Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases and, before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in the world--it is death!

That was what happened to me. I understood that it was no casual indisposition but something very important, and that if these questions constantly repeated them- selves they would have to be answered. And I tried to answer them. The questions seemed such stupid, simple, childish ones; but as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them I at once became convinced, first, that they are not childish and stupid but the most important and profound of life's questions; and secondly that, try as I would, I could not solve them. Before occupying my- self with my Samara estate, the education of my son, or the writing of a book, I had to know why I was doing it. As long as I did not know why, I could do nothing and could not live. Amid the thoughts of estate manage- ment which greatly occupied me at that time, the question would suddenly occur: 'Well, you will have 6,000 desy- atinas of land in Samara Government and 300 horses, and what then?'... And I was quite disconcerted and did not know what to think. Or when considering plans for the education of my children, I would say to myself: 'What for?' Or when considering how the peasants might become prosperous, I would suddenly say to myself: "But what does it matter to me?' Or when thinking of the fame my works would bring me, I would say to myself, 'Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakes- peare or Moliere, or than all the writers in the world-- and what of it?' And I could find no reply at all. The questions would not wait, they had to be answered at once, and if I did not answer them it was impossible to live. But there was no answer.

I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I de- sired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing... ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death--complete annihilation.1

Some writers use the term "existential despair" to describe the same phenomenon.

A collapse in values often results from philosophical and linguistic misunderstanding of such key concepts as "meaning" and "life". These concepts seem obvious at first thought. But they are in fact often obscure and misleading, both the concepts and the words which stand for them. Making clear the confusion often reveals the implicit values.

The sense of loss of meaning is usually followed by depression, though it sometimes is followed by uncontrolled elation or by a violent oscillation between the two poles. The basic idea of this book, negative self-comparisons, explains this phenomenon: Before the event, actuality and the person's values were in balance or positive most of the time. But with the removal of one's customary values there is no longer a basis of hypothetical comparison for one's activities. Hence the result of the comparison is indeterminate but very large in one direction or the other, because there is no boundary to the comparison. The comparison is more likely to be negative than positive because the former values are likely to have been a support for, rather than a constraint of, the person's activities and life style.

Values Can Cure the Sickness Values Cause

The most interesting curative possibility for collapse of values is the discovery of new values, or the re-discovery of neglected old ones. This is what happened to Tolstoy, when he later came to believe that life itself is its own value, a belief which he also thought characterized peasant life.

Tolstoy and modern existential thinkers have thought that the "despair" of loss-of-meaning depression is the educated person's common condition. It seems to me, however, that most "educated" people's training, interests, and life circumstances do not lead them to question the values they accepted in childhood, for better or for worse, in such manner as to lead to loss of meaning.

Summary

Values and beliefs play an even more complex role in depression than do ordinary goals. Values are more fundamental than ordinary goals. We can think of values as goals that are based on the individual's deepest beliefs about human life and society, assessments of what is good and what is evil.

The collapse of a person's values can lead to depression. The most interesting curative possibility for collapse of values is the discovery of new values, or the re-discovery of neglected old ones. These possibilities will be discussed later.

next: Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression Chapter 7