鬱が広がる時代にIn an Age When Depression Spreads

Strangely, people around me and my friends have been falling into depression one after another lately. People who were vigorously active in the world until now have inverted, as if turned inside out, and even ordinary life has become hard for them. Facing this, I have kept thinking about a world that inverts, and the sight looks to me like a signal that some unseen force has suddenly begun a great weeding-out. What on earth is this? I will read it through a change in the rules of the world, and through the change in time that symbolizes it.

The first premise is that every rule of the world we believed in has already changed. When the rules of the world we trusted change, those who lived believing in the old world will naturally feel the pain of a gap opening between themselves and their era. I think that under the rules of the old world the human being was made a subject, so an illusion modeled on the ideal of improving the world, in which individuals with a subject make decisions and the collective decision follows an ordered sequence, worked powerfully. In fact this was a rule that held generally within the old world, and an iron rule spoken of as having international universality. But what if it was a fiction from the start? Here the troublesome concept of the subject, which has been so thoroughly discussed that we mistake it for settled, comes to the surface.

I was born and raised in the Japanese-speaking world, so from the standpoint of the world of language I do not carry the risk of depending on the subject of the old world. In other words, I have no need to cling to the subject of the old world, because that subject and my own individual existence are not the same thing. Seen from there, something interesting comes into view. The illusion that "the subject changes the era" is clearly a rule of the old world. It is correct within that rulebook, but now that we have moved to the rules of the new world, we have reached the stage where the old rulebook must be thrown away. The change of rules between the new world and the old can be described at many surface levels, but what we must not forget is the transformation of the concept of the subject itself. What we must be thoroughly aware of is that the concept of the subject that we have believed in has already changed.

Considering the largest scale of change I can think of, the starting point may be the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius on December 22, 2020. It is the movement of the four great elements, fire, earth, air, and water, which shifts roughly every 200 to 240 years, and it is spoken of mainly in the context of spirituality. From that day the era moved from the "age of earth" to the "age of wind." If we call the old world the "world of earth," the last two hundred years were an age marked by possession: matter, money, land, authority, stability, and organization. It was an age that held a subject in the modern sense.

If the new world is a "world of wind," the next two hundred years are marked by information, intellect, experience, connections, movement, and sharing, and there the strength of the old world's subject is brought to nothing without mercy. The character of this age is described in many ways, but the point is to understand that all of us have already passed the decisive moment at which the way of seeing the subject completely changed. Everyone is now being asked whether they can live as a "subject of wind" in the new world, in contrast to the old "subject of earth." Even though both are called subject, we should think of them as entirely different beings, of different phases. The problem is that we still drag along the confusion of taking the subject of earth to be truth or universality. Those who rely on such a subject are weeded out without mercy by the era. Personally, I have begun to see that the discomfort I have always felt toward the idea of the subject was a discomfort toward the subject of earth in the past, and that this is different from the subject of wind.

With entry into the age of wind, which has a cycle of about two hundred years, a change on a larger time scale is also taking place: the Age of Aquarius. This is a great change of era that switches about every 2,160 years, determined by which constellation the vernal equinox lies in, owing to the precession of the Earth's axis. The last two thousand years or so were the Age of Pisces, marked by control, religion, devotion, blurred boundaries, self-sacrifice, and belief. The Age of Aquarius is said to be marked by science, reason, freedom, equality, universal love, and originality. At a glance these traits may look as if they had already unfolded. But taken together with the traits of the age of wind that coexists within it, they express a view of the world in which each individual stands independently and yet is in harmony with the whole.

The age of wind began in earnest when Pluto, the planet of destruction and rebirth, moved fully into Aquarius on November 20, 2024. The dizzying changes in the world that all of us experienced in 2025 were exactly the turning point at which the age of wind began. Everyone must therefore set aside judgments of good and bad, and make it the axis of their thinking to calmly understand that the rules of the era have completely changed. Judgments of good and bad, and even feelings of rejection, are all based on the rules of the previous era. As history makes plain, a change in the rules of an era presses on the people who live in it without mercy. To repeat what I said above, believing that the subject can transform the era is a rule of the old world, a trait of the subject of earth. Since the era has changed from earth to wind, we should regard the very attempt to keep living by that old rulebook as carrying great risk.

Together with my closest friend, I have discussed every year, from around the time of the shift to the age of wind, how things had changed, and for about six years we have kept watching this change of era in detail. By our sense, until 2024 the fading out of people who could not keep up with the change of era happened gently, but when 2025 began it suddenly turned into something like an avalanche. With the upheavals of 2025, when the rules truly changed, the speed of the weeding-out accelerated all at once and began swallowing all kinds of people without mercy. People who had been vigorously active around me have inverted and can no longer keep up with the era, and they have fallen into depression all at once. This is the present. Seen another way, their vigorous activity had been suited to the rules of the old world.

Seen calmly it may seem a frightening age, but for my friend and me, who have observed the era closely, it is a phenomenon that was bound to happen. I even think that the line that sorts people in this change of era is whether or not they had been preparing consistently. In my case, living in Japan, which carries the compound risks of huge earthquakes and volcanic eruptions more than any place in the world, I am quite sensitive to such subtle changes, and I prepare thoroughly and adjust every day. To survive in Japan, a huge earthquake or volcanic eruption could happen "at any time," more than the risk of war, and it has a real possibility of happening at this very moment. To survive, one must be as sensitive to the subtle changes of the era as one is to the subtle changes of nature. The new era has only just begun, and such widespread effects are already appearing, so it is self-evident that substantial upheavals will occur this year as well.

Why, then, have people who could live with spirit under the rules of the old world suddenly fallen into depression, and into a state from which they may not recover? What I feel when I watch them is that they have not noticed that the concept of time has changed. It becomes easier to understand if we read time through two aspects, "order" and "completeness." Order is time as flow, the time we ordinarily perceive. It is time believed to run in a straight line from past to present to future, but in fact it is not universal in the way many people think. The concept of time as order assumes cause and effect, and it is easy to handle: under capitalism, for example, it allows the illusion of ever-rising growth to be set in place. But this concept of time is in fact peculiar to language areas with a copula structure, and it is not the universal time of humankind. Having a copula structure necessarily presumes "subject, copula, predicate," and within it the existence of a subject becomes necessary.

Limited to the modern era, though, this consciousness of order in time has a clear record of being deployed across states and societies and functioning at a high level. People who have passed through the ritual of modernization therefore have this concept of time as a successful experience, and they hold it from the standpoint of living in society. They do not realize that, now that the rules have changed, it has begun to be a burden. What has changed, because the rules have changed, is time.

The other concept of time that matters here is completeness. It is not the time of order, "past, present, future." It is a state of time in which such distinctions have been brought to nothing, time that exists as "a single whole," time made spatial. This is nothing special. Everyone experiences it when dreaming or recalling an intense memory. In this time, things long past feel, without doubt, as if they were here now, and for a person with this consciousness of time, what matters more than the before-and-after relation of events in order is that the world is closed and complete.

Those generally considered normal place importance on time as order without any doubt, so even if the time of completeness appears, they can keep it a passing phenomenon. Among us, though, there are people who make the time of completeness absolute over order. In the state that most people call normal, yesterday and today are not confused, but this is because it presupposes a time dominated by order. Such people build society, so inevitably the time of society is built on order. But this view too is peculiar to the modern era. Seen from another side, it was a state in which this time was set in place in society and implanted in the people taken into it, so that the communal illusion of the state could be established and sustained.

For people in whom the time of completeness is dominant, a society that structures this time is nothing but pain. People who live in completed time have their own rules, and in them time gives priority to the completeness of an image over order.

What matters is that human consciousness does not have only one of the two times described above. It has both the function of processing time in sequence, as order, and the function of making time spatial, as completeness. When the balance between the two times breaks down or they drift apart, our perception of reality and, as illusion, art, religion, and madness arise. The real problem, then, is that the modern world has ignored the original character of time and made only order absolute. For the modern world to achieve efficiency, the deployment of linear time and the illusion of eternal upward growth were indispensable. What is serious is that in the process, completeness, the eternal time that can be drawn out at any moment, was discarded.

However thoroughly the time of completeness is discarded, it never disappears. It is the rule of the modern world to throw this obvious fact away and pretend it was never there, but now that this rule no longer holds, things have begun to invert. In the course of this discarding, a certain number of people cannot adapt to a society built on order and drop out. I cannot generalize, but such people usually place a strong weight on the time of completeness. I am one of them. From my own experience, I have carried intense pain throughout my life in the rift between the shared time of society, which has put order in place, and individual time, which gives weight to completeness over order.

Japanese society is a peculiar world in which order is built into every detail and enforced thoroughly, and not once in my life have I been able to meet the demands of this peculiar time. The symbol that exists everywhere for drilling the time of order into people is school education. Japanese school education in particular makes fitting in with those around you an absolute norm and forbids deviation from group action, so a child who has taken in the time of order there becomes, inevitably, a model of society, a social agent who erases the individual for the sake of the community. I thought from my youth that this was itself a kind of suicide, and as a rebellious child I caused trouble at school again and again. Looking back now, I could not accept answering as an individual to the closed nature of school education, a space for drilling in social norms, and to its abnormality. I think this rebellious spirit has not changed. It has grown stronger year by year with Japan's decline.

With these as basic premises, an interesting fact has come into view. As the rules changed completely in 2025, people who place their center of gravity in the time of completeness have gained the advantage. At the same time, many people who had lived in society under the domination of the time of order have begun dropping out as if in an avalanche. This is not something to be discussed as a dualism, but as a tendency it is already happening. What is more troublesome is that what has been happening since 2025 is a division arising among the people who place their center in the time of completeness.

People who value the time of completeness are skilled at creating images and illusions in their minds. In the old world this ability was judged to be of no practical use and was cast aside. What was called fantasy, delusion, or idealism belongs here. Society sets in place, in time, the absoluteness of order that is characteristic of the modern age, and disguises it as universal, so naturally the aptitude of those who live in the time of completeness had to be discarded. It was inefficient and not practical for society. The act of stopping the flow of order and fixing that moment as eternal, as a single work, only gets in the way of all the social activity built on time governed by order.

The change of rules after 2025, however, has overturned these worlds. As we saw clearly in 2025, technological innovation has already redesigned society widely, and every field has been transformed into a structure premised on specific technologies. Broadly speaking, technologies such as drones, AI, unmanned operation, and sensors were formed over the long time of order since the twentieth century, but once they eroded into the core of social structure, the way of fighting wars changed, ways of working changed, daily life changed, human relations changed, and the values of the old world were transformed without mercy, one after another. What is serious is that when the modern technologies formed by the time of order in the twentieth century were compressed to the limit against the axis of the time of order that humans are conscious of, the time of order that had built society and the world itself changed. The structure of the time of order itself remains, but it has been compressed until the character of order can no longer be sensed.

Here the time of order that humans are conscious of and the time of order that technology is conscious of break completely apart. It is inevitable that a kind of rejection of modern technologies appears on the human side, but the history of technology shows that such rejection is in the end brought completely to nothing. The personal computer, the internet, social media, the smartphone, low-cost carriers, overtourism: all the things we now use in common stood in the same position, and the fact that people adapted within only a few years is the clearest proof. Many people may still feel resistance now, but as I wrote at the start, we must set aside views of emotion and belief for a moment and calmly discern this transformation of time.

This is exactly the ground on which I have recently been developing various ideas inspired by Takaaki Yoshimoto's theory of the communal illusion. It is premised from the beginning that what matters to the communal illusion is not keeping the human individual alive. The period in which human existence mattered for the survival of communal illusion has already ended, and the standpoint of survival for communal illusions such as society, state, and world has already shifted from humans to technologies. This is because the time of order is not universal, and it exposes that the time of order, held to be universal in the modern era, had only the limited quality of a level of consciousness belonging to a subject that passed through modernization. For the communal illusion, technology that generates information at high speed and in large quantity, compressed to the limit, takes priority, so human existence is inevitably not needed. What matters here is to grasp that the very concept of the human has also changed.

From the standpoint of present social weeding-out, those being weeded out are social agents. They are the excellent individuals who have acquired the old abilities that worked from school education through social life in the time of order. Excellent here means only excellent at keeping the rules of the time of order, and once the rules have changed this is no longer needed. At the least, what we can understand here is that the rules changed because the time of order was compressed to the limit, and that dramatic weeding-out from society has begun there. Mass layoffs at companies are a typical example. When society specializes to the limit in efficiency, the truth it demands, the most inefficient thing is judged to be the human being. This is the crux of the change in rules.

Another aspect appears as the division among people who value the time of completeness. They have high potential to adapt to the new rules of a society whose time of order has been compressed to the limit, but needless to say, the images of the time of completeness produce no value as long as they remain images. The basic rules of society have not changed, yet it is not as simple as humans moving from the time of order to the time of completeness. Even those who place their weight on the time of completeness are subject to the rules of this compressed, ultra-high-speed, mass-generating time of order. This means that the old world's rule for making works, which prized how much time one spent in giving form to an image, has been completely brought to nothing, and a new attitude is required of makers: compressing to the limit the process of giving form to images.

Behind the rising resistance of existing artists and creators to technologies lies a rejection of the way the time of order has eroded even the side of completeness. What this time phenomenon is causing is the fall of creators, in the broad sense, into a complete propertyless class. In fact, I think that people who now call themselves creators, however famous they are at present, will probably have disappeared in a few years. They will be weeded out by people who until now were not creators.

Staying in the realm of images born in the world of completeness no longer works for those who place their weight on the time of completeness either, and to my sense the people who stagnate there are the ones falling into depression. They can hold images of the time of completeness but lack the ability to use the compressed technical processes of the time of order, so they cannot adapt to the change in rules. On the other hand, those who do not leave the images born one after another in the world of completeness as mere images, and who have acquired the skill to actively use the compressed technical processes of the time of order, achieve a speed and volume that the time consciousness of the old world cannot grasp. These are the people who have adapted to the change in rules. The gap grows dramatically year by year and, within one or two years, will become a division that can never be closed.

This time I wrote about the change in the rules of the era from the standpoint of time. What I always think is that we should not fall into emotionalism over the problems of our age. We should set aside such feelings and judgments for a moment and calmly discern, from a large view, what has changed. Otherwise we will inevitably stagnate in criticism of the signified and lose the strength to move forward. For now it is only the beginning and we can afford composure, but within a few years we will reach a dead end. That is the lesson of history, and this way of thinking may be the very spirit of the new era that we must acquire to truly survive.