Depression and Dissent in the Time of the Virus
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Hello, I’m a twenty-something living in 2020. At the start of the year, I had lots of I wanted to accomplish. Perhaps I was just about to graduate from university, excited to see what life had in store for me. Perhaps I was in love, excited to see where they and I might go. Perhaps I was just about to become a parent, or a spouse, or a homeowner, or an employee at my dream company, or a founder of a small business working out of my garage, or a recipient of vital healthcare I’d been on a waiting list about for months. Perhaps I’d saved up for years working a job I’d hated to spend a year travelling the world, anxious to leave a country that I never liked to find a person I might in myself. Perhaps I’d been working up the courage to leave an abusive relationship with my therapist in covert weekly sessions, figuring out that their love wasn’t the love I deserved or needed.
Well, now I’m stuck indoors with them; or, now I’m unable to leave that country; or, now I can’t get that medical treatment I’ve desperately needed for years. Now, my small business has collapsed, the bank have threatened to repossess my house after I remortgaged it to follow my dream, and I can’t pay my heating bills now it’s wintertime. Now, my offer at that great company was rescinded following the greatest recession in living memory, so I’m stuck living with my parents as if I’d accomplished nothing the last three years at university, wasting tens of thousands of future-me’s pounds to come right back to where I started. Now, one of the homeowners on the ladder above me decided not to sell at the last minute, so I’m left renting a mouldy, beaten down, unkempt flat in a neighbourhood I don’t feel safe walking through at night.
Now, I’m depressed. Though there’re no doctors available to advise, diagnose, or prescribe, I know I’m depressed. I have been denied the life, the opportunities, and the happiness I thought I was owed to me merely by being alive and by operating in accordance with the structures that make the rules and those who enforce them. ‘Why?’, I hear you ask, from thirty years in the future. ‘Your life must be awful, what happened to you?’. ‘The world was hit’, I respond, ‘by a virus. And now, I crave the time I perhaps was once desperate to see behind me.’
Even if my life before was misery, it is far worse now. Consigned to my home, wherever that might be, I am forcefully prevented from experiencing both the joy and the misery that would have inevitably been tossed in my way. And, even if it had been my life’s plan that solely misery was to be infused within the events of the year, it would nonetheless have been my life’s plan to unfold thus. It would have been my misery to cope with, my experiences to overcome, and my lessons to be learned from them. Worse off further am I were life to have planned happiness for my year, as I might have so hoped! So ardently did I work for that new occupation, or that new house to live in with my new-born, or that plane ticket to self-discovery. The virus has stripped me of both my opportunities and my freedom, and, now, I’m depressed.
Shocked, perhaps appalled, you then perceive me. My tone of arrogance toward the genuine and massive social, healthcare, and economic issues facing billions of people disgusts you, and you look upon me with your thirty years’ worth of displaced hindsight and scold me, ‘You’re kidding? Millions of people around the world are dead, dying, or have had their well-being irreparably affected, and you’re worried about a job offer, or owning a home, or travelling the world? How self-centred can you be?’
I, our generation of dreamers, look to my toes in embarrassment. Of course, I care about the lives that have been lost, I think to myself, knowing that my capacity to dissociate personhood from statistics reported in the news means that, really, I don’t. Of course, it’s terrible that so many are affected, I tell myself I believe, while I also recount to myself in a shameful, silent defiance how so few individuals my age are ever really affected.
Indeed, I am fully acquainted with the moralisation of issues that has proliferated through society and discourse surrounding the virus. It is one’s duty not to intermingle with others outside one’s household in large groups. It feels a societal obligation not to spend long periods of time inside another’s home, or play competitive sport, or travel on public transport, regardless of whether those things have been forbidden by the law. I must, as society tells me, stay indoors to stop the spread of the disease and protect the lives of those that are more vulnerable. This makes sense to me. And yet, I, our healthy and optimistic age-group, partake in all of these activities and feel no regret from doing so.
What gives me such insolent courage to stand in the face of this new yet already-established moral issue? Why is it that I feel so assured in my position that I am comfortable to do what society might say is wrong, and to do as such so often? Who do I think I am?
I put these questions to you, future student of epidemiology, history, or politics. ‘Who do you think I am?’, I inquire. As the astute student you are, you take no time in recounting the political mishaps (think driving to Durham), ditherings (think delaying the second lockdown), and mismanagement (think the Mayor of Manchester) that have led to my distrust in the U.K. government and my apathy towards compliance. You explain to me that, because I do not fear repercussions on my health given that I am healthy, and because I have been raised in a society where freedom is a right, I am narrow-minded and self-interested.
You tell me, ‘I know who you are. You think you are unaffectable in your health and owed by right the freedoms you seek. And, you are correct. But, I, dissecting your youth from the perspective of my own, see you for what you are: stupid and selfish. Had you only stayed indoors for a few months, so many hundreds of thousands might have remained as unaffected as you are still. Your life might’ve returned to how you want it now many months sooner, those dreams after which you pined before might’ve been realised even a whole year beforehand. But, no, you could not hold true. Your grandparents endured the worst war in human history, and you couldn’t sit inside for a few months. Shame on you.’
Perhaps you are right. I know myself, after all; I am selfish, I do believe I am owed the freedoms I desire, and I know I care more about pursuing those than preserving the hypothetical health of potential people I might encounter. Why? From where was this dangerous dissent borne?
When we first were forced to enter lockdown, I certainly showed no equivalent dissent. I did not parade out into the streets in rebuke of the regulation to wear a mask; in fact, I laughed at those people. I did not despise the police for handing out thousands of pounds’ worth of fines to people having parties; in fact, I supported them. I did not flagrantly socialise against the mandate of the law; in fact, I was wholeheartedly against the idea. What changed? Why do I now disregard what I once believed a duty?
For one, I am now, as previously established, depressed. The opportunities I had been promised had not yet failed to come into fruition before, so there was still hope onto which I could cling. I thought, or even hoped, maybe it’ll all be over by Christmas (as Brits infamously said about WW1). That hope has now been boiled, evaporating into the extractor fan of wishful thinking on the hob of a global pandemic. All the things I wanted for myself I now cannot have.
My depression, however, has evolved. It has mutated beyond a mere discouraged discontent towards my current circumstances. It is more than an immovable sadness for the death of the life I wanted to lead. It has turned into a flippant, headstrong, unsympathetic anger that has arisen in what feels like a simulation of a ‘fight or flight’ scenario, and I choose to fight.
I choose dissent. Why should I be made to suffer when I’m not at risk?, I, our healthy generation, think to myself. I think it, wishing that only those with underlying health conditions should, in some twisted utilitarian scheme that no government who wants voters could ever pull off, have their rights taken away like I believe mine have. I know, somewhere, that it is wrong. Even if I am so sure in this belief, I am aware, at some unconscious level, that sufficient introspection would yield to me reason not to hold it. And yet, still I do entertain it. I let it drive subsequent beliefs and behaviours. With it in tow, I dissent.
My depression will not cease till the life I wished for myself before the virus comes to fruition (which it never might). On some level, perhaps I will still hold resentment for the virus until opportunities I consider equivalent in significance come along. Perhaps it will be then when I’ll realise how selfish I was — my inability to conceptualise what it was like when I was miserable when I am not will never cease to astonish me.
However, my dissent is different. I, naiveté embodied, believe I have had my rights taken away from me. I have been institutionally deprived of hopes and dreams I might have held for years. My depression will fade, and perhaps the unlawful and immoral intentions I carry daily will cease once the virus has been controlled. When the new vaccine is released and life ‘goes back to normal’, I doubt I’ll parade in the streets about things again unless they impinge directly on my freedoms.
Yet, there will be something different about me. Perhaps it will be a greater lust for the thrills life can bring, aware it can just so easily take those thrills away. Perhaps it will be a more solid determination against authority and figures of power, rooted in distrust now cemented into my worldview. Perhaps it will be an intensified active interest in matters of politics and geopolitics, after having been acquainted with what I take to be civil injustice. Whatever it is, I, our generation, will undoubtably be different. We will be more; more active, more engaged, more aware — even if only subtly. With this, now, how I’ll shape the world is anyone’s guess.
