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How we learned to stop having fun

How we learned to stop having fun- THE GUARDIAN


We used to know how to get together and really let our hair down. Then, in the early 1600s, a mass epidemic of depression broke out - and we've been living with it ever since. Something went wrong, but what? Barbara Ehrenreich unpicks the causes of our unhappiness

But there was a price to be paid for the buoyant individualism we associate with the more upbeat aspects of the early modern period, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Tuan writes, "the obverse" of the new sense of personal autonomy is "isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, a loss of natural vitality and of innocent pleasure in the givenness of the world, and a feeling of burden because reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". Now if there is one circumstance indisputably involved in the etiology of depression, it is precisely this sense of isolation. As the 19th-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim saw it, "Originally society is everything, the individual nothing ... But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all [human]." The flip side of the heroic autonomy that is said to represent one of the great achievements of the early modern and modern eras is radical isolation and, with it, depression and sometimes death.

But the new kind of personality that arose in 16th- and 17th-century Europe was by no means as autonomous and self-defining as claimed. For far from being detached from the immediate human environment, the newly self-centered individual is continually preoccupied with judging the expectations of others and his or her own success in meeting them: "How am I doing?" this supposedly autonomous "self" wants to know. "What kind of an impression am I making?"

It is no coincidence that the concept of society emerges at the same time as the concept of self. What seems most to concern the new and supposedly autonomous self is the opinion of others, who in aggregate compose "society". Mirrors, for example, do not show us our "selves", only what others can see, and autobiographies reveal only what we want those others to know. The crushing weight of other people's judgments - imagined or real - would help explain the frequent onset of depression at the time of a perceived or anticipated failure. In the 19th century, the historian Janet Oppenheim reports, "severely depressed patients frequently revealed totally unwarranted fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace". This is not autonomy but dependency: the emerging "self" defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others.

If depression was one result of the new individualism, the usual concomitant of depression - anxiety - was surely another

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