Depression, Mania, and Self-Abandonment Among Many Young People: The Mind's Libido Will Mourn Itself

The deeper mind/mental energy/libido knows everything, knows the truth, has thought through and reasoned through everything, and can sense the most likely outcome in advance.

This is one reason for quietude and non-action: the brain no longer needs to create trouble for itself by overthinking. The opposite of quietude and non-action is restless, reckless action. The libido knows, but the empirical self, the brain, the ego refuses to accept it.

If the libido realizes that one’s spiritual life is about to die, depression and mania can follow.

For example, many students living in poverty or struggling academically in their second year of junior high or second year of senior high know that they are about to enter society, and that in all likelihood they will spend the rest of their lives spiritually dead. Students are sorted into different tracks, and so are their lives. Before this, from childhood through the first year of junior high, the vast majority of students behave themselves and sit properly in class. In the first year of junior high, students struggling academically begin to give up on themselves. By the second year, more begin acting like delinquents, and rebellious behavior becomes more common. Prolonged learned helplessness, with nowhere to turn for help. The libido gives up hope completely. Some people I know who are about to marry into their wives’ families for material advantage are the same: they behave erratically because they realize that their spiritual lives are about to suffer a devastating blow.

Yet many of these people, after a few years in society, become numb and unresponsive, like blocks of wood.

The libido mourns itself in advance: acting out, seeking attention, giving up on itself, becoming aggressive, feeling urges toward self-destruction and destruction. When the libido realizes that it will be difficult to go on living like a human being, it acts out like someone still alive.

This is where the depth of psychoanalysis lies.

This is also where the depth of Daoist philosophy lies. One part agency, nine parts having no choice. So-called talent and effort do not count for all that much in the face of fate, especially before the age of 25. Only by accepting the time and circumstances one finds oneself in, through quietude and non-action, can one truly exercise that one part of agency.

This is also humanistic psychology: do not underestimate anyone’s deeper mind. Behind every seemingly ordinary person are profound philosophical questions and a spiritual journey. Some actions that appear evil on the surface are, instead, driven by human needs. Respect every ordinary person struggling through everyday life. (“Psychoanalysis Reveals the Poetry, the Sacred, and Cthulhu in Everyday Life”; “How Ordinary People Can Experience Innate Wholeness”)

This is also Marxist psychology: we think young people ruin their prospects by giving up on themselves. In fact, they give up on themselves because they see that they have no prospects. This is a psychological explanation for the radical or extreme behavior of many young people around the world. The renowned British work of sociology and education, *Learning to Labour*, describes how working-class children, realizing that they are not “cut out for studying,” or that they “are not destined for an education,” begin actively turning toward “street smarts.”

In World War I, perhaps much as with many impoverished Slavs in the current Russia–Ukraine war, many instances amounted to collective suicide by young people whose lives were painful and hopeless—the trench charges of the British, French, and Germans. This is another brutal explanation for why the world situation did not develop as Marx and Engels anticipated. It was also this kind of environment that gave rise to Hitler and the Nazis.

Appendix: “An Overview of the Marx + Zhuangzi + Psychology Framework”

An additional note, also touching on the philosophy of death.

I increasingly feel that death anxiety has nothing to do with death, but concerns something else. (This is a vague sense.)

The question of physical death, the question of spiritual death, and the question of death anxiety in middle age are different questions.

The libido knows the truth.

1. If the libido realizes that one really is going to die physically—for example, with terminal cancer—many people instead become calm and experience awakening (Irvin Yalom, *Staring at the Sun*).

1. If the libido realizes that one’s spiritual life is about to die, depression and mania can follow (this article).

1. Some of the death anxiety experienced by middle-aged people is often, instead, a positive expression of libido: the libido has only just experienced the enjoyable side of the game and is in an invigorated state. So suggestions of death—depleted mental energy, outside interference, violations of boundaries—can deeply upset one’s narcissism. One is unwilling to accept it, unwilling to let the dance end. This is a form of anxiety, a positive and normal emotion. Of course, this accounts for only some of it. I feel it has explanatory power for what I myself experienced at the time. The word “death” in the question of death anxiety is merely a philosophical abstraction, a feeling. For example, under multiple pressures from being urged or forced to marry, “feeling like you’re going to die” is a different thing from the libido truly realizing that one is going to die, physically or spiritually.