A Self-observation About Depression, Truth, and Belief
What prevails if there is no truth?
What is truth? I mean, ultimate, 100 % objective, truth?
Great philosophers like Kant and Hume teach us that, even if there was something like ultimate truth, we could never experience it due to our limited cognitive capacities.
Even concepts like cause and effect or time and space are mere constructs of our human minds that allow us to witness and process information.
And if there is no ultimate truth, then we have to live with what our mind believes to be true.
In the past few weeks, I have been wondering: Why do I keep going forward? Why do I keep fighting depression when, no matter what I do, it keeps coming back?
My wife keeps telling me that this isn’t who I am or what I actually think. It is the depression that speaks for me.
But this raises the question:
What is my truth?
Is it what I am thinking in my depressive episodes, or is it what I am thinking when I am in a normal phase?
The longer and more frequent the depressive episodes become, the more I tend to believe that my depressive thoughts hold more truth than my “healthy” thoughts.
When my depressive phases were more moderate and rarer, I felt like these were the outlier thoughts, not my main truth. But as the depressive phases gain the upper hand, both in intensity and duration, my perspective, my truth, flips.
What if the depressive thoughts are my main truth? What if my healthy thoughts are only breaks from my actual truth? An instrument my mind came up with to help me cope with the harsh reality.
Truth be told, sometimes I don’t know what to believe anymore. Reality is blurred.
Oh, you thought this was an uplifting post. Well, I don’t know yet which turn this article takes. It is just a reflection of my current perspective. I am thinking out loud. Thinking about my current truth. An attempt to make sense of something that doesn’t hold actual sense.
But you know what? Since we established that absolute truth is inaccessible to us, a mere construct of our senses and intellectual activity, I think this is the anchor that I need to focus on:
If there is no ultimate, objective truth, then our thoughts are all beliefs, not facts.
And what we believe is something we can decide for ourselves.
In my subjective truth, there is a probability (no matter how small it becomes) that my healthy thoughts hold more truth than my depressive ones. Even when the depressive ones are more dominant. This probability may be small, but never 0.
And if everything is subjective, there is not much value in arguing which one is more true than the other. I will never know for sure. Because there might not be an actual truth, in the end.
And if all of this is a construct of my mind: the depression, my healthy thoughts, everything that I see, smell, feel, then why not construct a belief that my depressive thoughts represent less of me than my healthy thoughts?
Who is stopping me from believing that the depressive phases, while part of my truth, are only a small break from my healthy, optimistic thoughts? An instrument in adding value to all the beautiful things in my life. A means to see their value more clearly.
Where there is light, there is shadow.
And I know, for a fact, that there is light.
Even in the darkest hours.
There’s a quiet honesty in this reflection the kind that doesn’t try to over-explain, just observes what’s there. It captures how depression can be both subtle and all-consuming at the same time, especially in the way it shapes perception. It feels thoughtful, almost like watching yourself from a distance and slowly making sense of it.
There is ultimate truth and there's relaitive truth. This post is your truth. A vulnerable and authentic one. I hope putting out there in written form has helped you some sort of release.
Just remember that neither positive nor negative experiences/thoughts are "truth". It's all part of the brain trying to make sense in a world that's going mad.
I believe the Kurzgesagt YT channel made a video about nihilism that you'd find pretty useful.