Why Faust Is Depressed

Conscience: Le Falher.

A friend of mine, 79, went to his doctor recently. It happens, when you’re 79. The good doctor asked if he was ever depressed these days. “It happens to most people your age,” he explained, reflecting, I believe, received medical wisdom. “Eventually, you realize that you aren’t going to live forever.”

Now that’s a shocker. Who knew?

In other words, this bit of received wisdom among the medical profession makes no sense to me. Haven’t most of us always understood we weren’t going to live forever? And so what? If there is an afterlife, we can perhaps look forward to something better. If there is not, we face nothing worse than going out like a light. Yes, of course, there is the option of hellfire… I suppose that is reason for depression.

Interestingly, the medical consensus apparently does not tally with the real world most of us inhabit. Most people, after sixty, just get happier and happier. Multiple studies show this.

How to explain this discrepancy? My guess is that it shows there are two kinds of people. You might call them the sheep and the goats. The good news is, most of us are apparently sheep.

But maybe doctors are mostly goats.

I mentioned this strange discrepancy in perceptions to a Pakistani friend. He told me in response a tale of a man from his own village. This man had faced terrible struggles and adversity throughout his life. Though he was a good man, honest, hard-working, kind, he could never get a break.

In his old age, he was uncommonly happy. Asked why, he replied, “happiness is the reward for a clear conscience in old age.”

Saint Paul said something similar:

For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. 7I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; 8in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness,

Conscience: Chifflart.

This need not be about anticipated reward in heaven, either. This is about not being haunted by a bad conscience, and the realization that too soon it will be too late to set things right.

I worry, however, about those who rely on doctors for advice—including psychiatrists. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that psychotherapy is simply confession without absolution. Psychiatrists will work on improving your “self-esteem,” and try to convince you that everything is all right as it is. They have a personal, vested interest in believing this is so—the world and sheer self-centredness has so far been good to them. But your conscience is telling you you must change.

Caught in the middle, you may never heal.