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A Difference That Can Make a Difference: Mental Distress

I was reading Rollo May’s book The Discovery of Being the other day. I came upon a quote that I find important as the intro to some substantial issues concerning perceptions of mental distress. It helps to explain the notion that we have lost a sense of “being“—of realizing ourselves, our responsibility for ourselves, and our sense of potentialities. This has been replaced by the sense that we are defined by our status as a cog in the machine of productivity.

Rollo May writes:

A more serious source of resistance is the one that runs through the whole of modern Western society—namely, the psychological need to avoid and, in some ways repress, the whole concern with “being”… A man knows himself not as a man or as self but as a ticket-seller in the subway, a grocer, a professor, a vice president etc. On the other hand loss of sense of being is related to the mass collectivist trends and widespread conformist tendencies in our culture.

This is what I also often notice in everyday life of contemporary society. Ever since the period of the Enlightenment, the functionality that was supposed to help us in production has somehow taken over our lives. Functionality here refers to the guiding principles of purposeful rational action and viewing everything through an economic lens: maximizing resources and minimizing costs.

This principle has, since the Enlightenment period, spread through our culture. As the principle leading economic production, it has enabled financial growth and technological development. However, it has simultaneously overflowed from the area of production towards other areas—our emotions and symbolic meanings. What happens here is that functionality is often used to run away from the messiness that accompanies being human.

Who likes messiness? It is unstructured and unknown. It can pour out of its bounds and make us face experiences that seem to make no sense. When we see messiness in something, it can potentially remind us of our own possibility to succumb to it, which we don’t even want to think about. We don’t want to deal with that. We prefer our experiences to be ordered. This gives us a sense of certainty. As a civilization, we rely a whole lot on the repression of uncomfortable and painful experiences.

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