I am Depressed! Politically.

In a recent town hall, I spoke about how we as “political animals” need to restore our public life. I now understand what I really meant to say: we all have some levels of “political depression”.

The concept of “political depression” was introduced by Dr. Robert Lusson, a clinical psychologist who posted an article titled “Political Depression” on HuffPost. In the article, he defines political depression as 

“the perception that work, education, imagination and perseverance do not matter and that there is a ceiling on one’s possibilities”. 

It is the feeling of “whatever”. It is the feeling of “things around me don’t matter, and they won’t change anything”. It really is the distrust and disinvolvement of public discussions, governments, elections, communities -- public life, in general. The word “political”, again, means polis, a set amount of people in a fixed place.

The discussion of the concept surged after, you guessed it, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016. I am in no position to comment on Trump’s presidency, but his causing more people to feel political depression does make sense. Trump wasn’t the cause, but he certainly accelerated the trend of increasing public distrust of public figures and polarizing elections. I remember Mr. Sheehan talking about this in the advisory period, how competing parties and supporters have seemingly stopped having meaningful conversations, and every mentioning of that ended with a long sigh.

But it isn’t just U.S. elections we are talking about here, the world is going down. 

My mother stayed in Beijing for pretty much the entire COVID pandemic. Being in the special education school and also in the densely populated capital, she faced countless mini-lockdowns and school cancellations. In 2020 and 2021, most people like my mother genuinely believed that the country was acting in its citizens’ best interests. I still believe that, but the time has changed. The burst of outcries in the last few months reflect how years of negative news and missing public life affect people. People can, and some did,  go mad without public life. Luckily, the Chinese New Year follows right after the cancellation of zero-covid policy, and the society finally back.

Yet, after covid, we are still GOBLINS. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word of the year 2022 is “Goblin Mode”. Goblins, if you aren’t a gamer, are small, disgusting creatures living in underground tunnels. The term Goblin Mode captures many people’s feeling that rejects going back to social norms. Admit it, we have all been goblins some time during the covid years, whether it’s not-cleaning-up our room, lowering our aesthetic standards, or not going outside. The goblin mode habit is, of course, bad, yet with political depression, people feel more comfortable about it.

It seems like I am talking about two things here, but it really is the same thing. Political depression is the true problem for “new generations”.

P.S. When I learned about the “meta-verse”, I was blown away. I have always been a radical supporter of  technological innovations, but the metaverse is different. The concept of replicating our world in computers is different. My opinion on metaverse coincidentally matches a tweet from Shaan Puri, which reads: “The metaverse is the moment in time where our digital life is worth more to us than our physical life.” With increasing users of the Internet, I would add this: “Our digital life is becoming our private life, and our public life is moving toward private life.” Maybe digital life only takes 15% of everyone’s life for now, but I can only imagine the percentage increasing. When it becomes 51%, we as a civilization will face a real crisis. That’s how I imagine the end of the world: no slaughtering, just diminishing piece by piece…