The War Against Human Nature

There's no coming back from the death of humanness

"I feel nothing, doctor," he said, his voice as colorless as the winter twilight seeping through my office window. At thirty-one, Mark sat before me, his affect as flat as pressed paper, describing an inner landscape devoid of emotional texture. I leaned forward, drawn by the paradox of someone so articulate about their inability to feel.

When I probed deeper into this emotional void, he mapped its dimensions with unsettling precision. Joy, pain, frustration, passion - all had receded like colors bleeding from an old photograph. The chronology of this emotional exodus led us back to his teenage years, when at seventeen, he was prescribed SSRIs for what was labeled as depression.

As we excavated those adolescent memories, a different picture emerged. He described a young man suffering not with clinical depression, but with the raw, universal struggles of youth: wavering confidence, existential questioning, and a harsh self-image that saw ugliness in the mirror where others saw merely teenage awkwardness. His social anxiety around girls and lack of romantic relationships weren't pathological - they were the growing pains of an introvert finding his place in the world.

This seventeen-year-old self, I learned, had been a deeply feeling being. He found refuge in books and movies, channeling his intensity into creative pursuits. Film school beckoned, promising a way to transmute his emotional depth into art. Sitting there, I was struck by professional regret - if I had met him then, we might have reframed his experience not as an illness to be medicated, but as a necessary crucible of personal growth.

What unfolded instead was a profound irony. The SSRI prescription, intended to lift him from "depression," instead lifted him from the full spectrum of human experience. No one had warned him about Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD) – a condition that would persist long after discontinuation of the medication. This wasn't just about the loss of sexual desire or the ability to achieve orgasm; it was a permanent dampening of his entire emotional experience. The doctors who prescribed him these medications never mentioned this possibility – that his emotional numbness might not be temporary, that it might outlast the treatment itself.

In the clinical narrative, this emotional flatness might be recorded as success - depression symptoms: reduced. But in the deeper human story, something precious had been lost. The natural polarities of existence - pain and joy, love and loss, struggle and triumph - these aren't symptoms to be suppressed but the very voltage that powers human growth and creativity.

Now, at thirty-one, he sits in my office, expressing a desperate wish - not for happiness, but for the ability to feel anything with the intensity he once knew. His deepest desire is not to escape emotional pain, but to reclaim the full dimension of his humanity, to feel truly alive again. In his story, I see a cautionary tale about our modern tendency to pathologize the very experiences that make us human, and the risk of seeking chemical comfort at the cost of emotional depth.

The tragedy isn't that he once felt too much, but that now he feels too little. In our rush to eliminate psychological discomfort, we risk eliminating something essential to our humanity - the capacity to feel deeply, to struggle meaningfully, and to emerge transformed by our experiences.

The most haunting aspect of Mark's story wasn't just his current state, but the fact that this possibility was never presented to him or his parents when he was prescribed SSRIs at seventeen. How different might his choice have been if he had known that emotional blunting could persist indefinitely? That what was presented as a temporary solution to his teenage struggles might become a permanent alteration of his capacity to experience life? His case stands as a testament to the urgent need for informed consent in psychiatric treatment, and the devastating consequences of treating ordinary human struggles as pathologies requiring chemical intervention.

Witnessing the online debates about SSRI efficacy, I find myself increasingly troubled by the superficiality of the discourse. The question "Do SSRIs work?" echoes through digital forums, but what lies beneath this deceptively simple query?

We've reduced a profound alteration of human consciousness to the binary language of efficacy statistics.

What exactly do we mean by 'work'?

If by 'working' we mean the capacity to chemically castrate our emotional core, to systematically blunt our capacity for love, grief, and ecstasy until we drift through life like emotional zombies – then yes, perhaps they 'work.' If success means reducing the kaleidoscope of human experience to grayscale, dampening not just our despair but our capacity for rapture, dulling not just our pain but our ability to feel the electric thrill of falling in love or the raw ache of loss – then yes, we might call this 'working.' Never mind the reports of sexual dysfunction, the inability to cry at a parent's funeral, or the horror of realizing you can no longer feel the depth of love for your own child. But this framing reveals a darker question: Have we begun to equate emotional numbness with healing? Have we mistaken disconnection for recovery?

The Girl Who Felt “Too Much”

As if orchestrated by some cosmic storyteller, my next session presented a perfect antithesis. Sarah, twenty-seven, burst into my office with an energy that seemed to make the air itself vibrate.

'I feel too much,' she declared, her voice carrying both pride and desperation.

Where Mark's emotional landscape was a desert, hers was a rainforest – lush, overwhelming, sometimes dangerous in its abundance.

What I recognized as a rare gift – her capacity to feel the world's pulse as if it were her own – she carried like a curse. She experienced life in high definition: every color more vivid, every emotion more intense. Her empathy extended beyond human boundaries; she felt the silent songs of trees and the unspoken pain of animals with an almost mystical sensitivity. But this extraordinary capacity for connection came with its shadow side, a darkness that threatened to swallow her whole.

In the depths of night, when the world grew quiet, her fears would rise like tide waters. They weren't the mundane anxieties of daily life, but existential terrors – the raw awareness of life's impermanence, the inevitable losses that await us all. These episodes would crash over her like waves, making the simple act of showing up to work feel like swimming against a tsunami.

Love, for her, was both ecstasy and torment. New relationships consumed her like fever dreams – each possibility for joy shadowed by the specter of potential abandonment. Every hello carried the echo of an eventual goodbye. This exquisite sensitivity had driven her to seek escape through various portals: the sharp clarity of a blade against skin, the numbing embrace of alcohol, the soft blur of marijuana smoke. Anything to dial down the volume of her emotions, if only for a moment.

Her journey to my office was paved with well-meaning but misguided advice. Primary care physicians had dangled the promise of SSRIs like a life raft, which she had thus far resisted. She came to me as a last resort, carrying the weight of a lifetime of being told she was 'too much' – too emotional, too sensitive, too intense. Years of such messages had turned her emotions into enemies, transforming what should have been her greatest strength into a source of shame and fear. The suggestion of an SSRI was confirmation of her ‘brokenness’.

As she spoke, my mind drifted to Mark, sitting in the same chair just hours before, describing the emotional wasteland of his SSRI experience.

'Be careful what you wish for,' I found myself saying aloud, the words escaping before I could catch them.

Here sat two souls at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum – one desperate to feel less, the other haunted by the absence of feeling altogether. The cruel irony hung in the air between us, a cautionary tale about the delicate balance of human experience and the dangers of seeking chemical solutions to existential challenges.

The pharmaceutical companies might celebrate this dampening effect as therapeutic success. The metrics might show reduced symptom scores. But we must confront an uncomfortable truth: Are we confusing the elimination of suffering with the elimination of the capacity to feel? When did emotional flatness become our benchmark for mental health?

This raises even more fundamental questions about our species' trajectory. As we stand at the crossroads of human enhancement technologies – whether through psychopharmacology or neural interfaces – we face decisions of existential magnitude. The merging of human consciousness with technology isn't just a plot point in science fiction anymore; it's happening gradually, pill by pill, chip by chip.

We're conducting a massive experiment in consciousness modification, yet we barely pause to consider its implications. Each time we chemically alter our brain chemistry or dream of uploading our minds to computers, we're making assumptions about what aspects of human experience are dispensable. What parts of our consciousness can we modify or discard before we cease to be fundamentally human?

The debate about SSRIs isn't just about medication efficacy – it's a preview of larger questions we must face about human enhancement and consciousness modification. Are we prepared to trade the full spectrum of human experience for a more manageable, but perhaps less human, existence? In our quest to eliminate suffering, we risk eliminating the very experiences that make us human, that drive our creativity, that fuel our growth.

Perhaps the most crucial question isn't whether these technologies work, but what work we're asking them to do – and at what cost to our fundamental human nature. Once we begin this journey of consciousness modification, can we ever truly find our way back to our original state of being? Or are we unwittingly participating in the gradual erosion of human consciousness as we've known it?

The Divine in Our ‘Disorder’

Our humanness – this exquisite capacity to feel deeply, to suffer profoundly, to love fiercely – isn't a design flaw to be corrected by chemical intervention or technological enhancement. It is, perhaps, our most direct connection to the divine.

When we experience the full spectrum of human emotion, from the depths of despair to the heights of ecstasy, we touch something transcendent, something that connects us to the cosmic dance of creation itself.

Yet here we stand at a precipice, seduced by the promise of a more manageable existence, reaching for pills and processors to modulate our consciousness, to smooth out the peaks and valleys of human experience.

With each technological intervention that distances us from our raw, messy, beautiful humanity, we sever another thread connecting us to our divine nature. The pills that numb our pain also numb our capacity for rapture. The algorithms that simplify our choices also diminish our capacity for wisdom. The neural interfaces that promise to enhance our minds may ultimately separate us from our souls.

We are conducting a dangerous experiment in consciousness modification, treating our humanity like faulty code to be debugged rather than a sacred gift to be embraced. But once we surrender our capacity to feel deeply, to struggle meaningfully, to engage fully with the magnificent tragedy and comedy of human existence, can we ever reclaim it?

When we've traded our messy, painful, glorious humanity for the sterile comfort of technological enhancement, will we still recognize ourselves as human? Will we still feel the divine spark that makes us more than mere biological machines? The answer, whispered through the ages by mystics and poets, artists and philosophers, is that our humanity – in all its terrible beauty and magnificent imperfection – is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. To surrender it is to surrender our divinity itself.

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