March 12th, 2011 by Chris Eng

First the anxiety, then the depression. They were actually staggered the better part of a year apart, but both of them in conjunction kept me away from this blog for a year and a half. Let’s start at the very beginning… and by that I mean about three years back.

It all started for me with The Long Emergencyby James Howard Kunstler. I’d always been fairly green and very left, but that book was my wake-up call as to HOW BAD the state of affairs on our planet was. The Long Emergency was my formal introduction to the concept of peak oil. It was the Boogeyman ripping the covers off my previously-comfortable existence. To his credit, that was exactly what he was trying to do, so kudos to him; it worked. I went off and dove head-first into the literary pool, devouring everything I could read on various different yet intrinsically-connected subjects like Peak Oil, Climate Change and General Planet-Fuckery. I became reasonably self-educated on the subject, became convinced of the impending doom of mankind and was quite assured that I would be better off in a shack somewhere (or maybe a yurt—I like yurts).

And that’s where everything fell apart. First off, there was no real way that Carla and I could afford even a modest shack in the woods. We have some modest retirement savings put away, but nothing that would buy any kind of sizable chunk of land. Moreover, even if we miraculously acquired said chunk of land, we wouldn’t have been able to work it; neither of us had the skills necessary to cultivate a medium-scale garden, and there was no short term method for us to easily acquire them. (Yes, there were other options like community gardens and the like, but I’ll get to them in a minute.) So going Back to the Land became this distracting pipedream that we (but mostly me) fixated on. And by fixating on it, I set up a feedback loop of anxiety which grew louder and more oppressive as each day passed.

The thing about the enviro-lit books of a few years back is almost none of them had any workable plans or solutions in them, and while the reason for that is almost certainly that when asked how the planet could be saved scientists were forced to throw up their hands and yell “I DUNNO”, the general tone of the books didn’t help the problem. At the point in each volume where there should have been a few chapters discussing what ordinary people could do, the books simply ended. And yeah, there were several books that came out around that time which proposed addressing exactly that, but they mostly ended up addressing the question: “How can I save the environment while simultaneously maintaining my North American bourgeois quality of life?” They were, in essence, band-aid solutions to a triage problem—ways for the middle-class to assuage their guilt through cosmetic life changes—and I found them by-and-large to be trite and insulting and so consequently ignored them.

But by surrounding myself with environmental doomsayers 24-7 and without a shred of hope anywhere to be seen, my anxiety levels soon hit critical levels and the emergency shut-off valve was tripped. What the shut-off valve did was simple: it made me turn my back on all environmental discussion. It’s not that I stopped caring (if anything, I’d been caring too much), but in order to remain a functional human being I had to step away and since I hadn’t moderated my anxiety levels before allowing them to dominate me, I had to step away entirely.

It was an easy solution with an unpleasant side-effect: the depression.

I’m not going to pretend that going cold turkey on enviro-studies is what caused me to get depressed—it wasn’t; there was a much easier cause for that: I lost my job—but it contributed to it in one significant regard.

I had lost sight of one of my most sought-after dreams.

Moving to a plot of land somewhere in BC and being as self-sufficient as possible has been one of my dreams for a few years now, and not staying up-to-date on the environment and farming/permaculture/self-sufficiency basically closed the door on it. Moreover, losing my job and not having any spare income nailed the door shut. And so I sat at home, rudderless and directionless, doing the occasional editing job, not knowing where I’d end up five or ten years down the road, and spiraling down into depression until I finally came out of it, well, really about a month ago.

Landing the gig to manage my apartment building has been huge for my frame of mind. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but at least there’s money coming in and at least I’m doing something. I’m generally happy and motivated again, so I’m pretty pleased about that. The other thing that set me back on the enviro-track was Eaarth and I’ll get to that in my next post.