In this multi-part series <<Your quest titled ‘Major Depression’ has just begun>>, I will delve into the details of my personal story of getting Major Depression and ultimately curing myself without medication or professional help. I will also highlight my revelations at different points in my journey.
Up until this point, I had been trying to get rid of the symptoms but they stubbornly refused to go away. Since that approach was not very successful, I decided to try something else: deal with the big elephant in the room which I had been ignoring up until that point.
I was experiencing the biggest existential crisis of my life to date. Self-reflection and philosophical thinking were things that I did regularly pre-depression but I had never seriously answered the questions of “What is the purpose of life?”
Now that question kept echoing in my mind, haunting me, and whatever flimsy answer I previously had no longer sufficed to keep it at bay. Every aspect of life seemed pretty pointless at that moment. It was as if I was demanding a serious answer from myself and could not move on otherwise.
I pondered the permutations and possibilities. If there is some inherent purpose in life, what is its origin? Some otherworldly being? Maybe its nature and we’re just naturally born with one? If there is no inherent purpose in life, what then? Should I carry on? How can I carry on? I went round in circles like this for a while.
Eventually I asked myself, do I know of a way to arrive at an absolute truth? Unfortunately, no.
Okay then, what about a relative truth? Relative in the sense that it is the truth for me in my subjective experience, in a way that matters most to me. What matters most to me? I knew the answer to this one: Freedom.
Freedom to make my own decisions and take my own actions, being the absolute ruler of my life, being my own emperor. And if freedom is the most important element to me, what answer to “What is the purpose of life?” would be most significant to me?
“There is no inherent purpose in my life given by some other entity and that is the beautiful part because I can choose my own purpose.”
Existential crisis resolved. Well, almost. What purpose should I choose? I choose happiness. How do I be happy? By being myself, and living my life as an expression of who I am. For me personally, that meant being my own boss and focussing on the activities of:
- Identifying opportunities to make the world a better place
- Developing creative ideas to turn that opportunity into a sustainable and scalable business
- Turning those business ideas into reality
During this period of soul searching, I stumbled upon a series of Youtube videos that reinforced and illustrated the conclusions that I had reached.
The videos are voice recordings by the philosopher Alan Watts who predominantly lectured on Eastern philosophical and spiritual teachings (such as Buddhism and Taoism) to a Western audience in a manner that they could easily comprehend.
The video below was the most relevant one to my situation because it elegantly discusses the nature/meaning of life using music as an analogy:
“It [Life] was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played.” - Alan Watts
At the end of this process, I decided to quit my job and pursue my childhood dream of being an entrepreneur, but not immediately. I decided to stay in the job for another 1-2 years because there were still some specific areas of business operations that I wanted to learn about.
However, I promised myself that I would be more selective of the projects that I would accept and strongly reject the ones that were either irrelevant to my learning or bad for my psychological well-being.
After I made this decision, I immediately felt that a heavy burden was lifted from my shoulders. Over subsequent days, positive emotions slowly started coming back to me. At the heights of my depression, I felt as if life was in monochrome, a dull black, white, and grey.
But now I felt as if colour was slowly creeping back into my life. I felt a sense of purpose, a reason to live and to go on living. My mood gradually improved all by itself, without me having to take any special actions. As my mood improved, the other symptoms of major depression starting going away too.
This entire process took me between 2 weeks to a month of intense contemplation. It might have taken longer if I had not already known myself as well as I did back then. So don’t despair if you find that it takes you a while to arrive at your own personally meaningful conclusions.
Insight #5: The first step should be to resolve the existential crisis so that you have a reason to live.
To be continued…...
List of chapters in this series:
Chapter 0: Narrator’s opening speech
Chapter 1: Getting lost in a dark forest
Chapter 2: The paths in the forest go round and round, round and round, round and round
Chapter 3: Moonlight reflecting off a still pond within the dark forest
Chapter 4: Forward MARCH! into the unknown
Chapter 5: Stumbling upon the shortcut out of the dark forest
