It’s an annoying fact of life that anything worth having requires hard work. Not only hard work, but usually a lot of endurance and boredom and frustration. This is problematic, because nature has designed us to be pleasure-seekers, and as a result we often prefer spending time stuffing our faces with Doritos and lying around, sloth-like, checking Facebook.
Conventional wisdom presents us with several different — often contradictory — theories as to the causes of depression. We may see depression alternately as a genetic predisposition, a faulty neurochemical mechanism in the brain, a response to childhood circumstances, or to current adverse life conditions. Research has pointed the way to several effective approaches to alleviating depression, including psychotherapy, exercise, mindfulness meditation, and antidepressants (judiciously used). But it seems as though little attention is paid to the idea of a meaning or a message buried within depression.
Human beings are story-telling animals. Once our needs for shelter, food, and connection are accounted for, that which we most require is stories. Narratives are so fundamental to humanity they appear to be co-emergent with the origin of the species. For as long as mankind has existed, there are stories — painted on cave walls, carved into stone, sung in ballads, inscribed on parchment, printed into books, made into movies, and binge-watched on Netflix.