Melancholia in the Future (2016) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

A symbolically nude young female languishes in depression in the future world. Depression, acute or chronic, is a product of the complex nature of the biology of, at least, 'higher order', animals. We have found ways of counteracting its symptoms but are still far from a cure or prevention and it is realistic to anticipate that one hundred years and one thousand years from now, people will still suffer from it.
In part this is because the acute, reactive form of depression, is part of our natural survival systems, a slowing down in response to major changes that induces us to reflect on new elements in our lives and make adjustments in our understanding of how to proceed in the future.
Beginning in the womb, we begin to formulate theories about what is happening to and around us, a hypothesis that provides us with a basis for gauging our responses and evaluating our chances of manipulating events and their effects in the future.
This is a mechanical process consisting of the exchanges of chemical and electrical impulses in and between our neuron receptor sites and possibly involving the glial cells between them. Our neurons grow new receptors and arrange the chains of molecules that appear to act as conduits directing the flow of free electrons in the neurons. Our "perceptions" are the ever-developing dominant themes in our physical responses to stimuli external to our processing mechanism, (the brain), and we are the ongoing process of stimuli, to signaling, to a processing between neurons and regions of the brain, to signaling of response and feedback in the form of new external stimuli. What we perceive as reality, is the process of fitting signals in the form of single molecules and single electrons into the patterns we have formulated and think best fits them as reinforced by ongoing perception and response.
Subjectively, reality to each of us is what each of us perceives it to be. But that does not say, as many post-Positivist theories would hold, that "perception is reality." Perceptions suggest that there is an objective reality, unaffected by perception, (the falling tree making a sound when no one can hear it). Schrodinger's cat is either alive or dead, we just don't know which. Not, because we don't know which, it exists in a state of potentiality of being both alive and dead. Our inability to know does not affect its nature of being, Kant's theoretical noumena versus phenomena.
None of that helps, if you are depressed. If so, and it doesn't fade fast enough for you, try home remedies, make changes in your life, and then seek medical help for a physical malfunction.

Related themes

MelancholiaDepression