or, “You Can Be Depressed Anywhere in the World”
I’m in Athens, Greece right now, and I’m thinking about why I’m here. To see the Acropolis? Nah. To immerse myself in Greek culture? To learn the language? Nah. To take exciting touristy photos for Instagram? This gets the closest. The truth is: I’m fucking depressed and I want to be happy. I think these things will make me happier.
What do people do in the movies? In the stories? What do I see other people doing?
Well, from where I’m sitting, it seems like the cool, happy, fulfilled people who are in loving relationships are all doing exciting things in exciting places. So I, like so many others, start to imagine a story of my life, of what it would be like to be that exciting, sexy, brilliant person. I would travel the world, do cool things- see the Acropolis, eat a gyro. Be in Shanghai, work at a museum, wander the streets at night, track down Nick Land. A rapidly accelerating series of airports, cities, foods, cultures at my fingertips. I am grabbing on to the things that seem to give happiness, to create meaning, and I am performing them like rituals.
Reading philosophy, making art, travelling- all of these things are wonderful, but it’s also a matter of how you engage with them as much as what they are. What I suspect is that I am doing something that TLP might call “taking the part for the whole”. You can do things that are good, correct, helpful, productive, and so on, but in ways that are neurotic, violent, or self-destructive.
This is a lesson I am slowly learning. This is what I am experiencing, sobbing on the balcony of a beautiful castle in Santorini. This is what I am being told, laying awake at 4 AM in Athens, heart racing anxiously out of control after having spent all day marveling at the Acropolis, the Stili Olimpiou Dios, and a beautiful park that housed the prison where Socrates was held. I can do the same things that happier people do, that healthier people do, that more accomplished, respected, or fulfilled people do, but it does not make me them. This is me touching the parts, imagining that I can become whole through a simple process of accumulation, that, as long as I could graft these things on to myself, I could become something entirely else.
It is the same cargo cult that incels worship, as do the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ gun fetishists, hippies, and liberal technocrats alike. The symbols of wellness, of fulfillment, of wisdom or safety; signifiers, never sufficient to replace the whole they elide.
The truth is that happy people may also travel, that “cool” people may also make art and culture, not that travelling will necessarily make you happy, or that creating an artwork will make you cool, which will not make you loved, which will not make you okay with the profound emptiness inside of your heart. These are incomplete things, partial objects, that you can touch, or possess, or affect without getting any closer to the whole. The whole is something that travels with you, something you can’t elide or avoid.
There is a novelty and an excitement at travel, and in all of its possibilities, but what is it that we take home with us? Is the city just another restaurant to sample, just another gift shop with trinkets to accumulate?
I hope not, and I tell myself that it isn’t. I tell myself that I’m engaging with culture and history, that reading Plato’s Apologia Socrates while sitting outside of the cave where he was imprisoned will make me a better person — The type of person who would do that is a pretty cool person, right?
…right?
