You're Really This World Around You

We made it through the darkest days once more

We did it, everybody. Today’s the shortest day of the year. For the next six months the days will grow longer and brighter, and if that’s not something to celebrate I don’t know what is.

Prior to the last few years I don’t recall ever feeling affected by the shortening of the days as the northern world spirals toward winter. Kids are less susceptible, maybe, and teenagers are in such a constant state of bioligical warfare with their own bodies that the changing of the seasons barely registers. It really wasn’t until my late twenties that I could feel how profound the affects of the growing darkness were.

Not anymore. I feel it now, baby. I suspect being an adult who works for a living has something to do with it; when your time is by definition not your own, losing what scant hours of daylight there are to the whims and demands of some other entity feels more acutely devastating. (There are certainly positive aspects to the dark months; I am both a late sleeper and a Candle Guy and if there’s a time of year that encourages both behaviors in full, it’s this one. But on balance…woof.)

For whatever it’s worth, I know I’m not alone in this. More people than ever seem to be noticing that the world that’s been built and foisted upon us is in no way a match for the biological reality of our lives. Every few weeks I feel like I see a new viral post expressing the same horrified sentiment: that so much of what is difficult and exhausting about being an American adult is that we are all trying to do alone what we were meant to do together. And when the days feel hopelessly short to begin with, the weight of alienation can be enough to completely obliterate you.

It is important not only that we acknowledge this—and I certainly have found some twisted comfort in seeing so many others acknowledge the toll that it all takes on them, too—but that we use that knowledge to reframe our understanding of our own minds, and our own needs, and the ways that the structure of our society wages war on them. To wit: Research compiled and recently reassessed in Molecular Psychiatry shows that there is no real evidence for what we call “depression” being caused by low serotonin or “chemical imbalance,” our commonly held explanations for that variety of mental illness.¹ I find the late Mark Fisher’s framework for understanding this phenomenon compelling:

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation…This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one.

By privatizing these problems – treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual’s neurology and/ or by their family background – any question of social systemic causation is ruled out.

We are social creatures who are meant to form communities. And I don’t mean that in a saccharine sort of philosophical way, although I believe that way is true as well. It’s true biologically, from the social networks we can see in other mammals and primates all the way down to the microscopic level, as scientist and philosopher Andreas Weber writes:

We’re ecosystems. This microbial ecosystem inside of you is in constant dialogue with the ecosystem(s) outside of you. Your gut biota are continuously replenished by the stuff you eat because it’s full of bacteria. Your skin microbiome deposits itself on everything you touch. If you touch somebody, you exchange microbiomes. You don’t have a border. To think so is another bourgeois Western illusion. In actuality, you’re constantly blurring with the animate world around you. This is the ‘conversational nature of reality’ the poet David Whyte talks about.

In western capitalist society the concept of the individual is sacrosanct. The convenient misapplications of the scientific terms “competition” and “survival of the fittest” are the post hoc justifications for the world we’ve been forced into, but even if those concepts were true in the sense that Americans believe them to be (they’re not), they would still be poor rationalizations for the ongoing immiseration of so many. To be a capitalist in America is to enforce a rigid code in defiance of our human biology and then use biology as a justification for doing so. That so much of American cultural and working life demands an increase in work time and productivity at this time of year when our animal brains and bodies demand a slowdown, a quiet period of waiting and withdrawing, is frankly insane.

Weber continues:

Do you know why you find this unnerving? Because it shows you that you’re really this world around you, and one day you will be again, only you’ll be an ecosystem without an individual. We go back to the soil from which we came – few living in modern cultures appreciate the extraordinary beauty of such a truth. It’s unnerving because it’s about losing control, and our civilisation is terrified of that. It’s also about paradox. You’re not allowed to decide if you’re a colony or an individual; you’re both.

This is all to say that I want to make a sincere effort to carry the lessons of the dark months through with me into the lighter ones, when it’s easier to be alone, to work hard, to overplan and overschedule. I want to remember that I am not in control of myself any more than any other living thing is, that I am at the whims of the sun and the moon and the rain, that I am held beautifully hostage by my biological need for the love and support of others. There are no individual solutions to systemic problems, and building a world where our needs are structurally attended to feels woefully out of reach. But there are still individual steps worth taking, and the days are getting longer, and accordingly I have hope.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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1. This is not to say that no one is suffering extreme mental distress as a result of low serotonin or chemical imbalances, but that they are wildly insufficient in explaining the cause of most people’s depression.