Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Depression Chronicles: A beginning to an end

I have never actively thought of killing myself. I have however entertained the idea of my non existence occasionally.  But as Freud said, it's impossible to truly think of one's own death. This because you somehow have to be there to imagine your death.



Many people do not know this about me but I have been struggling with low moods for a couple of years now. I have a couple of speculations on what has led me to this but that's for a different post.

Depression is a somewhat curious condition and I have always convinced myself that I don't have it. Sadly, I am also a psychology graduate and so I know all it's tell tell symptoms.

Depression is like getting burned from your insides. You can almost feel the raw pain, what happens I don't know what exactly happens but it's something to do with an imbalance of chemicals in the brain. Too little dopamine re-uptake  Too much cortisol production? I am no neuroscientist, all I know is that I hate how it feels. The frustration comes from trying to feel normal which is like trying to lift yourself by pulling at your bootstraps.

I haven't had such a bad life, we have had family issues, we are not the most close knit family but then isn't this the story of everyone's life? Abuse comes in all it's shape and sizes and emotional abuse can be just as bad as it's physical counterpart. 

I remember during graduation, I had just gotten a second class upper. It was supposed to be my happiest day and yet I remember feeling empty. I knew I should be happy but i wasn't, I faked the smiles of course, human emotions are easy to replicate with a little practice. Only a skilled person can see beneath the layers of pretenses  and only an expert can see the layers of darkness.

I was lucky to land on a job almost immediately after campus with a liberal and really awesome boss. I work between 8am and 2 pm. This is the job of my dreams since allows me a lot of freedom and space to be creative and pursue my own interests and hobbies. And yet sometimes even getting satisfaction out of this can be difficult. Sometimes only sleep can help one escape the mental torture these moods can subject one to. Some poet talked about being together alone. This is really how it feels sometimes, you are locked in your own bad of bones on an indefinite sentence. 

Depression is like a demon that is also a part of you. You feel like you can't escape it because you can't outrun yourself. It erodes a little bit of your everyday, you watch  yourself fade. You feel helpless and this just sends you further down the black-hole  People who commit suicide I suspect are usually trying desperately to exorcise these demons, anything to make it stop, a pop of few pills, the ones with a flair for the dramatic blast themselves to hell (or should I say from this hell).  I think I now understand why people commit suicide. It's not cowardice, I think it's a final act of defiance. It's recognizing that there's no escape route anyway.

I consider myself a nihilist, I am not sure if my views led to these persistent dark moods or whether it was the other way around.  Perhaps it was an ugly marriage between the two, I will never know. I have never given much thought to suicide but at the back of the mind there's always that nagging question. What's the point of all these, why do we struggle to live when we are just living to die. Sometime it's easy to shake these feelings off, but days like these are usually a drag. A grim reminder of the fragility of existence. That thin line between being alive and non existence.



Not to toot my own horn but I will leave you with a quote I came up with in one of the depressive and perilous days "Mortality is always around the corner, lurking, no walls of denial and pretense are high enough to keep away the little hints life is always dropping everywhere around us. We are always reminded of this morbid eventuality, some more often than others..."

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

On Being a Kenyan Illuminati Devil Worshipping Atheist

An article from a local daily (The Star) here in which we were featured in has made me famous (or should I say infamous?) over the last couple of weeks. The article was on atheism in Kenya and the reaction to it has been rather interesting to me. Well, I knew it would cause some heat but even my wildest imagination did not prepare me for the responses we got from our dear Kenyan readers. It ranged from mild abuses from the Christians, to racism and even outrageous calls for our deaths. We were promised death, hell and eternal damnation among other threats which the pea brained commentators could think of or manage to spell.


You are probably wondering what I am on about. Allow me to bring you dear reader up to speed. I am a 24 year old Kenyan who thinks that believing in God is like growing up and keeping one’s belief in Santa. A less insulting way of describing me is non believer although I use atheist whenever I want to create a bit of a stir (You have to admit that it does the trick even though it’s only a negation of a position). A neutral definition of atheism is the lack of belief in deities. The Star was doing an article on atheism in Kenya and I happened to be featured in the interview. That has been the source of fifteen minutes of fame and apparently instant hatred from random believers as well.

Now that you are up to speed, let me get back to my rant. The most surprising accusation we got was that of being devil worshipers  After picking my jaw from the floor and surviving the fall when I jumped out of the window, I tried to rationalize how someone outside a mental institution could make such a claim. I am afraid that I might get to my grave before getting satisfactory answer. Daily nation prior to this had covered a story on atheism as well and I remember they hash tagged Illuminati when they posted it on their twitter feed. I thought this was infantile and rather stupid for a major local daily but I understood. However, I cannot get how I somehow worship the devil even after clearly stating that I do not believe in anything supernatural.

Anyways, everyone seems to be interested in why there has been a surge in non believers in this lovely ‘Christian Nation’ of ours. Is it the beginning of the end of the world? Are the religious institutions failing? Could it be because of the accessibility of information? How then would you explain all those morons commenting in the thread section of our article? There is probably a multiplicity of factors and I am not an expert in that sort of thing so I won’t comment on that.

 I have always had my doubts about religion but campus is really where I became a full-fledged atheist. I have always been a bit of a rebel and my inquisitive nature makes me a terrible candidate for religion. Christianity requires a sheep like unquestioning mind; it demands one to be a yes man (or woman).  I remember reading an article by Christopher Hitchens on Vanity Fair, from his works I got introduced to the rest of the horsemen and at some point I couldn't read those new atheist books fast enough. I was a convert for reason and science and I have never looked back.


Now that I think of it, Maina Kageni did contribute to this public outcry for our blood. When the article came out he did mention it in his morning show on Classic fm. He said we were out to ‘poteza watu’ as I was told by a friend who had been listening. Now apart from the people who are forced to listen to the show on Matatus (where it has become like an anthem of sorts) everyone else who listens to the show is probably either stupid or ignorant or both and is likely to be a Christian. These are the same people I suspect were vilifying us about the article. It probably never occurred to them that they could use the same internet to check out what atheism is all about (or not about) before typing all that garbage. These are the very same people who probably have never used the internet for anything else apart from Facebook and whose idea of a good time is listening to Maina and that other guy Mwalimu in the morning. I digress.

I am also in another group FIKA (Freethinkers Initiative Kenya) which has attracted quite a bit of controversy and conspiracy theories as it was mentioned in the article as well. This is interesting since I partly started the group in 2011, I would know if we were part of a conspiracy. But then again that’s the sort of argument I would make if FIKA indeed was a conspiracy or some government project. To deny a conspiracy is to affirm it so I won’t make it a point to convince anyone that we are not a secret society (whatever that entails). We will instead shine in the publicity it creates. What I will do is tell you what FIKA actually is because I am the current vice chairman so I should know right? We are a freethought group advancing critical thinking and rational approaches to issues; we are also a secular group meaning that we are of the opinion that there should be a separation between Church and State in public space. We advocate for freedom of religion but also strongly advocate for freedom from religion. We are not going to bring this about by burning churches but by having honest and intellectual conversations with the public. We hope to persuade people through reason and not using the crude ‘conversion tactics’ the church for instance used in the past and still does to various degrees.



I hereby come to the conclusion of my rant, there’s much to say on religion, non belief, secularism and our society but this works as catharsis for now. Always remember that the pen will always be mightier than the sword. To all those wishing us death, know that it’s easier if you just engaged us in discussion to find out what our views are. And in the words of my favorite villain (arguable) V, “Behind this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there’s an idea, and ideas are bullet proof.”

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

THE END OR A NEW BEGINNING:THE VIRTUAL WORLD

What is reality? I do not want to get into any philosophical or existential discussion about the nature of reality. As you all know a large percentage of the youth in this country and world are now addicts to the virtual world and more specifically the social networks. At some point I thought well this is going to be the end of our social lives as human beings. I remember one day we were supposed to be hanging out in campus but at some point everyone had their phone in their hands, Facebook, twitter you name it. I remember thinking to myself if we are like this and we got our phones mostly after high school, what is going to happen the future generation.
Kids now get internet browsing phones when as young as nine years. Are these boys going to know how to talk to a girl outside Facebook? Will they be able to take them out on a coffee date, will they even know the common courtesies involved in dating and well…in everyday life? There’s a fear that kids are learning more than they should be for their ages thanks to the internet age. This fear is justified because with the internet comes with unmonitored freedom, while it’s a good free source of knowledge, the internet has no guardian to keep the pedos and the child molesters out, with the typing of a link a kid can access all the pornography in this line. This verse from my favorite rapper Lupe Fiasco captures this dilemma beautifully. “Now imagine a group of little girls nine through twelve, on the internet watching videos listenin’ to songs by themselves, it doesn’t really matter if they have parental clearance, they understand the internet better than they parents.”
 I have come to change my view and not simply because I can now consider myself also hooked to the virtual world. I tried to stay for a week without technology but I only lasted two hours. Today I was watching an anime (Japanese cartoon for the anti geeks) called Serial experiments Lain. It’s basically about how thin the line between reality and the virtual world really is. The anime pushes this further by suggesting that in fact there might be no difference between the real world and the virtual one. The two worlds get blurred and interchangeable with devastating consequences. Luckily we have not reached there but who knows with this ever growing technology what tomorrow has in store for us. Today I and the rest of the frequent visitors of social networks have more virtual friends than they do in ‘real life’. But I’m I justified to even draw this distinction? What is reality anyway? Is it not simply whatever our brains can conjure and convince us that that is how the world is? When we are having a nightmare and we wake up, palpitating and sweating profusely, for all intents and purposes was the dream not real enough to us? When we get absorbed in a good book, when we cry when we watch a sad scene in a movie, is this less real than everything else we experience in our day to day lives? 


I was previously arguing that with the social networks comes the beginning of the end of social lives but my position is actually the opposite now. With the coming of all this technology and social networks then we are simply ushering in a new reality. The same way some people have argued that the end of the Christian world and the second coming as simply the mark of the coming of the new age of Pisces but that is a story for another day. More than ninety percent of my friends now come from interactions in the virtual world. Like the cartoon I was watching today it is becoming harder and harder to draw the line between the real and the virtual world. And just like in the cartoon my real world and the virtual world are starting to increasingly merge. Lovers, friends, enemies have been forged in this virtual world, others developing into real life friends others remaining in the interwebz. Some people could argue that it’s healthier to have more real life friends but this argument has not legs to stand on, real life friendships also go through the same phases virtual ones do, they too are not everlasting or perfect. And what are people? Aren’t they just the sum total of what they communicate to us and what we interpret about them? Bodies are nothing more than machines that allow for this interface, computers can now provide all that is required to interface with each other. We do not require physical bodies to communicate with each other, we can still make each other laugh, cry and even angry well from behind our keyboards, while the anonymity has brought with it’s a certain stain of callousness and the dark side of people, it has also allowed us to explore different personalities, to create how we want to appear and what we wish to communicate to the different faceless virtual interfaces we interact with on these social networks.
So while some people argue that social networks are the death of our social lives, we can tell them this is simply the birth of a new reality, a new world , more flexible, more exciting and easier to construct without all the burdens that arise in the real world. So a toast to the new matrix in which we are all pioneers of, we are free to shape it however we want it, the limit only lie with our imagination and creativity. With the every end comes a new beginning after all.