Groundless World: Depression as Twitter
On the entwining of truth and falsehood in the depressed perspective, Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011), and the poverty of social media
Is depression telling the truth, or is it deluding? The depressed person experiences thoughts and feelings which are, by all accounts, painful. But are they truthful? Some accounts of depression – including from the afflicted – insist stubbornly that depression is an extreme but rational response to unpalatable facts: life is hard; fulfilment and contentment elude us; death seems absolutely final. One theory analyses depression as the suspension of common instincts which are deeply irrational but highly desirable from an evolutionary point of view: a preoccupation with short-term gratification, an ability to subsist on dreams and fantasies, a tendency not to think about death. The depressed person, in this reading, is not deluded but the one who has escaped delusions, and opened their eyes. Politically attuned accounts of depression mostly begin with this principle. Understood as an internalisation of social or economic op-pression, depression looks self-defeating and unpleasant, certainly, but also austerely sane.
Yet the opposite point of view – depression as a delusion – feels equally necessary. Those of us who have known and loved a severely depressed person will be struck by the wild untruthfulness of the things that person says, especially about themselves, and especially about the future. In the Christian world before modernity depression was called despair – a spiritual affliction whose sufferers were completely convinced of their damnation, and couldn’t see any alternative. (There was also melancholia, a heavy and sometimes poetic sadness of mysterious origin, but in severe cases modern depression seems to be made as much of despair as of melancholia.) It’s the despairing hopelessness of contemporary depression that strikes sympathetic outsiders as most irrational. When someone says that everything about their life is bleak, it might be hard to disagree with them. But when they tell you with total certainty that there is no hope of any change, they show themselves to be prisoners of a terrible untruth. Almost everything can change, in ways we can’t understand: contingency and chance are as fundamental to human experience as suffering is.
A Helix of True and False
The simultaneous validity of both these accounts is perhaps what makes depression so awful, both for the afflicted and for those who love them. Painful but underacknowledged truths exist, in the depressed soul, alongside terrible misconceptions – but the bystander’s scepticism towards those misconceptions is undermined by the failure to acknowledge the painful truths. In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst plays Justine, a young woman who works in advertising and who relapses into severe depression in the middle of her own exhaustively choreographed glamorous wedding. A star, Antares, is shining especially brightly, and seems to pull Justine into despair; later in the film another star, Melancholia, appears from behind Antares and is forecast to pass very near Earth. As she falls back into depression Justine sees her bourgeois wedding in all its self-important absurdity. While her sister, Claire, panics about Melancholia’s impending approach, Justine accepts calmly that the planet is set not to bypass Earth but to collide with it. Within von Trier’s extravagantly imagined world, it’s a moment of symbolic truth-telling, a recognition that our death is far more real than any of the reified fictions – fancy golf course weddings; advertising jobs; the status gained by conventional success – to which we cling for distraction. Yet Justine has also fallen prey to wild misapprehensions. She is so depressed that she must be lifted, limb by limb, into the bath. Claire has her cook prepare a favourite meatloaf for dinner, but in her agony Justine finds it inedible. ‘It tastes like ashes’, she says. Justine is right about the finality of death, but wrong about the meatloaf. Just because we will one day die doesn’t mean that everything is marked, irreversibly, by death, and that we cannot be pleasantly surprised. She can’t perceive the difference between her insight and her error. None of the denialists around her can persuade her of it – and neither can we say, for sure, that in a world of astrologically influential planets a meatloaf definitely couldn’t taste of ashes; we can’t know what it feels like to be suffering such mental agony.
But if Justine can’t tell apart the two aspects of depression, its harsh truthfulness and its terrible delusion, perhaps that’s because they are more subtly interwoven than metaphors of two faces, or two sides of one coin, might imply. Perhaps extreme realism and extreme delusion are more like twin threads of a double helix, so intricately entwined that they begin to colour and inform one another. The depressed person is right not to shy away from frightening truths, but there is a wildness to their fixation which inflates those truths beyond realistic size. To the depressed person, perhaps, any death – any loss, even - brings to mind the apocalyptic collision of one planet with another. Conversely, what I have been describing as the wild delusions of depression, the total but totally unfounded certainty about the impossibility of any redemption, gain their dreadful tenacity by virtue of disguising themselves as realistic assessments. Underneath their wildest, most unsubstantiated conviction the depressed person sees a mountain of evidence. Depression imprisons its victims in the delusions of despair by speaking in the voice of realism. It writes off the future the way a responsible adult checks the weather forecast and cancels a holiday.
Poor in World
Byung-Chul Han, philosopher of contemporary life (I mentioned him a few posts back, in an essay on Radiohead), says that to be depressed is to be poor in world. Han is thinking of digital technology, and how our ever-present mediating screens distance us from the realm of things. Living through smartphones – primary example of the Non-Things in Han’s title – we forget the three-dimensional materiality, the bulkiness and resistance, of things in the world, even banal and modern ones like the landline telephone with its cord and receiver. This is regrettable, Han thinks, because it’s from acquaintance with material things that we gain the ability to relate properly to other people, and thus to feel fully present. Depression, then, is a ‘pathologically intensified’ version of the poverty in world of the smartphone addict. I’m persuaded by all of this, and hope I’ll write more soon on how the smartphone regime impoverishes not just our corporal belonging in the world of things but also our capacity to dream our way into other places.
But if the observation I made earlier – about depression speaking its despairing falsities in a language of realism – is accurate, then I think Han’s account needs slight adjustment. Depression certainly takes us away from the world. But it does so by conjuring up, in that dreadful voice of bogus realism, an illusory, thin and mean ‘real world’. The depressive is the person who has lost the ability, or the permission, to become enchanted; enchantment is the experience of being spirited away into some other, rich realm. Depression tethers its sufferers to a ‘real world’ stripped of colour, vivacity, and possibilities for change. Earlier in Non-Things Han describes this place as ‘hyper-real reality’. We could also describe it as a world (a place of austere, grown-up verities) stripped of ground (a three-dimensional, material place): a groundless world.
Twitter / X: More of the Same
If you’re enough of a masochist to still be active on Twitter – or to work in a profession, like academia, in which Twitter’s become the conventional place to hawk your wares – your algorithm might have been feeding you plenty of performative laments, in which long-term Twitter users lambast Elon Musk for turning a great and emancipatory platform into an alt-right ‘hellsite’. The conversion of Twitter into X has certainly released a flood of hatred, disinformation and manipulative clickbait, at terrible potential cost. Trump and his cronies can repeat their lies, once more, without consequences. Musk, meanwhile, seems to personify the horrific combination of anti-human techno-fetish, regressive social norms and Game of Thrones aesthetics in whose image the bloodless ghouls of Silicon Valley want to remake us. But Twitter was already bad, before Musk acquired it. As with most bad things, streaks of goodness ran through it: anarchic football memes, in my case, and Paintings of London and the odd useful announcement. But that was a sideshow. The mainstream of Twitter, long before X, was people having barbed and sanctimonious exchanges about unfolding events. It was a constant drip-feed of piety and rage, excessive earnestness and pathological flippancy, forensic vigilance and inattention.
Twitter was a groundless world. To spend an hour scrolling through it was to feel tethered to the ‘real world’ of (according to the algorithm’s calculation about me) challenging job markets and Parliamentary procedure and performative statements of solidarity. To be mired in reality, like this, makes it feel more than difficult to tear yourself away and concentrate on your work: it makes that tearing away feel irresponsible, somehow, a childish turning from reality. Except there’s nothing real about this Twitter world. Its commonality is a mirage, because the algorithm ensures that everyone sees a different combination of events. What’s more, it isn’t connected to the ground. L.M. Sacasas, author of a brilliant Substack on technology and the good life, points out that in the digital sphere ‘discussion detaches from the issue at hand’. On Twitter, a discussion about the UK academic job market quickly becomes a discussion about the wording of the original post, or one of its comments. This is equally true, sadly, for discussions about global affairs where the stakes are much higher than the UK academic job market. But even before this weird detachment kicks in, Twitter has the ability to cast the subjects of its discussions as exclusively real. Its hardcore users post several hundred times a day, sucked into a simulated reality in which current events, and immediate reactions to them, possess a reality denied to the material, three-dimensional ground in which those events must, presumably, have taken place. Sometimes, smugly, they tell each other to ‘touch grass’.
Twitter abstracts us, then, from everything: from our embodied and material lives beyond the thin reality of what is happening in the real world; from grass. But it accomplishes this abstraction by tethering us to a hollowed-out reality, a groundless world. Twitter – and perhaps, to a lesser but related extent, all life on the internet – makes us poor in world. It simulates depression. A truly emancipatory internet would be embedded in, and reverent of, the ground, the place of grass, of other things and other people. But for that to happen, we’d have to take it into our own hands.