Three Years Later: Treading water in the nowhere zone

I came here to feel useful, now I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Sitting in my immaculately clean house, the walls are closing in. Its been like this for a few weeks and I’m not sure how much more I can stand.

Perhaps it’s a particularly post modern problem. In the old days our lives were defined by roles, patterns and expectations and if at times they felt suffocating, for the most part they gave shape and structure to our time on this earth. For most people these days that structure is found in consumerism, debt, financial obligations and, in some cultures, family expectations. I look at friends at home with their nicely defined lives…most are financially comfortable although burdened by mortgages, most are reasonably happy being reasonably challenged by their jobs, many are or have started a family. My life is shaped around none of this, but it leaves the uncomfortable question as to what my life is shaped around. Its pretty hard to shape anything around the void of not having any strong material needs or obligations or overriding personal ties. In one sense, I realise that I’ve made my bed and I certainly don’t want the beds my friends and contemporaries have made for themselves, so I can’t really complain

These days I’m often reminded of some words of wisdom from literature. I may be caught in what Douglas Coupland in Generation X called “option paralysis”, which is the tendency when faced with many options to choose none….proof of what I’ve suspected for a number of years now that having too much freedom is as bad as not having any. Perhaps most of us are simply not equipped to deal with a life in which we only have our own expectations to live up to, only ourselves to please. Life is about checks and balances, you may not like your job but you need to feed your kids/pay your mortgage/save up for that trip, you may not like your location but you there to be with a wonderful person. With too much freedom, you only have your self to blame if things are not right, and nothing is ever completely right. So you change location, change your job, change your circumstance but you’re never happy. After a while you begin to lose hope that anything will get better, no matter what you do. You begin to lose enthusiasm for what lies ahead, for life in general. You feel bad and you lose hope that you will feel better.

On this line of thought, I started to wonder about the euthanasia debate. My appetite for food had drained away with my appetite for life, my nights were filled with strange dreams which did not allow me to rest. There were plenty of things I could be getting on with at work, but I couldn’t muster the energy to get out of bed. Experts on euthanasia talk about dying with dignity and of a rational decision to die. I’ve always believed there was nothing wrong with that thinking and that people in pain should be allowed to die if that’s what they decide or if they are alive only in a technical sense. But recently I began to wonder, if this applies to physical pain, why doesn’t it also apply to mental pain? At what level and over what timescale can the wish not to live with mental pain become a rational decision to die?

I guess the euthanasia debate rests on the fact that, physically, the person cannot recover, where its always assumed that mental illness always has some degree of curability. I wonder though, at what level of drug prescription/assisted living will a mentally ill person fall into the category of only technically alive? What makes not wanting to live in pain for one person a rational decision to die and for another a permanent solution to a temporary problem? It opens some difficult questions…

I guess one difference is that unlike the case of mental illness, assisted suicide cases bring up the intriguing ethical dilemma that, in many cases, the person wishing to die is not physically able to kill themselves. However and whatever the depths of depression I have sometimes felt, there is always, at least in theory, the possibility of escaping…I cannot imagine the level of hopelessness that the person can have being in pain, wanting it over and knowing they don’t have the choice to end it. This case at least seems pretty clear cut, but is it only the thin end of wedge?