessimism than I can change. Most of the time there are things you can do that will make you happy and more fulfilled. They generally small, but the positive effect adds up.
I've had depression for nine years and when I think about the future, there is still a really deep abyss I can sink in to. I'm still dealing with that, but I think the depression isn't so much about whether the future is "bad" or not, but the sense that I have so little control over it. To give you a direct answer, without a god giving you a sort of divine protection to make sure things always turn out ok, yes, you do face an existential crisis because the meaning, purpose and significance of your own life is no longer self-evident. You have to regain a childhood sense of wonder and love of things because it is the only sane response to it. you can be too rational and have to accept that the animal and emotional side of you is capable of doing good and not be afraid of it as "sinful" or somehow less human. Listening the music helps a great deal because it gives you a meditative space to really know and express what you feel. It gets easier but you have to keep pushing forward.
