Why Are You Depressed?

Why are you depressed?

When I was a kid, I used to wonder why animals had instincts and humans didn’t. Why they were born knowing how to live and we had to go to school. What I now understand is that humans do have instincts. We have an instinctive knowing of our soul’s purpose. We have an instinctive affinity for the people, places, things, and activities that will allow that purpose to emerge and unfold. And the way we experience our instinct is that we are drawn by our desire, which we may experience as curiosity, enjoyment, enthusiasm, satisfaction. Those of us who look back positively on our childhoods do so largely because we were allowed to play—which was a way to practice and explore and develop our skills at the things that were interesting and fun and rewarding and meaningful to us. Notice that this is what non-human children do with their instincts, too—they first do for play all the things they will later do to succeed at their lives.

Each of us came here for a unique purpose, so we each have to rely on our own instincts. No one else knows why we are here, or is here for exactly the same reason. However, I can give you a hint. All humans are creative beings. We all came here to make a difference that only we can make: discover something, improve something, learn and teach something, make or experience something. We know this in our bones, because one of the saddest things to imagine is living an entire human life from birth to death and doing nothing that couldn’t have been done just as well or better by someone else.

So we all came into this life with an instinct, a compass needle of our desire, that points us towards what we came here to do. And because this is a world of duality, we also came equipped with a negative indicator, which we may experience as indifference, boredom, misery or suffering, that points us away from what we did not come here to do.

This navigation system is elegant and user friendly, and works very well in the environment where it evolved. Unfortunately, for the last several millennia, that environment has been polluted by a toxic strain of human culture. Soon after we are born, the clean gears of our instinct start to gum up with sludgy messages. Desire is wrong. Suffering is virtuous. No pain, no gain. We spend the first quarter of our lives learning to ignore both our desire and our misery, and pursue a standard of success that is defined outside of us and serves others at our expense.

Depression is the natural and inevitable result of pursuing an externally defined idea of success that does not align with our instinctive understanding of our soul’s purpose. When we spend our energy on things that don’t matter to us, we don’t charge our internal battery and we burn out. We are quite literally disempowered, in that we are discouraged from doing the things that we are naturally powerful at, and which give us power to do.

Depression is what happens when we ignore our misery and our desire for too long. It shuts down the system. It forces us to stop doing, not just the misery-inducing things, but all the things. Once this happens, we can’t just go back to the way things were.

Instead, we need to reset our nervous system and reconnect to our instinctive navigation system. We need to “go to ground,” in the literal sense of putting ourselves in contact with the Earth. Reboot from the original hard drive. Go outside. Sit on the ground. Climb a tree. Dig a hole. Build a dam in the creek. Wander in the woods. Seek the company of animals. Lie on the beach and listen to the ocean. In nature, there is no pretext, no expectation, no shame, guilt, embarrassment, or judgement. All the pollution telling us to be something other than what we are is gone. Things are what they are. And when you’re there you can remember what you are, too. Stay—or at least keep visiting—until you start to feel alive again.

Those flickers of returning life are the first tendrils of connection to your instinctive self, and when you feel them, you must cultivate and strengthen them. The way you do this is to play. Do anything at all, as long as you’re doing it because and only because you enjoy it. And this is equally important: when you stop enjoying what you’re doing, stop doing it.

Not everything or everyone who brings us joy will keep bringing us joy. Sometimes they only join our path briefly. When we seek our success as we are taught to do, outside of ourselves, then we will bind ourselves to everything we love, and sooner or later get dragged into the swamp. If we measure by our internal instinct, we will notice if the suffering indicator starts blinking, and know our paths are diverging. We can say thank you, and bon voyage, and hope to meet again somewhere up the road.

Once you recover from your depression, the pressure to go back to whatever you were doing before is going to be very strong. And this is the one thing you must not do. Once you’ve located your instinctive self, the compass needle of your desire and the negative indicator of your suffering, you have to operate by it every day, in order to stay energized and healthy and living the life you came here to live. You have to keep doing the things you are drawn to, and walking away from the things that don’t attract you, and noticing when they change. This will probably be very scary, because the people around you, the ones whose expectations you were meeting when you abandoned your true self, are not going to know this new you, and are likely to object. You may lose some of them. But walking the path of your desire will feel so good that pretty soon you will not be willing to live any other way. The people who meet you there will meet the true you, which is a much better foundation for relationship. And when the power source of your soul’s purpose is constantly charged by the journey, you will have all the energy you need to address the obstacles that you will inevitably encounter along the way.