The Footnote.

I made a post last night around the quandary over whether or not to get another car. After the decision was made I reasoned (if that be quite the right word) that choosing not to get one was a victory for instinct, and perhaps some deeper spiritual need, over logic, a practice which has gained some currency in recent decades. But then I had another thought and said I might add a footnote. This is it:

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m subject to a lot of depression. It’s been with me since I was a child and has grown worse with advancing age. And I’ve noticed a strange feature attaching to depression which I don’t suppose non-depressives realise.

Depression usually has no obvious trigger; it just happens. That’s part of the difference between being truly depressed and merely being in a bad mood. And our brains are wired in such a way as to function on the basis of cause and effect. So if there is no obvious cause, it makes a certain kind of perverse sense to seek or even create a cause for the depression. And so we tend to find the means to do ourselves down, to deny ourselves something we need in order to make life easier or more pleasurable. The depression is now vindicated and has a right to exist.

It follows a practice common in parental attitudes when I was a boy. If a child was crying for no apparent reason, a parent – usually the father for he was expected to be the disciplinarian – would utter the firm threat: ‘Stop that crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.’ Whether it was common in British culture generally, or only in the grimy, industrial environment in which I was brought up (an environment in which the grim existence among factories, coal mines, steelworks, and slum habitation had instilled an essential mentality of stoicism) I wouldn’t know.

And whether that was the reason for my declining to buy the car, I also wouldn’t know. But maybe some of my odd ideas do, after all, have some basis in fact.