Those who embody this idea of the ‘absence of hope’ are probably the most hopeful people of all: they recognize the futility of ordinary living, the monotony of scheduled time and movements, the incongruity of the pre-ordained social desires of financial security, career contentedness and family rearing.
Those who refuse, who say “no”, while being burdened with a heavy head and a heavy heart, ultimately know that there is something more to life than this, but by themselves they cannot change it.
And while they are ostracized, demonized, stigmatized as being outside the social order (because by saying “no” they call into question the motivations of “happiness” or “living” that most people abide by), they perhaps are the people who have the answers (or at least the diagnoses) of how to fundamentally and truly change the world for the better.
Those people who are depressed do not “settle” for depression; they tolerate it. They tolerate it because they must.
To be “happy” on the outside but somehow “incomplete” on the inside (whatever that truly means, another term lifted from the discourse of the “joyless society”), this is a phenomenon not only ubiquitous but celebrated today, a condition anathema to those melancholiacs, cynics, nihilists perceived to be one step behind but in reality are ten steps ahead.
Ernest Hemingway once said, “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for…” Perhaps it is those happy types who are the ones too willing to “leave it,” not those afflicted with depression.
