Allow Yourself to Despair

Despair is an ordinary emotion and experience. Of course people can feel despair. Even great figures like Marx, Engels, and Van Gogh felt despair. All the more so for ordinary people like us living in a cyberpunk world, rural children from developing countries.

Like anger, despair is an ordinary, healthy emotion that people often deny and avoid. Despair and anger are often the same thing—for example, anger and despair toward a partner, parents, or a boss. There is reality in despair, a breaking through of delusion: it is a glimpse of a corner of the big Other, of Cthulhu. Despair is a good thing (all low states are good things).

One inevitable lesson in the passage from youth to middle age is despair. It is just that middle-aged people lack sufficient understanding, or have submitted to the big Other, and cannot point this out clearly. Starting a business, quitting a job without another lined up, changing careers, getting divorced, Nora leaving home, and so on all involve an inevitable encounter with despair. The truly brave are not those who never despair, but those who keep moving forward amid despair. Confucius was stranded between Chen and Cai, but Confucius had Yan Hui, and Yan Hui had Confucius. Marx and Engels had each other; Su Shi had his brother, friends, and students. Yet Marx, Engels, and Su Shi all experienced despair. What is truly hard is being ordinary people like us, like Van Gogh. Our younger brother is Theo, not Su Zhe; our friend is Gauguin, not Huaimin or Engels. They make us lonelier, tormenting us until we want to cut off our own ears. Proletarians also despair, but they live in a simple world, with simple connections, free of the karmic obstructions and Cthulhu that afflict those of us in the small and very small bourgeoisie. When Van Gogh painted *The Potato Eaters*, it was out of envy.

Despair is an emotion experienced by healthy people, milder than dissociation, depression, or toxic shame. Those are all common, so all the more so is despair. Despair is itself part of the sense of insignificance that everyone has; it is human intelligence’s instinctive response to Cthulhu.

Not allowing despair is a cruel prohibition. First, it forbids emotion; second, it forbids reality. Other people who do not allow you to despair are an even heavier presence of Cthulhu. This is precisely the root of disorganized attachment: your parents, your safe haven, are also the terrifying source of your hurt.

Only those who allow themselves to despair, who allow everything, can live in reality. Only by allowing yourself to be an ordinary person, without ability or striving, without desire or demands, without ego or attachment, following the course of fate, can you emerge from the predicament of despair.

The spirit of Van Gogh: despairing all the way, moving forward all the way.

Previous articles: “1863: The First Dispute and Rift Between Marx and Engels,” “Van Gogh Needs Marx and Zhuangzi,” “Brave Nora,” “Nora Leaves Home 3: Van Gogh Syndrome”