The excesses of the chemical robot

Sociologist Alain Ehrenberg’s 1998 book The Weariness of the Self makes the case that depression and authenticity are basically opposite sides of the same coin, emerging from the same historical conditions of social liberalization:

Depression began its ascent when the disciplinary model for behaviors, the rules of authority and observance of taboos that gave social classes as well as both sexes a specific destiny, broke against norms that invited us to undertake personal initiative by enjoining us to be ourselves … Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.

Once, Ehrenberg argues, people felt guilty and conflicted about their inability to conform and fulfill the fixed roles they were expected to play; now they feel responsible for creating the singular roles that they will play and repeatedly justifying them to the world. They have to be filled with ambition and self-belief, and be capable of imposing their understanding of themselves on others.

Authenticity is one name for this feat of projection; the demand for authenticity is a demand to substantiate the value of something that has lost its original context and whose purpose is no longer self-evident. Depression, from this point of view, can be regarded a refusal to perform the endless work of building up one’s human capital, a refusal to go along with having to proclaim one’s value over and over again for a society conceived as implacably skeptical of it. Depression is how you go on strike once you have been compelled to become your own boss. It’s a withdrawal from hustle culture, and while sometimes this may feel like an empowering refusal, most of the time it feels like inadequacy, as Ehrenberg emphasizes.