We start at the origin of the number line: zero. We are absent. We’re nothing, and then all of a sudden we’re not. Now we’re the number one. The gravitational tug of infinity pulled us into existence and pulls us yet further: two, three, four. This isn’t age but an impossible quantification, a reduction to one dimension of the unanswerable question, How alive are you?
Death is not the antithesis of life. We started at zero and will return there one way or another. But wherever we are now the force of the ineffable excites us to higher numbers. How alive are you? is static, and nothing static exists. What most exists is the dynamic force. You were not just zero, but zero for a long time. Now you’re not, and though the force may go unseen it’s implied by your velocity: How much more alive are you becoming?
The antithesis of life is not zero, but life’s reflection around it. The force of life pulled you to one, but something flipped it. You’re below zero, in the realm of the negative numbers. You aren’t becoming more alive, but less. Life’s rightward tug now seems mocking as it pulls inexorably toward the infinite: our path now traverses zero. Death. When returning from the rightward side of the number line, it’s thought to be rest well deserved. When returning from the leftward side, it’s perceived as respite from something worse. We call attention to the noun, but when one suffers from depression it is the truth of the verb that we should honor.
Negative numbers are not based in the material world. If Sally has three apples and she gives three apples to Alice, Sally simply doesn’t have any apples, and it doesn’t matter what Alice promises about repayment. A creditor can no more eat the debt she feels owed than she can eat any other story.
Of course, their immateriality1 does not make stories unreal but rather differently real. If I don’t pay my mortgage for a year I don’t think I’d find the idea of not being able to eat debt amusing. But ideas live further up the evolutionary ladder; if rocks tell stories or suffer, they do it only slightly. The universe must grow a mother consciousness before concepts may be conceived.
And with the evolution of new life there is the evolution of new disease.
The immateriality of negative numbers and implied immateriality of depression is not meant to imply that no causes of depression have material bases.