According to Mental Health America, 21 million Americans are affected by depression each year. The symptoms of depression are things like apathy, unable to get out of bed in the morning, overeating, etc. Do you think evolution favored those behaviors? Obviously not. I don’t believe depression is genetic, I believe it is a combination of diet and our modern lifestyle and that we all suffer from some level of it. Depression is not a natural part of being human. Animals aren’t depressed. If a mountain lion didn’t want to get up in the morning then it would never survive. I believe that life is naturally meant to be full of happiness because it makes sense evolutionarily. Happiness is a great motivator.
We are born with a genetic blueprint to eat certain things and live a certain way. Of course, if you’ve read this blog before then you know I’m an advocate of integrating parts of natural living into your life. You might have an image of the primitive lifestyle in your head and picture someone wearing buckskins, walking around eating berries all day. But that’s really not the important part of what I’m talking about. To me, team sports is a great example of one aspect of natural living. A group of people who rely on each other and struggle together. There are mentoring relationships and a deep feeling of trust between teammates. When I look at the NBA, I see valuable bonds and great mentoring that lasts throughout player’s lifetimes. I believe those parts of natural living are much more valuable than wearing buckskins. We are able to adapt in many ways to modern life but our social instincts don’t want to budge. Unfortunately, professional athletes have far more unnatural influences in their lives than natural ones.
My basic point of this post is that we evolved to feel happy when we live according to our genetic blueprint (same goes for all animals). So to achieve maximum happiness, one would have to live totally according to our genetics.
This summer I’ll be living for a month without any modern tools of any kind with twelve other people. This is a primitive immersion program led by Lynx Vilden in Washington state. In a few years I’d like to run my own version of this month-long program and eventually longer ones. I think one of the most basic freedoms that we aren’t allowed in our modern world is the choice to live in a modern society or a natural one. I want to see a world where humans are thought of like a keystone wildlife species and can be reintroduced to national parks. Natural resource managers are well aware of the benefits hunter-gatherers can bring to a landscape and the drastic amount of damage associated with their removal. If there was a permanent tribe living completely primitively in the United States it would be a gold mine for research. Anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, nutritionists, child development specialists, and countless others would have a field day studying the effects of our original way of life. If you want to be a part of that some day, let me know.
My experience with treating depressed folks for 33 years is that for a majority of people, depression was not the beginning of their troubles but the result of worn out brains due to anxiety. Using your idea of depression being of no use in the evolutionary process, I wonder about how the good healthy level of fear that contributes to survival has gone wild so to speak and morphed through the history of time into rampant anxiety. Anxiety comes from the same part of the brain as fear except there is not a clear and present literal threat to trigger the reactions. If someone is about to hit you in the nose, that is not anxiety, that is fear. If you wake up and are worried someone is going to hit you in the nose, that is anxiety. The chemical response is basically the same. To connect this with your idea, how much anxiety and subsequent depression might be cured by people learning how to use normal fear in a healthy way? Survival, I suspect, is a combination of knowledge and channelled fear. Fear can be good energy if it is not paralyzing or only fight/flight. Anxiety is greatly draining on the brain by sapping the resources and ultimately leading to circuit overload which often presents as depression.
PWO (your dad)
Connor,
Glad to hear you are doing the program with Lynx! Maybe I’ll bump into you out there in Washington, when you are doing the prep classes.
Tom.
Hope to see you out there, Tom.
Connor, I hope you will let your mother be part of your tribe in the future.
Ok. We’ll definitely need elderly wise-women. Not that you’re old…