Depression’s felt realism mirrors capitalist realism’s lowered expectations

Evidence

One difference between sadness and depression is that, while sadness apprehends itself as a contingent and temporary state of affairs, depression presents itself as necessary and interminable: the glacial surfaces of the depressive’s world extend to every conceivable horizon. In the depths of the condition, the depressive does not experience his or her melancholia as pathological or indeed abnormal: the conviction of depression that agency is useless, that beneath the appearance of virtue lies only venality, strikes sufferers as a truth which they have reached but others are too deluded to grasp. There is clearly a relationship between the seeming “realism” of the depressive, with its radically lowered expectations, and capitalist realism. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1489

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mapping of depressive conviction as a truth reached not a pathology — that depression feels like clarity — performs serious conceptual work worth sitting with.
• XREF: Links back to the ch33 claim that class inferiority is an empirically unfalsifiable sense of hidden worth — depressive ‘realism’ as ideology. — connects to: Depressive ontology seduces because it is half true — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 144; Depression constitutes a theory of the world, marshaling instances as evidence — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 138; Capitalist realism’s self-diagnosed realism mirrors the fatalism of depressive realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2217 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalist realism’s self-diagnosed realism mirrors the fatalism of depressive realism #corroborates (0.93) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2217
• Capitalist realism’s required realism is an escalating series of depressive thresholds #expands (0.85)
• Realism both critiques and reinforces the status quo’s exclusions #complicates (0.72) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 438