“Maybe working on the little things as as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.” – Haruki Murakami
There are many hard things being depressed – the sadness for one, but also the gnawing guilt, the relentless fatigue, the persistent knowing that there is so much to do and so little will to do it. But to me, what feels hardest about depression is this deep hum that runs underneath everything that’s happening: it says, “Nothing really matters.”
I could make dinner, it says, but what would really be the point? I could take a walk, but what will that change? I could pray, text a friend, pull myself out from underneath these covers… but I just know that things will be exactly, terribly, the same.
From the most generous interpretation, we might look at depression’s pull to retreat as a kind of conservation of energy. There’s so little energy available, after all, and it wants to keep us safe and cocooned, even if that means stuck on the couch, mindlessly scrolling, lost in our despair. Nothing really matters, it hums. You’re right, we reply. I’ll stay right here.
I’ve been thinking lately about the way this belief takes hold of us in depression, and the emotional parallels I see happening at a societal level during this polycrisis we’re living through. It feels quite dark out there right now, to state the obvious. We’re afraid. We’re tired. We feel so very lost.
I’m not necessarily suggesting that we’re all in a state of depression (though I wouldn’t go so far to say that we’re not), but I see the way that our collective despair is working on us. We’re getting cynical, haggard, self-protective. Tired in ways that are pulling us away from things like art, play, and forming new relationships.
I hear people talking about only feeling able to think through today or next week – unable to really conceptualize beyond that. This experience has a name, and it’s called having a sense of a foreshortened future. It’s a documented human response to trauma in which our sense of possibility and even of time itself is altered.
And maybe most jarringly, I see the way that insidious, depressive belief is creeping in, telling us it’s all for naught. We start to look for the number to call our senator’s office and we put it down. We consider going to a protest and then we decide it’s all too much. We convince ourselves that the forces are too big, the momentum too strong. Nothing really matters, it hums.
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Last year I heard Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Violence, talking about what it was like in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre. It brought me right back to those cold winter weeks all those years ago, when even the most jaded among us allowed ourselves to believe that this had to be the turning point in firearm safety reform. We almost couldn’t let ourselves believe otherwise. Could we even bear the idea that if twenty first-graders being gunned down didn’t change things, that maybe nothing would?
It was in the days immediately after that tragedy that Watts had started a small Facebook group for Moms Demand Action, a grassroots movement that would eventually grow to have active chapters in all fifty states and eleven million supporters. She said that at the time, what it could be wasn’t even a thought. She just couldn’t be idle.
Watts also had the pragmatic awareness that the movement that she was building wouldn’t set its sights on broad, sweeping reform. She would work locally, not federally, she decided, focusing on a policy-by-policy, state-by-state approach. In fact, Moms Demand Action would put much of its energy toward blocking “bad bills,” preventing the rollback of protections and harmful legislation from moving forward.
The strategy wasn’t about transformation, and it didn’t carry the sexy cache of bold promises. It was intentionally incremental, focusing on shaping new norms and policies piece by piece by piece. It was about small wins, and even small losses – holding the belief that ultimate success wasn’t about not failing, but instead failing forward.
Watts explained to the online magazine, Tricycle, “Activism is like drips on a rock. I wish the system in this country were set up for wholesale overnight change. It is not. It is set up for incrementalism… but if you don’t show up to make those changes, then change never happens.”
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I think about incrementalism a lot in my work as a psychologist – in part because baby steps may be all someone feels capable of when having a hard time, but in fact more so because I’ve seen enough times just how powerful it can be.
Years ago, when I was learning a particular model of family therapy, the trainer urged us to focus on what she called one degree of change. She took her marker and drew a little airplane on the whiteboard. “Let’s start in L.A.,” she told us. “We’re heading for New York. But we get one degree off course. Where will we end up?”
Certainly not New York, it was clear. Incredibly far from it, in fact. If New York was where you wanted to go, this was bad news. But if New York is where you’d always gone – the conflicts and patterns and dynamics you couldn’t seem to stop going toward – one degree of change could mean the opportunity for something wildly different.
That insight stuck with me. It helped me stay open and hopeful when sitting with someone in the midst of even the most profoundly dire circumstances. It shifted my attention to where a one degree in each situation might be.
It also got me thinking about why a one-degree approach might move things. What about that was meaningful? What I came to believe is that it wasn’t the thing itself, but that even tiny, incremental actions help shape a different sense of self. I become a person who is doing something. I become a person who has – even if infinitesimal – a degree of agency. I become a person who believes something, anything matters.
In psychology terms, we could call this creating prediction errors. We operate in our lives full of predictions of what things are and what will happen next. When we are stuck in depressive or anxious loops, those predictions are even stronger. Doing just one small thing differently allows for a prediction error, and that helps tell our brain, Wait just a minute… Maybe things could be different than I thought?
Doing a one-degree action is, in a way, a tiny vote for the future. When the future feels uncertain or foreshortened, that’s not nothing. It’s a vote, too, against demoralism, a state that can be incredibly compelling.
As I write this, today a five-year-old boy was released from an immigration detention center where he’d be taken after being picked up with his father on his way home from preschool. I noticed in reading about his release how easy it would be to say, “But that’s just one child. There are so many. I’m still so angry and scared. This isn’t enough.” I noticed how easy it would be to let myself feel like one degree didn’t matter. That maybe nothing would.
But here’s the thing. It does matter – for that little boy, who is hopefully back to his fuzzy blue hat and his Spiderman backpack and to the arms of his terrified mother. For that family, it matters. I have to think it matters more than anything ever has.
Will it change the nature of our political crisis? Will it turn the tide? Will it save democracy? We could hardly say yes, but I also won’t say no. We’ll have to accept the profound uncertainty of our shared future for now. But regardless of what came before or what comes after, this little boy going home – and all the work of all the people who helped make it happen – matters.
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So what do we do now?
Well, I think we each figure out the one degree we’re going to commit to. Not because we think it will be the answer. It doesn’t have to be. It just has to remind us that we are here and we are real and that things do still matter.
When we’ve gripped by despair, it can feel hard to know where to start. I think about sitting with my patients with depression where it’s not just the demoralization, but the indecision that keeps them spinning.
The good news about incrementalism is that you can start anywhere – literally, anywhere. You could say hello to a neighbor you’ve never spoken to today. You can donate $10 to a cause that means something. You can pull out your journal and write about how this has been landing for you. You can make that phone call to the senator after all.
Anything you do will be a signal to yourself that you are a person who does something. The scope of what you do is irrelevant to shifting the narrative that you are incapable of helping. It all works. The story starts to change.
That said, I will tell you that if you do want to get the most emotional bang for your buck, in-person advocacy and, community involvement are linked with better well-being — and this is supported by empirical research. So if you have the choice, do something with someone.
But again, just do something. Start close in, as one of my all-time favorite poems by David Whyte tells us. Start with the ground you know / the pale ground beneath your feet / your own way of starting the conversation.
It matters.
