Category: meaning of life

Fear of death

When I was three or four I was afraid of television aerials, dogs (particularly black ones), plugs, painters, thunder, and pneumatic drills. As I grew up these specific fears resolved into more general anxiety disorders, but I still have mild arachnophobia (I bear spiders no ill will, but they have far too many legs and move much too quickly for their size), and thanatophobia, a profound fear of death.

When I was three or four I was afraid of television aerials, dogs (particularly black ones), electrical plugs, outdoors painters, thunder, and pneumatic drills. As I grew up these specific fears resolved into more general anxiety disorders, but I still have mild arachnophobia (I bear spiders no ill will, but they have far too many legs and move much too quickly for their size) and thanatophobia, a profound fear of death.

Most people don’t want to die, but I am surprised how casual most people are about their eventual demise. Why isn’t everyone raging against the dying of the light from the moment they first realise that the light will some day die? I think that in twenty-five years or so I could well be dead, and I think back twenty-five years from now and that doesn’t seem to be any time at all. Even if I die peacefully in my sleep, which seems to be most people’s goal, I won’t be happy. When I reflect on my fear I’m particularly afraid of not being conscious ever again. The universe will roll on perfectly well without me. A few people will grieve, but that will fade, and the ripples of the effects of my life will soon die down and I will be forgotten. Just writing that makes me very, very miserable. And angry, as does thinking about the unfairness of having to get old.

Mental illness requires consciousness. Your computer can’t be depressed, but a dog can be; we know from Martin Seligman’s studies on learned helplessness that dogs can show symptoms akin to depression, and of course other animals can suffer mentally too. Social outcasts in groups of social primates also give the appearance of being depressed. But can a wasp be depressed? We can’t know for sure, but it doesn’t seem likely. A wasp has very little consciousness, not enough to feel depressed. I explore animal consciousness in my new book, The Science of Consciousness.

Some forms of mental illness require more than consciousness: they require self-consciousness: thanatophobia is one example, and illnesses to do with the meaning of life are another. I am pretty certain Beau, my poodle, is not afraid of his death. Of course (non-human) animals are capable of fear and other negative emotions, but not of concepts that require self-reflection. I don’t think he has any concept of death, so he can’t be afraid of it. I’m not saying that if something happened to me he wouldn’t be very upset, but that he can no more appreciate the meaning of mortality than he can understand quantum mechanics. These concepts are utterly beyond his comprehension because he doesn’t have the mental capacity for them. It isn’t simply that the concepts are too complicated for him, it’s that reflecting on the death of his self requires a complex concept of his self, and for that he requires self-awareness. Awareness and self-awareness are very different things. Many animals are (probably) aware, but few are self-aware. I’m not sure it’s right to talk about awareness and self-awareness as if they are a dichotomy – he might possess a bit of self-awareness, but not enough to worry about his death.

Can we learn anything useful from all this? On the whole I’d say Beau is much happier than me, and he doesn’t spend his life reflecting on canine existential concerns. I think his happiness and restricted self-obsession are related; sometimes humans reflect too much. Of course some thinking is good: it’s good to be aware of our situation; it’s important to prepare for our deaths and leave our affairs in order, and I wouldn’t want to put existential philosophers out of a job, but for many of us too much reflection can be a bad thing. We should look at Beau and realise that it is good to live in the moment, which is essentially what studies of mindfulness and mental illness tell us to do. This obsession with death is also utterly futile because there is nothing I can do to prevent my impending obliteration. And maybe that’s true of much mental illness: we need to learn to stop thinking. Easier said than done of course.

Psychologists occasionally reflect on what makes humans unique. To the list of language, a highly convoluted cortex, and opposable thumbs, I think we should add the ability to suffer mentally in particular ways. Our uniqueness has given us unique ways of being tormented.

Is this all there is?

The holidays are over; normal life is resumed. We are heading towards Blue Monday, the third Monday in January, the alleged day of the year on which most people tend to be most miserable, and for which there is no scientific evidence at all. (I’m happy to be proved wrong.) Nevertheless there is a sense that people are ground down by the lack of sunlight at this time of year, the absence of anything to look forwards to after Christmas, with work or school to resume as normal, and perhaps left to reflect on having spent money over Christmas that they didn’t really have on things they didn’t really want. What can cheer us up?

I enjoy Christmas, but as I said in my previous post I don’t make too big a thing of it, or overdo things. Even so I am left feeling both a bit empty apart and full of dread. The rest of the year stretches ahead. Maybe I’ll go away a few times. I might enjoy a few days in the sun in summer. I might finish writing a book or two. But soon the days will start shortening again, and then it will be my birthday. Another year since the last one. And not long after that it will be Christmas again. A year nearer old age, a year nearer infirmity, a year closer to death. And so the cycle repeats.

People tell me that this is a negative, depressive way of looking at things, to which I say: this is exactly what it means to be depressed! “Normal” people often appear to think that a person who says they’re depressed won’t have any symptoms.

I realise too that I am luckier than most: I’m in relatively good health, I achieve some fulfilment in my work, and I’m not struggling to eke out a tough existence doing a biring repetitive job (which is one of the things I dread most in the world). That knowledge doesn’t help. I feel lonely and I feel alone, an alien on the sidelines watching everyone else enjoying life and finding meaning in mundane things, helping giving their children a good life, or comfort in their God.

I can’t even imagine what meaning there could be to make up for the grind of everyday life. THIS is all there is.

An interesting seeming paradox then is my Kurzweilian obsession with life extension. I don’t think there is in fact a paradox: who wants to go to a football match if you know it’s going to be abandoned because of a water-logged pitch after ten minutes? Part of my ennui is because it hardly seems worth starting anything if I’m going to be dead in forty years. (Again, please don’t tell me this is crazy messed up thinking.) I’ve got to rush to finish writing my book on consciousness and the next one on weather and psychology because bits will start falling off me in a few years. So yes please, sign me up for freezing my head, having my blood vessels cleaned by nanobots, neural implants, and uploading my intellect to cyberspace. To paraphrase Woody Allen, I don’t want to become immortal just through my work, I want to become immortal through not dying. Life extension would give my life real meaning.

Scientific progress in the quest for eternal life is one of the few things that stops me from killing myself at this time of year.

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas comes but once a year – thank God

I am no grinch who wants to steal your Christmas. In fact I love many aspects of it; I love the lights, the colours, a nicely decorated tree, an opportunity to drink champagne before lunch, and thinking about the turning of the seasons as the winter solstice at last arrives. But I don’t feel the joy of anticipation and the frenzy that many people, perhaps most people, apparently feel. It is one of many events, like parties and family gatherings, where I feel like an alien.

Why do people get so worked up about Christmas? Maybe I’m very lucky in having such a good life that I don’t need special days; maybe it’s because I don’t have children; maybe because I’m not so conditioned by the insane advertising that tries to force us to think the event is the most important thing ever. Or maybe it is because I’m an insane alien. Sure, it’s nice, but the reaction of nearly everyone else seems so over the top  to me, particularly given that most ignore the religious aspect. (Indeed usually the more religious people are, the more restrained they are about the commercial aspects.)

It is seen as opportunity for many to “let their hair down”, and have fun, a good “blow out” for a day or two. But why just one day? Why can’t our lives be full of meaning and pleasure all year round? Why can’t it be Christmas every day?

I know of several people of whom it is said “they live for their holidays”, among which I am including Christmas. I find that sad: the remainder of their lives is so unpleasant and has so little meaning that they’d rather they didn’t happen, but instead would pass as quickly as possible until the next special day. At this time of year it is almost impossible to get into Marks and Spencer’s food hall, and that’s assuming that you can park within ten miles to get in; what are you doing the rest of the year, shoppers? Where are you? What do you do the rest of the time? And why are you such bad drivers? I am supposed to be antisocial and depressed, yet I think your situation is the sad one. One day of joy and gluttony, three hundred and sixty four of misery. At least in good years I can manage five days of joy and only three hundred and sixty of misery. (Bugger leap years.)

Is it really that “work” you have to do really so unpleasant? It is clear that many people have really unpleasant jobs. It’s manual labour and repetitive, boring jobs that would get to me. Being an academic was good; working on a checkout sounds dreadful to me. Most jobs are in between. Yet the people who do them don’t seem that unhappy; they have friends, they chat, the time appears to fly by for them, although I would hate it. I am left confused. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but I am the unhappy one who is depressed. Is there some causal relationship here that I’m missing?

Is the experience of Christmas much worse if you are very depressed? I have been alone a few times on Christmas Day and it’s not nice. There are several good sites (here is another) talking about how Christmas and depression “don’t go” together. It is hardly surprising, because there are few things more depressing when you’re depressed than happy people.

If you are crazy about Christmas, good for you. I’m not trying to demean or cirticise you; I sometimes wish I could join in more easily. I’m simply saying that there are some of us who are cut off from normal life. I wish I could, if only once a year, let my hair down, as they used to say, but probably no longer do. But a very Merry Christmas to you!

Finally, a few notes. First, I am in the process of updating my website, so there might be a few hiccups along the way. Second, a little shameless self-promotion: my novel, Fit for a King, is available from Amazon for Kindle on special offer over the festive season for £0.99 here, or $1.32 on Amazon.com here. You can buy a paperback version if you prefer. A novel about how to be sane in an insane world.

Getting the words out

I’ve been silent because I’ve been busy. I have found that writing my “great work”, The Science of Consciousness, is good for my mental health – although whether I’d be able to write at all without a certain level of mental health is a moot point. Writing gives my life direction and purpose, and structures my day. The amount of work involved makes a mockery of any notion of being “retired”; writing is fulltime job. Consciousness is the most difficult subject I’ve ever written about: to paraphrase the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland “an awful lot has been written on consciousness, mot of it rubbish”; why do I think what I’m writing isn’t rubbish too? I suppose you can only do your best and then just hope. I’m not going to fall into the trap that many psychologists fall into, of equating consciousness with attention, or even just visual attention. I recognise it’s a big, difficult topic.

I have been reflecting about why I have found this writing so enjoyable and so therapeutic. Perhaps it’s obvious, but it’s because I really want to do it. I would probably write it even if I didn’t have a publisher and a contract. The only downside of a contract is often a fairly tough deadline – but if I didn’t have a deadline I almost certainly would work more casually, so it’s an advantage as well as a curse. (And usually the deadline wouldn’t be so bad if only I had started earlier.)

In the odd spare moment that I have, I wonder if my mood would be as good without this purpose. As ever there is circularity: doing stuff makes your mood better, but you have to be well enough to be able to do any stuff in the first place.

Of course in the end I will die (unless I decide to have my head frozen, and even then I expect eventually to die regardless) and eventually my books will go out of print, and I will be forgotten. At this point I envy people with children; they will live on through their genes. As others have observed, our lives are like stones thrown into a pool, causing ripples to spread out. Eventually the ripples fade and it is, for most of us, as though our stone was never thrown into the pool.

When writing a book I try not to think about it too much. I have 150,000 words to deliver before the summer. If I think of it in that way, the task is an enormous one. So I break the task down into 1000 words a day (number of words left divided by number of days left, allowing Sunday off – or rather do those jobs that have accumulated in the week) come what may. I think deciding to miss one day is a slippery slope; of course choosing to miss one day wouldn’t make much difference, but it’s easy for that one day to become two, and before I knew it, a month would have gone, and a 1000 words a day has become 1250. And then there’s reading, researching, and checking. You have to treat it like a job, or any other job I suppose, and just get on with it. I know there’s no point putting off starting to write every day because I know that it has to be done regardless, and starting at 5 pm is much more miserable and difficult than starting at 9 am. I still procrastinate a bit first thing, but I gather many writers do. I think it was Derren Brown who said something like “all self-help books just boil down to – just do it”. If you’re writing a book, writing an essay, or just have to mow the lawn – get on with it now.

Also on the positive side, I have had three outputs this week, and nothing lifts my heart more than seeing my name somewhere.

First, the second edition of my book, Talking the talk: Language, psychology, and science has just been published by Psychology Press. See:

 

 

This book is a gentle introduction to psycholinguistics, the science of how we produce and understand language. I still think the first edition was the best thing I have ever written (so far).

Second, I had a letter in the Daily Telegraph on Tuesday about futurology, robots, AI, and the implications for the economy. I’m a pessimist about these things:

 

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Rather to my surprise, it generated a great deal of interest. There were letters in reply (none of which really addressed the problem, I thought) and offers to write about the subject elsewhere. I think the future is a pretty scary place, and although I would have loved a laptop with fast internet connection when growing up, it could be that I have lived in the best of times – a rather optimistic conclusion for someone as usually as negative as me.

And third, finally, I gave a talk at Durham University on How to be successful in academia, particularly if you’re suffering from mental illness. I’m told it was very successful.

So a good few weeks. Success and achievements lift the spirits – just as you would expect. If you can, do something. But there will be times when you are too depressed to do anything. My advice, based on my experience, is to sit it out. Things will get better eventually, because they always have in the past. I promise.

 

The future is bleak (updated)

As regular readers will know, I am obsessed with death, and I do not understand why everyone else isn’t too. What could be more depressing than the knowledge that it is all going to end for each of us relatively soon, and that eternal annihilation is all that lies in wait for us, whatever we do?

As regular readers will know, I am obsessed with death, and I do not understand why everyone else isn’t too. What could be more depressing than the knowledge that it is all going to end for each of us relatively soon, and that eternal annihilation is all that lies in wait for us, whatever we do? I saw a very old gent in the café last week, and he was enjoying his coffee and smiling beatifically at all around him. Was he perhaps just simple, I wondered? Why isn’t he petrified by the imminence of his extinction? I spoke to my therapist about it, and she pointed out that perhaps he was just enjoying his remaining time (how, I wondered), and was practising radical acceptance of his situation rather than thinking so catastrophically. It’s true that it seems to me that most people I talk to just don’t to give a damn about their own death. And I agree that it is bizarre that I am so afraid of dying that the existential despair sometimes almost drives me to suicide.

On the other hand, in a way I am glad I am not young in these troubled times. Life must surely be much more worrying and stressful for people in their teens and twenties than it was for me, in the good old simple days before pocket calculators. There is so much pressure on you to do this and that, so much political presence and political correctness in your lives, “free space” that are really prisons, with mobile phone cameras you can be in the public eye all the time in an instant, you have social media contributing to enormous peer pressure and perpetuating your simplest most honest mistakes for eternity. And then after working your way through university while building up enormous debts you might struggle to find a good job – or any job at all. But then there’s plenty else to worry about; the end of the world is near for you. I doubt if many of the young today will die a natural death. The things below worry me, and I think I’m rational to be scared by them, even if I am a nutter; they would terrify me if I were any younger, and probably just immobilise me with fear. Or drive me to suicide.

Terrorism. Surely top of anyone’s list of worries? I worry about being personally involved every time I fly or catch a train, drive over a bridge, or visit London, but I’m sure I’m not worrying enough. They will find a way to get to us in places and ways I can’t imagine. And that’s just in the short term. Surely in the long run terrorists will acquire biological and nuclear weapons; we only have to wait long enough for the worst to happen. So in a hundred, too hundred, three hundred years, whatever, they will lay waste to London, Paris, New York, and doubtless many other places. It’s just a matter of time. Verdict: grim.

Russia. Now even as a proud liberal I’m more pro-Russian than most people I know. I appreciate its geography and history, and therefore that they feel threats many of us can’t imagine. I can see why they needed Crimea as west Ukraine headed in the direction of even more west; Sevastopol is their only warm water port, and not a particularly good one at that. I also am a great admirer of Mr Putin, and have my own ambition to be photographed naked holding a machine gun one day. Oh those Russians. And if Russia doesn’t scare you, what about China or India? And the Middle East isn’t going to become a happy place anytime soon. Apologies to all my readers living in those countries; you’re probably worried about us (as well as each other). Yes, the geopolitical situation keeps me awake at nights. Scary.

Viruses, biological, and chemical warfare. We don’t even need people actively searching for ways to kill us; accidents and mistakes will happen. But why people would want to unleash a virus that is just as likely to kill them in the end as kill us in the short term is a mystery to me, but that’s nihilism for you. Perhaps they’re just hoping for a little local mega-tragedy. But if the terrorists don’t get us first then nature surely will; new viruses are always appearing and mutating, and even good-old fashioned bacteria are becoming increasingly antibiotic resistant. Eventually something really bad is bound to turn up. Yes, a pandemic such as the Great Plague of 2026 will wipe most of us out, probably in an unimaginably horrible way. Boils on the brain or something. Time to prep! Frightening.

Nuclear explosions. See also under terrorism. With a new cold war round the corner, and rogue states acquiring weapons, surely it can only be a matter of time before something happens somewhere. And if countries somehow manage to restrain from throwing their nukes at each other, and if mad men (and men they always are) don’t take charge of the arsenal, mistakes will happen; we’ve come surprisingly close to accidental nuclear war before. Within the next millennium it’s almost certain to happen. Megadeaths will leave humanity looking like the worst kind of survival disaster movie. I expect to see a double flash most days. Horrifying.

Nanotechnology. Now we get to future technologies that most people don’t worry about much at the moment – but they should. Nanotechnology means lots of very tiny things that may be able to replicate and might turn out not to be that controllable. Nanobots crawling around your veins and arteries scraping away cholesterol and plaque sounds wonderful, until as a result of some coding error they start scraping away at your artery walls too. Who you going to call? Perhaps we should retrain the unemployed (everyone – see worry below) as Botbusters. And nanobots munching away on rubbish and plastic bags turning them into compost is an excellent idea, until by mistake they decide that everything organic, including humans, is there to be munched on as well. Disturbing.

The disappearance of work. Jobs are disappearing all the time. Those that can be are being outsourced to countries where the wages are much lower and where they don’t have troubling legislation such as a minimum wage. Computers and online resources are claiming many other jobs – when was the last time you went to a travel agent? Robots already do much manual labour in garages, and I see that they are now taking over the jobs of at least some surgeons. What will be left for us to do in a few decades? A few high tech jobs; some teaching; creative work; maybe. Politicians, for sure. The overall effect will be to reduce the availability of work and so drive wages down. But there is a problem here that I don’t think has been much thought about: the owners of most of the computers and robots are making products for people to buy. But what will happen when the people can’t afford to buy anything because they have no money because the robots took their jobs? The whole system will collapse. We will be reduced to a nation of people working in coffee shops so that we can earn just about enough to go and buy coffee in another coffee shop in our breaks. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about starting out on a career just now. Unsettling.

AI and robots. I have recently finished reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, which talks about the threat posed by the development of artificial intelligence (and the associated robotics industry). Apparently the average prediction by “experts” of when we will develop an artificial intelligence with intellectual abilities greater than that of a human is 2040. Now of course as a professor of cognitive psychology I foresee all sorts of difficulties: our intellectual abilities and our consciousness arise because we develop from  birth, endowed with genes that prepare our brains and intellect for life that have been honed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, grounded in the world, surrounded by other people, and with five sensory inputs (with feedback). I think 2040 is very optimistic. But I don’t see that as “in principle” argument against the development of super-intelligent conscious artificial intelligence – just that it’s more difficult than many people image. It isn’t merely a question of developing a computer with enough megaflops. Some might be surprised that I accept the idea of a conscious computer so easily, but if it has the right stuff, I don’t that it’s possible, I think it’s inevitable. You can’t have a zombie that acts as though it’s indistinguishable from a conscious being but isn’t conscious. (More on this topic in my forthcoming book, The Science of Consciousness, due to be published in 2017.) But what reason do we have to suppose that when we develop a real AI that it will be friendly towards us? Might we not instead face a Terminator-like future where the missiles are fired and machines turn on the remaining few? I don’t find there to be much comfort in ideas such as those proposed by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that if we programme machines with his three laws of robotics (“a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”; “a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law”; “a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws”) that all will be well. Humans live by laws, and they do a lot of people no good at all. People can’t even manage to drive without using their mobile phone. Why should a super-intelligent AI, with its own personality, life history, and at least the delusion of free will, feel obliged to do whatever we do them? We act in accordance with our own best interests (or at least think we do), so why shouldn’t an AI? I see disaster down the line. And will AIs suffer from existential despair? Will they worry about the power supply being switched off? And will they act to stop that happening? And then we’re assuming that intelligent AIs which have their own goals and personalities will be sane. Humans aren’t, so why should artificial humans? Why shouldn’t an AI become traumatised, or suffer from depression, or anxiety, or even personality disorder? Doesn’t mental illness come with the territory of being conscious? What would a psychopathic super-intelligent AI connected to the internet do? Or a suicidally depressed AI in charge of nuclear weapons contemplate? Alarming.

The network of things. My central heating is connected to the web, so when I’m in California I can play with turning the heating up to 30C back home. My pressure cooker is already pretty smart, but presumably the next generation will be networkable, so I will be able to cook my beans at a swipe of my iPhone from anywhere in the world. There are already robot vacuum cleaners, and fridges that check what you put in and take out and order food automatically for you. What happens if your fridge goes haywire and refuses to open, or if it orders a million toilet rolls instead of a nice piece of cheddar? Will you starve to death? So if terrorists, Russians, germs, the plague, nukes, tiny things, and robots don’t get you, your fridge probably will. Terrifying.

… To which I add a few weeks later:

Genetic engineering. How could I possibly overlook this one? I foresee nothing but trouble. Bring on the Daleks. Worrying.

Social media and surveillance. Isn’t Britain already the most watched society in the world? Aren’t there many calls of many people who should know better to monitor the press and curtail freedom of speech? Don’t we already have libel laws so draconian that people flock here from other more liberal counties (e.g. the USA) to press their grievances? I have just finished reading David Eggers’ “The circle”; although I think it is a flawed novel in some minor ways, it is immensely readable and thought provoking. With our obsessive use of social media, our pursuit of fame without effort and the idolisation of celebrities, and our ignorance of how our liberties are being eroded, we are sleepwalking to the sort of disaster chronicled in “The circle”. China is apparently working on a scheme that sounds like it should be left in science fiction where citizens accrue points for “good citizenship” (see this BBC article for example) – well, you can guess the sort of thing that makes you a worse citizen than your neighbours, and some of the possible consequences. Scores in the first instance might affect your credit worthiness or enable you to jump a queue for a good flat. But you can imagine a society where our Facebook posts and blogs are monitored, and all of a sudden things happen like your bin is “accidentally” not emptied one week. Or you get carted off to a gulag at dawn. Perhaps we already are monitored in this way and it was no accident that my supermarket home delivery last week didn’t include macadamia nuts. Thought provoking.

And then if we do somehow manage as a species to survive all that, and colonise space avoiding the doom of the solar system, we will eventually face the heat death of the universe. Surely anyone rational should all be very depressed.

Retiring and getting old

Mar 15 eclipse 6Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
– Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night”

I realise that at least part of my recent mental malaise is to do with “retiring” and getting old. There’s been a lot of personal stuff too, which is also related to ageing, being alone, contemplating death childless and alone. There has been an unfortunate conjunction of traumas coinciding with nearing the end of the day job. Heavy shit has been going down, as they say.
As of writing this sentence, today I have 40 days left in the wilderness as an employee. Unfortunately many people are insisting on calling it my retirement. It’s only a word, but it gets to you, after a while. Many people don’t want to retire; many do and then regret it; a few look forward to it and really enjoy it. I must admit to having doubts. Suppose I can’t cut the mustard on my own? Suppose instead of writing I drift and each day follows the preceding one in a (hopefully) long line before the grave? Suppose I write and it’s no good? Suppose I have only a life of grinding poverty to which to look forward? Suppose (particularly living in the country) I become socially isolated? Suppose I never find love? Suppose I become more and more inward looking? Suppose I starve? Suppose I trip over my teddy bear and break a leg; how long would I lie there before anyone notices? And because I’ve been so unwell recently I’ve written very little, and that makes me feel like a failure, which in turn makes me feel more depressed …
I’m pretty sure I’m doing the right thing but doubts about major transitions are perhaps only natural. I’m not enjoying my job any more, and so much of it seems pointless. I’ve recently been so mentally ill I don’t think I’ll be able to do the job properly much longer. I don’t think it’s fair on my colleagues to have to carry me. Already I feel like I don’t have the energy or enthusiasm to carry out really good novel research any more; I was out of it as a manager for too long. I tootled along with research for a while. but am now out of tootling. It’s time to let someone younger have a go. There are things I want to do and can do; I believe I can still make a contribution through writing. So my plan is to maximise time for how I think I can make a difference. But I am doubting the plan. I am doubting whether I can execute the plan.
Why do people not rage more about getting old? It’s horrible. Why do so many go against Dylan Thomas and go gentle into that good night? Most other people I know either accept the prospect of getting old and infirm and then dying, or don’t even see that there’s an issue. Why am I cursed to be so different? Why can’t I just accept getting it like everyone else?
Perhaps we all rage against the dark, but most people keep do so quietly. The highest suicide rate of all is among elderly men. Am I an elderly man yet? We’re lonely, we feel useless, we feel that we’re a burden, we look at young people around us enjoying themselves and feel envy and regret. Our bodies afflict us with increasing troubles and increasing pain. People expect us to be depressed in a way that wouldn’t be tolerated in other demographic groups. Those of us alone and without children are even worse off. Although as far as I can tell everyone who is severely depressed feels very alone, even if they surrounded by friends and family, so perhaps really being alone doesn’t matter as much as I think it does. I don’t know.
Leaving a job is one of the great transitions in life – particularly for academics, who tend to stay in the same career all their lives, and often at the same institution for decades. I know many people who have only worked at the same place from the beginning of their careers. We lose our focus, our purpose, our social setting, all one day. Overnight any meaning in our life has gone. It is sad to define meaning and purpose in terms of work, but for many work does much more than pay the bills.
On another note, I consider it possible that the relapse has been exacerbated by cutting back on my medication – particularly the quetiapine. I was boasting about this success only two blogs ago, but it could be that as the drugs fell beneath a critical level the depression and anxiety kicked in when life events conspired. My resilience has gone. So my healthcare professionals have urged me to increase the dose again, at least in the short term. I hate it. I hate the sedated feeling, the necessity to sleep so much, and I live in fear of starting to put on weight again after I’ve fought so hard to lose a little. And I particularly hate the fact I can’t concentrate on anything. No wonder I can’t write. I can’t even read much, and that makes me feel like a failure, which in turn makes me feel even more depressed …
Last year I experimented with reducing the dose of my anti-depressant, Duloxetine (Cymbalta), and that experiment was a disaster for my mood. Within five days of increasing the dose again I started to feel better. It could be that I will need this dose of both drugs for ever. And that makes me feel like a failure, which in turn makes me feel more depressed …
Once I have left the job perhaps my life will be defined by having to empty the dishwasher every day, or periodically buy a new tube of toothpaste. It’s these things that I find to be overwhelming, and that make me think most of that savage god, suicide. (I have been reading Andrew Solomon’s The noonday demon, and am relieved to find that he thinks exactly the same way.) I do the dishes today and fuck it, they need doing again tomorrow. It overwhelms me. What is the bloody point?

A brush with death

Just before Christmas I nearly died.
One Saturday I was feeling fine – rather stressed, but physically fine. Sunday morning I couldn’t urinate. Sunday evening I was in hospital. Monday evening my temperature was soaring, my pulse racing, my blood pressure falling through the floor, and I wasn’t breathing well. I was in a stae of severe sepsis – what my mother calls “blood poisoning”. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the stage I reached has a mortality rate of 50%. Fortunately I recovered; my infection responded to the antibiotics, and I had wonderful care at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. Recovery was slow, and I still don’t feel completely well.
It turns out that there is nothing like nearly dying to focus the mind on what you should do while you’re living. We’re all going to die sometime; if I’m lucky I might have another 40 years or so, although how many of those will be quality years is unclear. What should I do in the next 20 – 30 years? What do I need to do now so that when in the future I am on my death bed I will be able to lie back satisfied and think “yes, that was a worthwhile life”?
It wasn’t just this near death experience that made me think about the meaning of life, although it has focussed my mind on it. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with how I should live my life, and how I should spend my time.
Someone once said something like “No one ever said on their death bed ’I wish I had spent more time at the office’.” (I think it was the American rabbi Harold Kushner.) I suppose though it depends what sort of office you’re talking about. Hillary Clinton might well end up saying “I wish I’d spent more time in the Oval Office”. It depends on your job in having an extremely good job: I am an academic, a Professor of Psychology.
For many years I even said “I don’t make any distinction between my work and my life”. My reasoning was that (most) academics are pretty much working all the time. You go on vacation (or “take annual leave” as it has now become) and you read a psychology book – are you now working on holiday? You think about a problem in the bath, answer a student email while sipping a glass of wine at midnight, you read a short article Christmas Day while waiting for the turkey to cook – you see the problem about defining work, holiday, and non-work.
Unfortunately some of fun, for me at least, has gone out of the job, caused by increasing bureaucracy and attempts to quantify academics’ time with the noble aim of ensuring that the public aren’t being ripped off. Of course the public should be able to sleep safe in the knowledge that university dons are earning their pay, but you, the public, can rest asure that there isn’t a widespread problem: we aren’t on holiday for half the year, because there’s always research to do, new teaching to prepare, PhD students to supervise, and administration to catch up on. A recent article suggests that many academics work considerably more than 50 hours a week. And now we have to account for our time, by filling in forms and keeping track of what we do. Mechanisms with names like TRAC determine how government money is allocated on the basis of these timesheets. Workload models proliferate, mostly giving us 1768 hours a year to account for – even though we might work more than 2500 hours! And they all suffer from the problems above: what exactly is an academic’s work?
For these sorts of reasons I no longer think that my work is my life. And certainly my job isn’t. The life of an academic has changed over the last 30 years, largely for the worse I think, and it is now full of countless meetings, evaluation, meetings, and forms to fill out. I don’t find that part of the job much fun (and I doubt if I am alone).
So now I do distinguish between my job and my life. It’s still a great job and better than most others. And there are still many parts of the job I love (writing and teaching enthusiastic students, for example). But after a brush with death I cannot find meaning in my job alone.
The mortgage has to be paid, but is it possible to do so while living a meaningful life? And where is this meaning to be found?