May 2020 – Depression and Ungrieved Futility

Last month, I was interviewed on the Sidewalk Talk podcast by my friend and colleague, Traci Ruble. Sidewalk Talk is a project to bring empathic listening to the streets, literally: volunteers set up chairs on sidewalks all over the world, and fellow humans get to sit down for a bit, and just be heard without judgment or trying to be fixed. It’s a brilliant and heartful idea, and Traci has added this podcast to help support the hundreds of volunteers with different interviewees offering different perspectives on how to understand the project, and stay inspired.

So below are a few notes about the interview, and the link to the audio recording. Enjoy.

Depression and Ungrieved Futility

The focus of this interview was, how does depression relate to connection, given that Sidewalk Talk is all about fostering and deepening connection. So, the talk went into an exegesis of depression as I see it, circling around the concept of “ungrieved futility”. If you’ve been following along over time on this newsletter, you’ll have some idea of what that is. But to recap: ungrieved futility is what I propose is the core of what makes depression tick, being the state in which some attachment has been lost, and we refuse or see as impossible the letting go of that bond (if we can let go, then grief, instead of depression, arises).

Traci refers to us as geeking out, which is kind of true, and what the talk also points to is the necessity—I’d contend it is simply not an optional part of healing—to have a good-enough conceptional/theoretical understanding of what depression actually is. Transforming and healing from depression is something like the old Risk game: if you don’t occupy the territory, someone else will. If you don’t have a good theory of depression, then depression itself will give you the theory, and it is never going to let on about the truth of what it is.

So although the talk (it is about 40 minutes long) goes into detail, and is pretty conceptual, I think it’s actually an accessible claim on that theoretical territory (maybe Australia). It might bear a couple listenings, but I think it’s worth it.

Here’s the link to the podcast: “Depression and Ungrieved Futility”.