Depression is a bitch. It’s one of those self-evident phrases we hear all the time—succinct but true. You’d think that based on the stigma behind it, it’s something that belongs to very few of us, something worthy of shame, but it seems to be a common affliction in American society a la 2018. Maybe depression is just endemic to humans, or maybe it has to do with our estrangement from nature and the habitats that molded us for hundreds of thousands of years. With all of these glaring lights and computer screens and that culture of hyper-competitiveness, it’s all inevitable. Sounds pretty Marxist, actually—estrangement from nature. I had a conversation about Marx the other night. Now, I’m a progressive, don’t get me wrong, but you’d think that from all of the college-aged supposed Marxists who are also social justice-inclined that Marx was some sort of egalitarian visionary—freedom from capitalism for all!—but the guy was basically a white supremacist by today’s standards. Well, a European supremacist, but I guess they’re one and the same if you really get down to it, and also ironically quite classist. Marx believed in a teleology—a natural progression of history that seems entirely European (read: white) and not at all considerate of people who lived in, you know, colonial (also read: occupied) territories. The ones who were actually subject to the worst of classism! It also assumes the ignorance of the masses and relies on white savior ideology, that the upper classes are somehow going to come to their moral defense. Now you can cut him some slack given that this was the 19th century and all, and in certain ways was certainly ahead of its time (in that it predicted industrialism before industrialism had truly taken over in all of its glory, at least the way we think of it) but the point stands that no true self-respecting socialist would ever stand behind pure Marxist philosophy these days, if they only knew what it really entailed.

I suppose I’ve gotten on a tangent here, and have given myself some self-fed food for thought (and possibly an article?) and this really doesn’t have much to do with depression at all. But that’s just how freewrites work! No short stories are coming out of this brain today. At least it’s not as bad as the time I wrote one hungover just to stay in the game. Hey, you asked for this.