Out of steam and wallowing in chaos

After the Eid Al Fitr holidays, I suddenly realized that a time off from work and home is no longer the prescription for combating depression. At least, I know now that it doesn't always work for me...

I vowed to change my attitude from being a fatalist-realist during the start of the year, but alas, my built-up sensibilities proved to be a worthy opponent. Not to mention that the grim realities of everyday living is like a Multi-Colored-Dot-Matrix Ad board along EDSA mocking you with all these problems and challenges like theres no tomorrow.

Feeling all too vulnerable, I tried to immerse my self constantly into physical and mental activities in my desperate attempt to fend off the onslaught of this depression. I even resorted to meditation and changing my daily routine to give it an extra kick.... Guess what? No USE!

I think when it comes down to it, the biggest mistake one can ever do when it comes to these things is to ignore them. So, I am writing it down here as a sort of self-medication to see if anyone else out there is sensitive and knowledgeable enough to provide me with some answers (or a clue, which ever works).

I know that spirituality brings some answers to these paradoxes - I've personally witnessed it work. Not that I'm poking my head into blasphemy again, it's just that, this time around, I wanted more specific answers and not just the usual "its all in His plan...." mutterings of some robed guy you see on Sundays.

I tried to ponder on things that happened to me that might explain this lull state I'm currently wallowing from. So far, I have not discovered anything out of the ordinary, except of course that the monotony of living as an expatriate, trying to cope with the illusion of success and fortune, is the only new thing in the mix.

I wanted to get direct answers from someone whose had first hand experience on tricks on how to make it living as an expatriate, constantly battling depression and work fatigue...

So I tried approaching my dad, whose been working here for around 18 years. Tried to fish some ideas from him about how he made it through all those years with his sanity still intact; all without giving away my intentions, current emotional and psychological state.

I wanted to preserve the integrity of the inquiry so that I can at least promulgate something unabated about combating psychosomatic fatigue and burnout. You could call it "A scientific approach to depression..."

As expected, he uttered vague and sometimes esoteric advices and anecdotes. I guess it’s just him being him. I think all dads are like that. It's like an unspoken code or something - "to be perfectly obscure, yet crystal clear...". I know because I do the same stuff too when my daughter pins me up with some questions of her own.

More than the usual phases that everybody goes through, I felt that what I was experiencing will not leave me until I find a way to understand it's complexities - sort of like Grey's Anatomy but milder.

So, without further a do, here’s my list on things that I think I'm getting my depression fix from:

1. Why do you have to slave like a dog when every month you end up with loose change from your so called "Pay Slip" (more like Spend Slip to me!) on your bank account?


2. Why do we try to better ourselves on our careers when we know that along the way, a younger, more improved versions of ourselves will probably walk out of the University as your company writes you a pink slip and calls it "Early Retirement Availment...."


3. Why do we even bother to get up every day and work 8-10 hours and even put up overtime whenever we can, when we know we will only earn X number of Pesos annually and probably end up with less than 2% of that as your savings


4. Why do we even immerse ourselves with quaint childish forms of leisure, (shopping/gadgets/weekend getaways/clubbing/etcetera) when we know that at the end of it all, we'd end up with less Pesos on our pocket and have to do double the work just to pay off our credit card bills...


5. Why do even bother to dream grand ambitions of profiting from our very own business when the fact is, we're all chicken shit to commit to an unsecure, labor and capital intensive ventures, if we can stay in the comfort and so-called security of our day jobs. Content of the fact that we will never amount to something more than a glorified office grunt whether our designation reads Manager or President.

In retrospect, I understand that the laws of nature are immutable - Survival of the fittest, Winners never Quit, Think outside of the box,

or my all time favorite, life is hard, so quit your whining!

I guess there's little comfort to the fact that in 1898, a guy named Jacques Hadamard first propounded the idea of the Chaos Theory.

It states that any existing natural system that exhibits mathematical chaos/disorder (like brain cell function, lightning, electrical circuits, fluid dynamics, magnetic resonance, as well as human emotions) is almost always deterministic, meaning, the resulting action is a statistical certainty - ergo there is still Order in Chaos.

Sounds kind of the funky doesn't it? So does this means, I am in effect "statistically certain" to end up like a depressed whining loony???

Sadly, Mr. Hadamard's little theory seems to agree so...

Let's see Dr. Phil make sense of this shit....