Sadness-Negativity Syndrome

I have an illness. I call it sadness-negativity syndrome.

It is a social disease, passed from one person to another. If you contract sadness-negativity syndrome too, then given time, few of those around you will be spared.

I live in an age of disillusionment. People have lost their spirit. The wheels of the age roll relentlessly forward, while those beneath them are crushed by the weight. People say all sorts of things, but most of it is still steeped in negativity and sadness. Sometimes they take a little spiritual opium in search of fleeting relief, only to find their symptoms worse in the end.

The news says everything is looking up, yet its language grows harder and harder to understand. “Flexible employment.” “Basically achieved.” It is as if every predetermined goal has been met by lowering the bar, and our country has once again grown more prosperous by the day. But what of us? We all have sadness-negativity syndrome. No one speaks. No one acts. Everyone simply lives in silence.

Do we still have a future? I do not think so. Our future dissolved long ago in a fever dream. The dreams of the past, the dreams of the present, the dreams of the future—all have been put to the torch. These are the curses of this land. The people who have lived here generation after generation have always belonged to some grand narrative. They grow within this ignorance until they lose even the courage to evolve. Generation after generation, they repeat the same story: new banners rise over the city walls; people change the name and carry on with the tale.

The blind, the deaf and mute, and those merely pretending to be ill have together made us in their image. We are gradually disappearing, and they are taking our place. Who are they? I do not know. I, too, have become deaf and mute.

Later, I died sad and defeated. It was not sadness-negativity syndrome that killed me—the doctor said no such illness existed. But I could see that he was sick too.