Depression is What Happens When We Talk About Something Way Too Much and Also Not At All

“There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.” -Alain de Botton

What do you think about when you hear the word depression? What do you mean when you say depressed, whether to describe yourself or someone else? Do you wish you had more places, and more language, to have conversations about what to do when you feel depressed or how to be there for someone who’s experiencing depression? Most of us do. You aren’t alone.

We seem, collectively, to be coming to terms with the need for moving away from a culture of crisis-management towards a culture of prevention and care. This idea is widely acknowledged as a good one but in practice we’re far from seeing it take root. As we come to terms with the need to be more preventative we are also waking up to the reality that the only way to make this shift is together, at the macro level. We don’t create culture-change alone, all by ourselves.

But how do we find one another amidst the constant cascade of distractions competing for our attention? The macro is, after all, just the sum of the individuals that comprise the whole.

Part of the answer seems to lie in the practice of discernment. Without the skill of wise and deliberate discernment, we have no agency over our attention. Our gaze is not our own and, thus, neither is our time. We’re pulled, as if without the ability to resist, in so many competing directions, all vying for our time and, often, our money.

So few of these distractions aim to serve our deeper well-being or offer us genuine creativity or challenge us in ways that make us uncomfortable and thus allow us to grow. No wonder our bodies (and minds) become so imbalanced. No wonder we get so “depressed.”

Working in clinical, creative, and esoteric settings I am regularly talking with people at a level far beyond small-talk; in therapy sessions, yoga classes, and writing workshops things tend to get kind of deep pretty quickly. Still, so much of what is being expressed, implicitly and through what is not said, is that in all other places — outside of these rare incubators of vulnerability — we feel suffocated by the need to seem, and act, okay.

Consequently, we are ill-equipped to fully take advantage of the opportunity to share more honestly or ask better questions when given the chance. It’s the paradoxical problem of finally having a reprieve from pretending but not quite knowing how to behave without the mask we’re so used to wearing. There is an order to things, after all. We are not, historically speaking, well-prepared for being preventative.

But we can be.

One thing I tell my psychotherapy clients is that we need to learn how to slow down (mind and body) so we can more carefully select and define the words we choose to use. It’s important to know what we mean when we speak or type (even if we amend our meanings over time as we learn, gain experience, and reflect). It’s empowering to take the time required to think about, and create meaning for, our habitual vocabulary.

We can’t guarantee that others will understand the meaning in the words we choose but if we begin by understanding the meaning for ourselves we can start to create stronger bridges between one another, bridges we can cross to find the commiseration, companionship, and solidarity that each one of us needs more of.

This self-awareness and conception of intention are the foundation for uncomfortable conversations within our own minds and out in the world with other humans. Having to avoid uncomfortable conversations for fear of judgement or because you sense that you lack the necessary tools for being misunderstood or disagreed with is a major risk factor for this state we’ve taken to calling “depression.” The self-doubt, shame, and repression implied in so much practiced avoidance — not to mention the missed opportunities to learn something new — are too heavy a load for anyone.

Put another way, we become depressed, in part, because we’re afraid to talk about depression in the ways, and words, that would really help.

Luckily, we have the information, and more of it every day, about how to manage discomfort, how to stay with challenges instead of fleeing from them, and how to create space for ourselves, or someone else, to be with whatever is happening in the moment without worsening it. Sometimes doing nothing is the best action we can take.

We all benefit from having more time between stimulus (thought, feeling, etc) and response. As Viktor Frankl said, in that space we find a rare and essential form of freedom, the freedom to choose a response that is intentional, considered, and worthy of our wisest self.

Of course, it is far easier said than done to access this space of slowing down that exists between any given stimuli and our chosen response. This slowing down is NOT a function of will power. If it were we’d be living in a very different world of very different relationships and interactions.

This space of slowing down is made possible by having a balanced “body-budget,” which we achieve through deliberate awareness (mindfulness) and establishing healthy habits, as well as the ability to compensate when we inevitably deviate from those healthy habits; we are only human after all.

By engaging in regular practice of the things that change our body’s resting baseline (meditation; deep breathing; doing pretty much anything more mindfully) which changes (lengthens) our default reaction time, we learn to maintain a balanced body-budget more often than not. The body (and the mind it creates) becomes healthier, more capable of getting out in front of and correcting any impending chemical imbalance.

These practices allow us to control for the variables we have any reasonable ability to manipulate so we’ll know when it’s time to ask for additional forms of help like therapy, medication, or a break from something taxing.

As we learn to slow down and give our attention more carefully, we also increase our self-understanding, such that we can name, and act from, our values (which is to say that we learn to live by the philosophies or convictions that our future self won’t feel ashamed of).

Everyone changes over time, gradually and in subtle ways, and if we’re moving too fast and thinking too little we’ll miss the smaller shifts in our own priorities or interests. We might even take to calling ourselves “depressed” when it’s actually something else that’s going on. An incorrect assessment leads to an inadequate plan of action.

To this end, I offer an alternative way to think about depression, as a reasonable, if wholly, unwanted, response to various circumstances and shifts in context, internally and externally (see the work of Peter Levine, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and many others for more on all of this).

Depression has clearly become a catchall for a continuum of psychic discomfort. Almost everyone I know has talked about feeling depressed at one point or another but the variance in the related emotions and circumstances they describe is major, as is the variance in their level of comfort with the topic and their beliefs about what it means to be “depressed.”

This little word is being asked to hold immense diversity of experience. In an effort to relate to each other through use of the mainstream lexicon, we too often end up feeling alienated because our expectations for feeling understood are so (understandably) high but our means to that end are so limited by our lack of nuanced language.

Until we develop a more precise vocabulary that will allow us to better understand ourselves and each other, we’ll stay stuck at the surface, not going deep enough, never rooting out what’s really hurting us and what would provide some desperately needed relief. Most of us seem to agree: we are tired of coping, of living in survival mode; we want to heal and thrive. And we want the opportunity for healing to be available to everyone.

One of the most egregious aspects of our lack of prevention and wrong-headedness about depression is the fact that the fields of psychology and psychiatry historically and, in large part, presently treat depression using so many of the same techniques and patterns of thinking that provoke depression in the first place.

My work as a therapist, writer, and mindfulness guide has shown me many times over that our fundamental misunderstanding of what wellness consists of is endemic to the social culture in the United States. To say that this misunderstanding is holding us back is an epic understatement.

The onset of a pandemic painfully amplified this misunderstanding and the related misappropriations of attention and resources. Trace the line between our failing approaches to mental health and our failing approaches to sustaining our planet….it’s a short distance.

We can’t deny the need for change any longer.

One of the many things I’ve learned from all the brave souls who share their stories with me is that “depression,” most often, is being used to indicate, more than anything, the experience of feeling unwillingly, impossibly distanced from the self you perceive to be the truest version of who you are.

Depression is a distancing and it’s also a sort of suspension, so that even when things move in close — as a phone call or visit from a friend, an outing with a bunch of warm and joyful bodies, that film or book you used to love so much, a sunset, a home-cooked meal — you can’t make any kind of complete or satisfying contact with what’s apparently right in front of you. If you were a marionette the puppeteer keeps tugging ever so slightly on the strings just as you think you’re about to connect, finally, with something tangible and meaningful. To feel hopeless in such a situation seems utterly reasonable, inevitable even.

At this point it’s probably necessary to mention the other ubiquitous if less stigmatized state we refer to as “anxiety.” This is another word that we use as a substitute for actual emotions. It’s helpful for me, and for my clients, to think about anxiety as a form of depression, a related state of arousal that is not an emotion but, like depression, is comprised of, and creates, a range of specific emotions.

Depression in the form of anxiety can’t sustain itself for very long as the body becomes increasingly exhausted. We go from hyperarousal (too activated) to hypoarousal (under-responsive), in other words, from fight/flight to collapse; like a wave rising-cresting-falling, there is a physiological lifecycle to our most extreme emotions. These responses are inherently adaptive (if often unnecessary) capacities of the human body, specifically the peripheral nervous system. They are far more preventable, manageable, and useful than we are regularly shown to understand.

Without guidance for addressing all that plays out inside the body we’re too often left with no option but to be tossed around by the waves of it. This is excruciating at best and highly dangerous at worst.

So much of what we’re told and shown is pushing us in the wrong directions when it comes to learning how to work with — not against — our evolutionary biology. And so much of our depression-anxiety discussion flagrantly omits the role of protective factors and lived experience in how a person is, or isn’t, impacted by and vulnerable to the states of anxiety and depression.

Oppression and systematic chokeholds on power and influence create more pipelines and ecosystems for breeding psychic suffering than anything else and yet we continue to talk about — and treat — people as if their environments are an arbitrary nonissue in their mental health.

The weather is not the climate. This atmosphere can be altered.

Even when systems do work for people and allow them to find some semblance of stability those systems are all too often operating under a definition of “productivity” that doesn’t include time for slowing down or for any other form of individual maintenance that doesn’t directly benefit the system (see Micheal Pollan’s new book and his discussion about the way our government decides which substances are legal and which are highly criminalized.

There will likely always be some people whose bodies are prone to depression in a chemical sense. But there will likely always be more people who are, in actual fact, suffering from what would better be described as self-neglect and/or cultural conditioning. To label these people depressed or anxious is a misuse of language that benefits very specific means and mostly causes harm.

Imagine what would happen to the big drug companies if even half the people currently taking psychopharmaceuticals stopped using those medications and began investing that money in enhancing their well-being instead of in masking their pain.

The resistance to so-called “self-care” that I so often encounter seems to be the all-too-common endgame of growing up in the realm of ruthless capitalism. The idea of self-compassion sends so many people into fits of eye-rolling and, at best, a begrudging willingness to feign an interest for short bursts of semi-curiosity. But we aren’t committed to doing the longer-term, often un-sexy work of creating the root-deep changes we need. One-off yoga classes and sporadic meditation retreats won’t shift what’s ailing us. If we don’t change what’s wrong at the individual level the collective remains broken.

We are not optimizing our wellness or quality of life because we seem to think we’ll get to all that later, after we’ve earned all the money or acquired all the status or checked all the items off our to-do lists. The happiness trap will hold us in until the end of our time on this planet, if we let it.

But we have other options.

No one feels good all the time. We are sold a totally unrealistic, uninteresting, and harmful story of perfection and superhuman mood-stability that makes completely normal people feel inadequate by comparison to this nonexistent ideal. This is where the dissonance comes in. We know, in our guts, that the way we’re feeling is relatable and common yet we’re afraid to talk about it because the stigma that comes from this nonexistent ideal is so strong that it shuts us down in fear of being judged, deemed weak, crazy, or burdensome.

To have places — and relationships — where we could unlearn the stigma and develop vocabulary for talking about what’s so relatable would be to choose those other, more effective, options. Instead of normalizing the daily fight with psychic pain we could start talking to each other about the difference between inexplicable, concerning mood instability and mood shifts that are situational, certainly unwanted but not in any way unreasonable. We could help each other learn to work with these ways of feeling, to gain insight and resilience from moving through them and from sharing those experiences with others who have the same feelings.

So many people seem to recognize, intellectually, the potential for finding solidarity by way of shirking the stigma. But the emotional barriers, including shame and fear, are so strong. These contending parts of ourselves unsurprisingly leave us in a fog of cognitive and physiological dissonance that understandably sends us into all manner of avoidance. And the wheels of the big machines keep turning.

The Greeks and the Romans seem to have done rather well with dissonance and contradiction, more gracefully holding two seemingly conflicting notions or constructs at once, finding ways to incorporate incongruences into their frameworks and philosophies. We, the second, third, fourth generation Americans, are flailing on most accounts when it comes to these concepts.

There’s a glaring need for more self-education and more consistent investment in advocating for improvements in things we may not perceive ourselves to be directly, or at all, affected by. Everything in a society impacts all its members even if some are enabled to carry on in ignorance of those impacts for most of their lives.

The discordance isn’t the issue, it’s our reactions to it that make us frantic, addicted, anxious, depressed.

To elucidate the relevance of this dissonance a little further let’s review a striking statement from a 2010 National Institutes of Health report about a study aiming to shift public perceptions of “mental illness.” The report abstract ends with the following conclusions: More of the public embraces a neurobiological understanding of mental illness. This view translates into support for services but not into a decrease in stigma. Reconfiguring stigma reduction strategies may require providers and advocates to shift to an emphasis on competence and inclusion.

Competence and inclusion, indeed.

I’m certainly not blaming us at the individual level for not being more effectively preventative or for not intervening in ways that would actually help versus harm. There are powerful and insidious reasons, stemming from the ignorance and greed of influential, interlocking systems, that lead to our inability to see the healthier, more creative, more realistic alternatives. It’s hard to avoid a bit of cynicism when you start to understand how these systems are set up and how real their shameless disregard of human life so often is.

To make matters even more difficult for us, so many of those who claim to be in the business of pushing back against the status quo are actually working within the same structures and constraints as the systems that are making us sick. This includes the white supremacy infused throughout the thoughtless cultural appropriation and colonization in so many aspects of the mindfulness industry and the ways that mainstream media elevates so much mediocre, damaging content that’s created within/adhering to the same toxic paradigm of boring puritanical unoriginality instead of clearing pathways for material that asks good, hard questions and provides provocations that make us feel challenged, enlightened, and inspired to do our own self-expression.

Social media is obviously another of the major sources of confusion and is hugely complicit in the overwhelming dissonance we’re all dealing with every day. For instance, have you ever seen a social media post from a mental health or “wellness” professional offering a sort of roadmap or mantra for liberation from depression through various layers of achieving “good use of time,” by way of poetically simple quotations or colorfully crafted graphics that ultimately only point to or highlight the very ways you are NOT currently able to feel?

Here’s one such offering from a prominent voice in the contemporary “wellness” culture, someone who has published several best-selling books and blogs on the subject, and has around 2 million followers on Instagram: “If today’s a sad awful day, just rest, drink tea and wait it out. It’ll pass.”

I believe I can speak for a great many of my friends, clients, and colleagues when I say that this kind of “advice” smacks of performative vulnerability and a sort of twisted take on toxic positivity, as if to attempt the sleight of hand that would let you simultaneously disparage the thing while engaging in it directly. And in a more practical sense, it’s confusing. Is this post telling me to wait out my “sad awful day” because it’s guaranteed to pass or because waiting it out is how to make it pass? And what to do while I’m waiting? Do I literally drink tea all day and nothing else? That would require a really high level of skill in mindfulness and distress tolerance that I, the reader, am obviously not yet in possession of, hence the fact that I feel so awful in the first place. Am I so passive in my own healing that my only option is to wait out my suffering while sipping a hot cup of chamomile like waiting for rain to stop? The answer, in a healthier society, is a resounding NO, but we aren’t there yet.

Personally, I don’t feel seen or supported when I read things like this. And, more importantly, I worry that, for people who are in much deeper and more intolerable psychic pain, people who have far fewer skills or supports, posts like this are as good as an endorsement for giving up if, after all the idle tea-drinking one can possibly withstand, the sad and awful have not, in fact, come to pass. The stakes literally can’t be any higher. We owe each other better.

So what can you, or I do, in the face of all this? My journey so far has led me to believe that it’s within local community, first and foremost, that we make the most lasting changes in ourselves and in the world around us.

To that end, I’ll speak more directly about the idea of therapy for just a moment. In response to what looks like depression, psychotherapy is perhaps the most common suggestion, one we offer to ourselves or that’s floated to us by a concerned loved one. And therapy can be a great option, for some. But, A). it’s not the only option we should consider and, B.) for therapy to work it has to operate squarely outside the realm of stigma.

Therapists are not, despite various characterizations to the contrary, the harbingers of some dark narrative about an inevitably doomed human condition. As therapists, our job is to partner with our clients — our fellow human beings — to dig deeper, or float for a time on the surface, depending on what the situation calls for.

A therapist’s job is to support clients in meeting themselves where they are so that, together, we can find the way through toward wherever it is they want to be. It is also part of our job to help people recognize, and accept, that some amount of suffering is expected in the course of a life; if our only goal is to avoid pain we aren’t fully living.

As humans we don’t get from here to there by ruminating on our frustrations about not having what we imagine is over there. Whether the source of a person’s despair is heartbreak, childhood trauma, or terror in the face of the climate crisis, the despair must be normalized as an entirely reasonable response to the given context. Then, we can begin to integrate the pain without suppressing or denying its existence.

Therapists ought not be, but so commonly are, the secret-keepers of things that people are afraid to say to anyone else. We can be a helpful stop, a dress rehearsal of sorts, on the way to sharing with others but psychotherapy overall must become integrated into a culture of acknowledgement and collaboration — competence and inclusion — and everyone has a role to play in that.

As it stands, as a therapist, I so often have to work against being in a position of inadvertently playing into the stigma of depression (and all its related states). A therapist’s office can so easily come to conjure the feeling of an alternate reality where these otherwise untouched cans of worms called “depression” or “anxiety” get opened, a clandestine realm far away from the shininess and quick-fixes of social media.

In some ways, for these reasons, some of my clients have struggled with a subconscious (occasionally conscious) disdain for having to come to therapy at all. I have worked hard to develop specific skills, and an overall holistic approach in my practice, that creates space for people to talk about, and overcome, this disdain as part of their therapy. Still, once in a while I encounter someone who simply can’t get past it.

It’s in these instances that I see a terrible sequence of events play out: the weight of stigma is too heavy so a person turns to the doctors who will write a prescription without requiring talk therapy or mindfulness training and this person begins concealing their symptoms (while simultaneously numbing themselves to deeper levels of joy or pleasure) without learning anything about how to work with and heal their pain and distress. This is the gross incompetence of systems failing individuals in appalling ways.

Acknowledging this phenomenon, and working to end it, are a huge part of my work and should have been a very big part of my training (these things were no part of my training). For a very long time now we have been engendering a lack of respect for, or at least lack of focus on, prevention in how we approach psychiatric and psychological education.

It’s well past time for us to have better conversations and more deliberate definitions that call us into an honest examination of ourselves, in ways that allow us see what’s happening (the strengths and the room for growth) in our mind and body. Little by little these healthier individuals would coalesce into a more unified whole able to demand the changes necessary for a kinder, safer world.

A recent New York Times article highlights one such definition for creating more options beyond depressed or not-depressed. The article invokes the word “languishing,” using it to describe a feeling-state that is not quite depression but also not optimal psychic well-being. This “neglected middle child of mental health” that exists between depression and the more ideal state of “flourishing” is, according to the article, “a sense of stagnation and emptiness.” I don’t know that it’s safe to say everyone who doesn’t meet the diagnostic criteria for Major Depression is languishing but I think it’s a helpful addition to our ever-evolving vernacular for talking about the range of emotional realities.

“Languishing” was first used to describe mood by a sociologist named Corey Keyes who predicted that people who weren’t experiencing Major Depression right now but were currently languishing were those most likely to experience depression in the future. Languishing, for Keyes, is a risk factor for, and predictor of, Major Depression. Put another way, if we could capture the moment when we, or someone we know, are in a state of languishing and intervene appropriately, we could, theoretically, prevent Major Depression, at least some of the time.

Alas, part of what makes languishing so prevalent but so undiscussed, according to the article, is the fact that it breeds apathy, lack of self-awareness, and a dissatisfaction that’s just high-functioning enough to allow the languishing individual to appear fine to others, not raising the kind of red flags and undeniable concerns that more seriously depressed people will inevitably eventually provoke.

But is it really that we simply fail to see languishing (in ourselves and in each other)? Or is it, at least some of the time, that we don’t want to call attention to this lower-grade suffering, hoping — fingers crossed — that it won’t snowball into full-on depression? Is it the languishing that’s the risk factor or is it our silence and misguided patience?

Written in the context of the ongoing global pandemic, the Times article also acknowledges that languishing most certainly predates the pandemic but was, for many, exacerbated or activated by it. This offers yet another reminder of the dire need to be more preventative, as we can never predict what personal or global crisis will happen in the future.

Knowing that we’re doing everything we can to be prepared for moving through hard times allows us to stop worrying so much about what will happen next (in other words, prevention is an antidote to anxiety).

One deeply unnerving, unavoidable consequence of our failure to be a culture of prevention is manifesting in a lot of the conversations I’m having lately, as a white person, with white people who are newly interested in “becoming antiracist.” Important and honorable as this objective may be, the majority of white folks I encounter and observe seem to think that the route to becoming antiracist, as a white person, is to focus on what they can do to improve the lives of people of color; a savior mentality takes over for too many white people as a way to deflect from our own pain, from the ways that white supremacy has harmed white people over thousands of years, and how that harm lives in our bodies today.

The very people who have difficulty overcoming the stigmas around discussing mental health, who report a strong resistance to meditation and other mindfulness practices, who spend the majority of their time pursuing paid work to the exclusion of spending time on self-reflection or deepening their vulnerability skills, are the same people who want to be allies or co-conspirators in this essential racial justice movement. There’s a glaring disconnect here.

It’s not bad intentions or individual lack that leads to this disconnect. It’s the total failure of our broader infrastructure, starting with public education and the subsequent messages, models, and values that children grow up with and pass on to their children, generation after generation. It’s also the fact that we are moving, for the most part, way too fast way too often. Urgency is our most common default state.

Why are we so high-strung and impatient, so distractible and suspicious of things that ask us to be still and do nothing? In such a relatively short time, we’ve been deeply impacted by the overuse of technology; our insistence on immediate results and measurable progress is incredibly antagonistic to our stated ends of more mindful living. We’re missing the real purpose of paid work which leads us to mortgage our futures for some fleeting sense of inflated success today, measured in metrics we probably don’t feel altogether aligned with or impressed by. It’s the game, we say to ourselves, and isn’t it our job to play it? What if the answer isn’t yes or no? What if the answer is that it depends on how, and also why, you play?

There are wrong-headed ways to go about adopting a mindfulness practice and I appreciate being careful to not become self-absorbed in a way that fosters blindness to what’s going on beyond our subjective realities. We have so many messages coming at us about “self-care” and “wellness” that it leaves even the most reflective among us vulnerable to the mistake of spending too much time on the design and performance of the practices and not nearly enough time in the practices and the integration of their benefits.

When someone uses the term “new age” in a disparaging way they usually mean to take issue with a sensibility that asserts a sort of ironically assured point of view about the best ways to manage our lives devoid of the self-awareness necessary to recognize the message as yet another form of evangelism, one that leaves precious little room for creativity or original thought. I bristle at this approach as much as anyone and am constantly aware of going a different way.

But, the fact remains, we all have stress and most of us have some form of trauma. At the very least, everyone needs effective ways to balance the uncertainty and overwhelm of living in the world and having such constant and sprawling access to information. If the new age-y approach is distasteful at best, what should we be looking for and after whom should we model our approaches to wellness?

My sense of it, in reading and listening, and spending many hours reflecting and discussing, is that interconnectedness and compassion are the non-negotiable, requisite keys for opening the door on a more livable reality for all of us. These are abstractions at first glance but they are actually incredibly concrete instructions for how to relate, make choices, listen, speak, and grow. We seem to have a collective notion that individual neglect and sacrifice are honorable forms of selflessness, of respecting the group. I’ve come to see and believe that the very opposite is true.

The better care we take of ourselves, the more we learn to practice wise compassion and to create space in our lives for our own basic, essential needs, the more we can show up in the world, in all our relationships and pursuits, without being burdensome, violent, or simply unlikable. When it comes to whiteness, the responsibility to unlearn this mistaken manifestation of selflessness is nothing less than a moral imperative and a public health concern.

In the “The Fire Next Time” James Baldwin says: “White people have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

When we feel the urgency of guilt or skepticism kick in, we know it’s time to take a deep breath and a big step back from our reflexive perceptions. It’s time to ask ourselves where our core beliefs come from and if they need any amending. It can be disorienting to challenge or change the things we’ve held as truths for so long but it can also be freeing, and quite a relief.

Depression and anxiety can be brought on by many factors. No matter the source, the solution requires that we take things step by step. If you don’t presently have a practice whereby you are altering your nervous system to effectively settle your body back to its baseline in a (relatively) short window, under some degree of distress, you aren’t ready yet for situations where your reactivity could cause direct or indirect harm. There’s no shame in this. Be where you are. Just be honest and proceed accordingly. Take the first step.

We are all in this unlearning and rebuilding and maintaining together.

What we know for sure is that our approaches are not, on the whole, working. Accounting for all the dedicated, well-informed, and well-intentioned efforts, the medications, therapy sessions, hotlines, and lip-service have not amounted to the changes we need to see. Too many people are dying. And too many people aren’t afforded, or are strategically barred from, basic access to a chance at a healthy quality of living.

Meanwhile, things that have far more promising outcomes than our conventional interventions (namely: 1. Seated meditation and mindfulness practices, like yoga and breathwork; and 2. The therapeutic use of certain psychedelics) are not paid the attention or respect that would foster a willingness for mainstream endorsement. We aren’t having enough of a public discussion about these “alternative” techniques and medicines.

These public discussions are essential because they lead to private chats which lead to shifts, however slowly, in individual perceptions. These shifts in individual perceptions lead to collective perspective-change and, from there, we find ourselves moving toward a competent grasp of what’s actually on the table. People are empowered to make better choices in their purchase and votes, policies change, and, in time, the status quo slides along that seemingly stagnated spectrum. It’s happened before with other issues and it can — must — happen again.

Everything can be taken from us except, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl again, our chosen attitude in a given situation. If this profoundly empowering philosophy could grow out of, and be applied to, concentration camps in Nazi Germany, it undoubtedly holds immense wisdom and instruction for us today, in the context of this fragile social fabric and teetering democracy in the United States of America.

We are all capable of cultivating the perspective that leads to asking better questions and refusing to accept what doesn’t work. But we need a workable share of time, silence, and community. We have to practice calling out to each other in creative ways so we can make connections amidst the constant cascade of distractions competing for our attention.

The status quo is how things are not how they should (or have to) be.

What Yasiin Bey said:

“We’re all headed in the same direction….it’s just how you get there.”