{non-fiction}

We use the word friend a lot. It’s one of those weak spots in the language. It means pretty much anything. As a noun, it can mean a bunch of people you know a little who show up to the same parties, or it can mean the person you call when your life is on the line. As an adjective, it can describe a neighbor you don’t ever think about or a flirtation that obsesses you. And since Facebook, it’s become a verb too - one that means barely anything at all.

It’s understandable that we use the word so much. There are no real alternatives. ‘Acquaintance’ is bloodless and hollow, ‘associate’ more so; ‘chum’ is weird and antiquated; ‘buddy’ sounds like you’re making fun; ‘bro’ is narrow and silly; ‘cousin’ is useless to non-Hawaiians now that Dennis Hopper has passed on; and every other iteration is either archaic (‘companion’, ‘familiar’, ‘confidant’), slang-specific (‘homeboy’, ‘mate’, ‘BFF’), or too close for non-sexual comfort (‘soul mate’, ‘second self’, ‘kindred spirit’).

So what are we left with? Another ‘love’: a word that means too much and too little. I love my mother, I love my dog, I love my wife, I love chili cheese dogs, I love Bach. Do these feelings have anything in common? And does Facebook friending someone you knew in middle school have anything in common with being there when another human being says, ‘I need help’ - or better yet, before?

We think we know people. It’s human nature. A child sees a parent for years on end, a student sees a teacher for an hour of every day, a neighbor sees a neighbor for an hour of every week, a viewer sees a movie star for an hour of every month, and everyone thinks they know who they’re seeing.

There’s a name for that: it’s called the surface.

Maybe a more revealing word than ‘friend’ is ‘connection’. That’s the one marketers use, and it’s how we talk about romance too, at least on reality dating shows. You’re looking to ‘make a connection’ in order to hopefully, eventually, be ‘in a relationship’. Far too decisive a loss for we English majors to keep up the fight, but being ‘in a relationship’ means nothing at all. Everything in the cosmos is in a relationship with everything else. It’s programming language, which isn’t surprising, since most of the human interaction in the industrialized world now relies on the intermediaries of electricity (which involves connection) and math (which involves relationships). They call it an if/then statement: if there’s a connection, then there’s a relationship - a simple function of two variables.

The key point here, apart from the my god what have we become, is that no terms are set for words like ‘connection’ or ‘relationship’. They’re deliberately functional, which means they exclude anything not directly associated with the problem. Math is a brutally streamlined discipline: quite literally no extraneous material is ever included, out of principle. In a way, it’s the source of its beauty. When people describe math as pure or even divine, they mean it’s absolutely free of any complications unnecessary to the solution.

The joke you’ve heard if you’ve ever been a freshman in a math class goes something like this: a physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician are stuck on a desert island when a can of food washes up on shore. The physicist says, ‘Let’s drop it from a tree.’ The engineer says, ‘Let’s hit it with a rock.’ The mathematician says, ‘Alright, let’s assume a can opener.’

So if you’re not in a relationship, it’s complicated.

One of the great and abiding mysteries of existence is that we can get better. There’s hope, but there’s also reckoning. Many more of us are dying, and many many more us are suffering, than need be.

What’s that old chestnut your chatty friend likes to repeat about relationships? The opposite of love isn’t hate - it’s indifference.

Ever let that sink in? That means the worst thing you can do is nothing. Just sitting there reading this, in relation to every other creature or pursuit on God’s green earth and beyond, you’re doing evil so profound it’s worse than hate.

It’s not an exaggeration, a triviality, or a verbal trick. It’s the nature of existence. A father who does nothing at all is a terrible father - pretty much the worst kind. The hopeless crush who broke your heart didn’t do it by hating you; they just ignored you. And in the world of dark moral hypotheticals, watching a man drown while you hold the buoy out of reach is about as odious a thing as you can do. Killing them yourself would at least mean acknowledging that they exist.

This is not an easy moral lesson to learn, not least because of its impossibly wide-ranging implications. It defeats even the most learned among us. Refusing to acknowledge the unintended consequences of our actions is perhaps the major dilemma of geopolitics. We believe that we should be judged by our intentions (what we care about), not by the unintended consequences of our behavior (what we don’t). So if, for example, we target a brutal criminal for execution by drone and hit a wedding party of innocents instead, we don’t expect to be judged by the terrible thing that we actually did - because we didn’t care about that. We expect to be seen as righteous lawmen who made a mistake, because we’re morally oriented that way. Yet to someone who lost a loved one, the fact that the killer didn’t mean to do it may in fact be even colder comfort than if they did. Hate, at least, is recognition.

Here’s a word that does have terms: communion. To the modern ear, these terms are pretty stark. That’s because, for one thing, they force us to acknowledge the divine in human affairs, something that scares the shit out of everyone - even people who call themselves religious. And that’s mostly because we don’t agree on what that is.

Agreeing on the same God is beyond us now, and for many of us, that means having to live without Him (or Her or It or Them or Us) entirely. Being included in one religious community means being excluded from another, and since - as news readers and social media users and cosmopolitan people about town - our communities overlap more than they ever have before, we tend to tone down the whole spark of divinity in all of us thing.

That’s nice - even necessary. We don’t offend anyone and we don’t puff ourselves up and we try to see the world clearly. It’s easy and cool and smooth, and it’s a nice change of pace from the wars of religion that have occupied much of human history. Finally a little smooth sailing.

What’s impossible to tell from the prow is that the sea is drowning.

The better part of a million people kill themselves every year. That’s many more millions of people who lose someone they care about. One in a hundred of us has made plans to kill themselves. For young adults, it’s the second leading cause of death. In around 90% of cases, the departed was suffering from a mental illness.

It would be shameful and wrong of me to suggest that these tragedies have a common underlying cause. Even in a perfect society, people would be driven by dark, terrible inner forces we don’t fully understand and probably never will.

But here’s another thing: treatment can work. People who are in serious mental health peril can be counseled, medicated, and rallied around. It’s never a sure thing, even for people and families and friends who try the hardest, but there’s a chance at saving people. There’s even a chance for people to save themselves. One of the great and abiding mysteries of existence is that we can get better.

And since this is so, we can understand that these problems, as deep as they are, aren’t always bottomless. There’s hope, but there’s also reckoning. Many more of us are dying, and many many more us are suffering, than need be. 

What didn’t we do?

Depression is often called a modern disease, but of course it isn’t. The name is, though. In pre-modern times, it was just as likely to be called a spiritual crisis.

Again with the God stuff. But consider: God is, even by the standards of the most rigid and orthodox religious practice, essentially unknowable. We may know about God, but we don’t know God. It’s the name we give to things we don’t understand. We recognize that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our antiquated names. Some of us are perfectly okay with leaving it at that. Those who can’t, or don’t want to, ask about God.

Of course we know a lot more now - about the sea inside and out. We can even change them, both deliberately and not-so-deliberately. We can flood the world, use mescalin, save the whales, make and take pills that right our ships and save our lives. There’s a lot less we don’t know, and so there’s a lot less God.

That means different things to different people. For some, it’s a boon. We can live better, control more of reality, elevate our vision of ourselves. For others, it’s a blow. Revelling in the mystery of existence was a lot easier when God was the horizon. All you had to do was look out at the sea at night to experience total immersion in the divine.

Not knowing much may be a small way of living, and a depressive in a world like that might have been lost at sea. But the danger in knowing is thinking you know.

A man experiences intense despair. Bottomless darkness, ringing anxiety, crushing loneliness. His place in the world feels meaningless. He’s in deep, seemingly insurmountable debt - an almost ubiquitous human dilemma that can become an unbearable psychological weight. (Rich or poor, debt is one of the most crucial factors leading to suicide.) His unhappiness makes him feel like a burden to those who need him. His pain makes him feel unable to satisfy the demands of his work and family.

Once upon a time, this man would have gone to church. Today, he’d go to therapy.

With a mental health professional listening to him and guiding him, he’d open up. He’d pour out his feelings, his anxieties, his pain, his most secret fears and longings. He would do this, in part, because he hasn’t been able to do it anywhere else. And gradually, with careful attention paid to his feelings and medicine prescribed for any underlying conditions, he might start to feel better.

In most cases - let’s be honest - a doctor can and does help a lot more than God and his self-styled representatives would. At the moment of crisis, when the heart is close to giving out, you need CPR, not prayers.

We see this scenario play out again and again and we understand it as representing the parameters of mental health: crisis, intervention, and hopefully, survival. The storm passed, the sea becalmed, and the sailing smooth again. But all we’ve seen is surface. The sailing goes on, but the big fish are almost gone, the water is acidifying, and there’s mercury in the catch. The body may have all the doctors it needs these days, but all the soul has is paramedics.

I’m not the first to say that therapy is the secular version of confession. In the modern world, it’s often the only opportunity we get to talk about meaningful things in a meaningful way. Most of the time, we’re flitting through, trying to be nice, trying to be light. That’s what our kinds of connection encourage. Therapy tries to fill the void, but it has sharp parameters that isolate it from everyday life, and make it a strange place for a soul to find solace.

In the first place, it’s medicalized. The doctor is treating a patient, meaning that there is a sickness that must be cured. If the person doesn’t consider themselves sick, or if the other person doesn’t think they’re sick enough to be there, the whole thing pulls away like an annoyed ambulance driver. And then, of course, you get the bill.

The monetization of the endeavor, so often glossed over by mental health advocates, is deeply problematic. On the practical level, anxious, depressed, debt-ridden people can be quite readily scared off by the prospect of exorbitant costs associated with their treatment. To their credit, health professionals work very hard to bring those costs down for the needy, and in many cases the financial burden is negligible. But it remains a genuine obstacle, both in reality and in perception.

This isn’t just a matter of public awareness, or advocacy. It goes much deeper than that. Patients understand themselves to be buying something from their doctors: expertise, medicine, equipment. It’s a good, and people expect to pay something for it. From the get-go, it’s a moneyed equation. Say what you will about a church - and there’s plenty to say, especially about money - you can just go in one and sit down. You can’t do that at a doctor’s office.

Relatedly, the whole process of medical treatment is heavily formalized. In the manner of a well-oiled bureaucracy, detailed records are kept of all proceedings, all manner of health indicators are constantly assessed, and the clock is carefully watched. The phrase most closely associated with psychiatry in the popular imagination is, ‘Our time is up.’

What if a human being just wants to connect in a meaningful way with others? What if a person wants to be heard, to hear, to participate, to contribute, and to experience the world in a genuinely engaged way? What if they want to talk about their longings, their dreams, their fears, their hopes for themselves and their loved ones and the human race - off the clock? What if they’re afraid of glaciers melting and the world sinking underwater? What if they can’t find a job that makes any real use of their talents? What if they desperately want to help their community grow and heal, but have no real opportunities to do so? What if they suspect there’s a lot more to life than YouTube videos and the Top 40 and two hours of commuting every day? What if they think, at some profound level, that there’s something terribly wrong? Who do they tell? And in what context?

It’s not something that the workplace encourages. There are stark terms to employment in corporate America, and the big questions are very much off the table. Even a basic agreement among employees to defend their mutual interests is a lightning rod of controversy. You’re supposed to do your work and go home.

Schools can be a little better, but in some ways they’re even more rigidly governed. At a critical age of inquiry, students are driven by powerful social forces to toe the line and do what they’re told on threat of lifelong destitution - all in a state of jaw-dropping sleep deprivation, exacerbated by aggressively marketed technological distractions.

Even churches don’t generally function as churches anymore, if indeed they ever did. A free mind looking for passionate inquiry into the state of the world and their soul would be met, not only with the wrong answers, but much more grievously, with the wrong questions. A 21st century citizen of a dying world might not be terribly concerned with preserving the so-called sanctity of marriage, insisting on legal jurisdiction over a woman’s reproductive system, or rabidly decrying evolution, but that’s what they’d get from much of Christian America. 

We might just as readily expect the followers of Jesus’ gospel to be more concerned with endemic poverty, perpetual war, and a for-profit health care industry. After all, Jesus blessed the poor and the peacemakers, healed the sick, and said not one single fucking word about homosexuality, abortion, or Darwin, but here we are.

So what’s left? How do we commune? And what happens if we don’t?

The other big word in social media is ‘like’. That’s what people do when they’re on Facebook: they click a button to signal that they like something. For anyone trying to reach people, it’s an astonishingly big deal. ‘Likes’ have a very real market value. The more ‘likes’, the more value something has. They can make you rich. In a way, they can even make you powerful.

‘Like’, not incidentally, is as valueless a word as the language contains. Even before Facebook, it was so ubiquitous as to be wrung of every last drop of meaning. The most elastic word of them all, it can be a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, and quotative. It’s also the main ingredient of verbal diarrhea, spilling out of the mouths of those who’ve failed to think before they speak - especially the very young, who’ve yet to master the language. It’s what you say when you don’t know what to say.

Yet, naturally enough, it’s also an icon of la dolce vita - the sweet life immortalized by Fellini. This is the idea that life can be full by being empty; that carefreedom is freedom, that an endless parade of pleasures can successfully divert you from any existential pain. It’s video games. It’s YouTube. It’s Facebook. It’s twinkies. It’s everything that anybody ever tried to sell you - and especially, the next one after that.

The problem with la dolce vita is that, if anything is ever taken to heart, the whole thing shatters to pieces. When you like something, it means you don’t love it. You don’t get to love it. There’s no button for that.

People say love a lot too, of course. It’s just as watered down as like, but as a lake to a sea, it covers more ground.

It’s easy to tell someone you love them. It’s even easy to love them. That’s just a feeling - the surface of the ocean. Deeper than love is caring; caring about something or someone. And deeper than caring about something or someone is doing something to help them.

If only life could be simple. If only the world could be flat. If only God was the horizon. It’s the natural reaction of a small being facing a suffering, complicated world. The defense - the only defense we have - is not to go too deep. So we try to stay afloat and sail on as best we can. But whether we want it or not, there’s a big blue beneath us.

6/2/2015