Depression: From Futility to Acceptance

Following on the article in August’s newsletter (here), describing depression in its basic components as a mechanism (the depressive symptoms), and a switch (how we have learned or are vulnerable to having that mechanism turned on), in this month’s article I’m looking at the “switch” of futility, or rather the “switches” of different types of futlity.

Futility is defined as that experience of the uselessness or ineffectualness of further action towards a particular goal. Political candidates, for instance, drop out of the race when their assessment is that further campaigning is futile.

But we don’t always act so rationally in assessing futility.

So here we’ll take from Paul Keedwell’s book on the evolutionary origins of depression, How Sadness Survived, his list of the five ways in which we “struggle on in spite of failure,” and thus create chronic stress…and thus court depression. After these, we’ll talk a little bit about why acceptance is, then, so important in “unspringing” depression.

Five Forms of Futility

1. Ignorance: You simply don’t know that your work is futile, not having on hand the information your mind needs to make that assessment. You keep at the task, work harder and harder, thinking that there is a chance to succeed when there actually is not. You keep submitting patent applications (say) without know that there is a company working unethically to squash that emerging technology. From your perspective, not having that information, you keep thinking that the problem is on your side, and therefore you believe there is a possibility of success if you only do it right.
2. High moral scruples: We refuse to yield our scruples in a situation which punishes us for holding those scruples, without also choosing to leave the situation. This is not to say that we should have low moral scruples, but rather to know when to stop fighting for what cannot be won. If you are teaching English in a college devoted to training army officers, and you are a pacifist wanting to spread your message, if you are not able to accept that the institution is not amenable to your message, or leave and find more fertile ground, you are likely to experience the chronic stress arising from your unyielding dedication to your beliefs.
3. Trying to please others rather than ourselves: We find ourselves trying to satisfy another’s goal, and avoiding addressing and acting on our own. Eventually, we will find ourselves in the stress created by inauthenticity, of trying to shape our lives in someone else’s image of what our life should be. We join the military to become an officer, when at heart we’re a pacifist, because the lineage of men in our family have always been in the military.
4. Unrealistic expectations arising from childhood: We bring beliefs from our childhood into our adult lives, and keep trying to live them out. For instance, “I’m only lovable when I am the best at everything I try,” being (say) the message you got from your father, who would only show approval when you got good grades or succeeded at football. It becomes your programming for adulthood, and without being challenged, creates a constant underlying stress about what happens when you, inevitably, fail. I.e., you’re constantly, at some level, stressed out about losing love, and that drives you to a perfection that no one can attain.
5. The Manic Defense: “Someone with this manic defense is terrified of having his core feelings of worthlessness exposed by others,” (Keedwell). In order to avoid actually feeling inadequate, one is constantly doing, being, becoming, conquering, dominating, creating-essentially, always going. Not from a joie de vivre, but from a fear of collapse.

Acceptance (as the Solution)

So, those are five ways of creating chronic stress, and therefore courting depression, which functions to de-motivate (or de-attach) us from a futile goal. Look at the five and see which one describes your modus operandi most closely.

Then notice that the resolution of all these chronically stressful situations is not further struggle, but accepting the futility of further struggle. In other words, accepting that you’ve lost the battle and surrendering. Because each of these five is deeply embedded and invested in a struggle: to figure out the problem and fix it (#1); to sustain or spread one’s values in the face of obstruction (#2); to make someone else’s desire our own (#3); to live according to a belief system that is fundamentally false, but which we think we can’t live without (#4); and to constantly struggle not to fall into a despair that we always feel tugging at us (#5). Struggle, continuously.

Acceptance is the letting go, or cutting away, that which we are attached to and identified with, but which we can’t actually succeed at. Because if we don’t do this consciously and willingly, depression will do it to us. If we are not willing to fall back from the futile and surrender to both the relief and the grief of losing these cherished, if futile, desires, then the crushing hand of depression will fill in by simply squashing us in our tracks, simply making us too heavy to move towards anything.

So–and this is where mindfulness practice is so vital–we must practice acceptance, or as a Buddhist writer put it, “The skill of letting go.” The five situations above are like the raccoon grabbing the shiny treat within a trap that catches him because his balled fist (holding the treat), cannot fit back through the hole, but he’s neither willing to let go of what he wants. The solution is not an overcoming, but rather, a falling away.