All the maps tell us that on the path to authentic selfhood we must remain for a time in the dark night of the soul, in the winter of our discontent, until we reach the very bottom of despair. Only then do we discover that the seeds of renewal are blindly pushing their way up through the fertile loam toward the yet eclipsed sun. In past times theologians, philosophers, and spiritual pilgrims spoke about this part of the journey as being crucified, dead and buried, losing the ego, being lost in the wasteland or a slough of despond, descending into hell, being consumed by the hungry ghosts, being in the belly of the beast, doing battle with dragons, encountering demons. Nowadays we strip it of poetry and give it clinical names: stress, depression, and burnout. And, predictably, having renamed the phenomenon, we have created a new class of professionals—stress managers, therapists, and burnout consultants—who destroy the spiritual significance it once had.
But beware the once-born psychological cheerleaders, the purveyors of one-minute solutions, who assure you that all you need to do is change your diet, manage your time more efficiently, exercise more, learn to relax on the job, adjust your priorities, communicate better, learn to enjoy stress, or think positively and avoid "negative" emotions. Because stress is not simply a disease; it is a symptom that you are living someone else's life, marching to a drumbeat that doesn't syncopate with your personal body rhythms, playing a role you didn't create, living a script written by an alien authority. Depression is more than low self-esteem; it is a distant early warning that you are on the wrong path and that something in you is being pressed down, beat on, kept imprisoned, dishonored. Burnout is nature's way of telling you you've been going through the motions but your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. And false optimism is like administering stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.
When we arrive at the dark pit of despair, we have reached the nadir, the low point in the spiritual journey—the place which is, paradoxically, the womb of the new self. Despair is the grave from which we may be born again.
But before the rebirth the old must die. As men we have habitually if not obsessively practiced the questionable virtue of optimism. We live by upbeat mottoes: "Every problem is an opportunity waiting for a solution. The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer. We will overcome." Despair is the shattering of our manly illusion of being in control that comes with the awareness that our stance as conquerors of life is an illusion and that we are not "masters of our fate" and "captains of our souls." Powerful as we are, we can only whistle a brief melody in the eye of the hurricane. The earth quakes when it wills, the stars move in the heavens, and our DNA preprograms much of the biohuman computer of brain and body. If depression is a learned emotion that results from an artificial sense of helplessness, then despair is a primal emotion that is rooted in the honest awareness of our true helplessness to change the cosmic drama.