Discovering the desire that undermines depression: Discerning versus deciding who we are
The article for this month concerns the relationship of desire and depression, and how we typically inherit our thoughts about our desires, rather than discern those desires through the process of examining ourselves. If we are to find what our authentic desires are, we have to look closely and carefully at ourselves, in an often somewhat arduous process of getting to know what this “self” actually is. So many people—parents, families, cultures—tell us what we should want, and what should satisfy us. But rarely do those simply line up with our unique desires, and in that gap of knowledge, and then action on those desires, is the fertile ground from which depression can spring.
The question, “What do you want in your life?” is perhaps one of the more dreadful things we can try to answer, if we are not defaulting to a pat or inherited answer. “Well, I want to be happy, and to have a good mate and a family, and want to contribute to the world”—that’s all well and good, quite laudable intentions, but desire is actually very particular, very unique, and often very unsettling. Knowing our desires is knowing ourselves, and that often upsets our, and our culture’s, best constructed apple carts.
Desire and Depression
But how is desire connected to depression? Webster’s defines desire as a “conscious impulse toward something that promises enjoyment or satisfaction in its attainment,” which certainly encompasses our more topical desires—for instance, “Well, if that’s what we have to choose from, I guess I’d want Indian food.” But if desire at its deepest level is a set of attachments to “satisfactions,” and that that set in a large way defines who we actually are, then a frustration in the attainment of desire is a frustration of being our selves. Not knowing our true desires, we organize our lives around either unclarified, or false desires, either running on autopilot, or according to rules and satisfactions that others have told us are true of ourselves. Either way, we will be pouring our life energies into pursuits and relationships that deep down are not interesting to us. Dissatisfaction builds up and, not just particular pursuits are frustrating, but our lives themselves start feeling more and more futile, i.e., what we want for ourselves cannot be attained, and that’s exactly the situation depression is built to respond to.
Depression, in short, doesn’t care whether we’re happy, but only if we are apportioning energy in a sustainable way. It doesn’t know if we are deluded about our desires, only if those goals prove themselves over time to be running in the energetic red. Futility, the objective condition in which goals in the world cannot be accomplished, is monitored by the depressive machinery, and if something is deemed futile—say, endeavoring towards playing pro basketball when you actually don’t have the ability—and you will not let it go, then in order to not keep bleeding energy without any return, depression will pull the plug on us, shutting everything down.
The upshot here is that if we do not know what our actual, real, particular and unique desires are (that which “promises enjoyment or satisfaction in its attainment”), we will chase false ones and engender over time a sense of futility about our own lives, which then courts depression. To avoid that inevitably requires us to know ourselves…like it or not.
Which then begs the question of how do we go about knowing our desires? What I contend is that knowing desires is not a matter of deciding, but discerning. In other words, we cannot just, by fiat, say what we want, but rather have to take our present awareness of desire and subject it to examination. Desire is what we find when we look closely at ourselves; it is not decided, but discovered.
For example:
Greg is a 37-year-old tech guy, climbing the ladder within the corporate world of his company, having reached an upper level of management after emerging from the ranks of the engineer group. His next step is into senior management, probably a VP position overseeing marketing, which was his focus in business school. Family life was going fine—he genuinely loved his wife, and his nine-year-old daughter was healthy and had a good relationship with him—but work, for all its successes, was starting to feel greyer and greyer. His connections were ok at work, not strong friendships, but respectful colleagues, and the work itself was interesting…so he didn’t understand why there was an increasing low-grade malaise creeping in over the last years into the work.
Eventually, as his performance began to slip, he first sought out the advice of his MD, who didn’t see any physical explanations. But the MD referred him to psychotherapy, assuring him that this kind of depressive experience was common for people in his position, particularly in the tech field. With that, Greg came to me for therapy, assuming at first that he simply needed some tools to deal with work stress better. In looking at the nature of the depression, though, what we found was that his work life had more or less evolved out of chance opportunities, and family assumptions, rather than out of desire per se. His father had been a successful business entrepreneur, creating a track for his son to follow, initially after school within his father’s company, and then moving to a different firm. Being talented and well trained, he moved steadily through the ranks, in a linear stepwise way that came relatively easily, as it was clear and known.
Some people come to looking at their own choices because of a crisis, but Greg came because of a slow accretion of dissatisfaction. He thought that his father’s pattern of life was, de facto, the route to his satisfaction, and rarely questioned it. But some deeper part of him—perhaps stimulated by being a parent, or perhaps by aging and a creeping awareness of mortality—began to question that logic, finding a sense of something being missing.
So, our work was to uncover what those more basic, more in-wired, desires were, and we couldn’t do it by simply deciding on a different pattern of satisfaction. It wouldn’t do to simply say, “Well, apparently corporate America is not for you, so now you must try farming.” If the problem was having unexamined inherited desires, we couldn’t have him simply transplant another set into him. He had to discover what had always lay in him as true desires, which was the process of our work together.
Discernment of desire
The process of discernment, then, is fundamentally different from deciding based on a kind of mental analysis, because discernment comes from the act of looking. How do we look? Essentially, we offer up options to our deeper self—which is in large part our body, and the younger parts of ourselves—and listen to how it thinks about those things. Children are natively great about this: “For bedtime reading, do you want the ‘Adventures of Bunny,’ or, ‘Adventures of Herbie’?”, to which is immediately replied, “Herbie!” Something implicit tells them about their desire in the moment, something that gets buried in adults, and has to be excavated and re-known. We have to access desire through what we feel, not what we think, about the world and its multiple options. Sometimes we can find out things about ourselves which are not included in the approved manual. Maybe we discover we’re actually gay, or do actually want to be a hippy farmer, or as a hippy farmer discover the horrific awareness that we’re longing for a life in business, or are done with our marriage but haven’t been willing to admit it. We live with illusions about ourselves for good reasons, because to know our actual real truth, has consequences, both in obtaining real and deep satisfactions, and in making real and consequential changes. No one said it would be easy, but when the unavoidable outcome to living these illusions is, eventually, to have to, or have to keep, tangling with depression, then in a sense the pursuit of self-knowledge is a foregone necessity.
Postscript: Greg
In Greg’s case, he did not need to make radical changes to his life, when he went through the process of exploring himself and his desires. He confirmed that his family life was actually what he wanted, but the importance was that he was now sure and confident about that, rather than worried that the problem was something about being a husband or father. With work, he discovered that although his training was partially in marketing, he didn’t essentially like the work. What he realized had always excited him out of the corner of his eye was the engineering work related to graphics and creative digital design. When he (with some effort and grief) switched to one of those teams, taking on a mix of management and creative design, he began feeling a sense of satisfaction that reached far down into his body, and confirmed itself when he asked his body about returning to the old field. Daily life and stress, considerations of mortality and standard human conflicts, did not go away, but the depression that was generated by his increasing sense of futility did abate, and because he was both aware of his deeper desires, and know how to keep discerning those desires, that depression did not return.
