You can’t not feel awful—not in any full, final sense. Not if you really grasp what Cioran or Becker are saying. Cioran strips away every illusion of coherence or consolation, and Becker shows how so much of what we call life is a death defying performance. If you see that clearly, then some kind of awful is inevitable.

But how one feels that awfulness—whether it petrifies you, exhausts you, becomes strangely beautiful, or quietly reshapes you—can shift. Not because the awfulness is resolved, but because your posture toward it might stop pretending it needs to be. There’s no need to escape, sublimate, or spiritualize it. You might start to live with the awfulness rather than against it—not stoically, not triumphantly, but maybe with a kind of grim fidelity or a dark tenderness.

If reality is as awful as Emil Cioran or Ernest Becker described then feeling depressed isn't an aberration; it's fidelity. It’s staying true to the condition of things, rather than participating in the compulsory optimism Becker said we need to function, or the anesthetized stupor Cioran mocked.

So, in a way, the question is backward:
How could you not feel depressed if you were lucid?
To not feel depressed would often require self-deception, numbness, distraction, or what Becker called "vital lies" — the illusions that keep us stitched together in spite of knowing.

But here's something deeper:
Cioran especially hints that because depression (or despair) is the appropriate response, it can become paradoxically freeing. Not in a redemptive, "oh, now it’s all good" way — but in the sense that if despair is the native climate, then you can stop punishing yourself for feeling it. It is not a personal failure; it is what awareness costs.

The "how" of living then shifts. It's no longer about "fixing" depression, but about learning how to exist with lucidity without needing anesthesia all the time. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you can, but only barely. That's not failure — it's staying in contact with reality.

You might even say:

• Depression is not a malfunction.

• Depression is the scar tissue of consciousness in a broken world.

• Depression is the weather inside the soul when the soul refuses to lie to itself.

The real mystery isn't how to avoid feeling depressed — it’s how anyone manages to live with it, and sometimes even create, connect, and sustain themselves for a time, knowing full well how bad things are.

Would you like me to also draw out how Cioran, in particular, found small "methods" (even bitter ones) to endure without lying to himself? They’re grim, but they’re profound.

• When you catch yourself relying on a narrative (e.g., "Life has purpose", "Justice will win"), add the silent asterisk: "…because I can’t sleep without it."

• For others: Offer fictions transparently. A parent telling a child "The world is mostly safe" is lying—but it’s a lie that buys time for resilience.

• For yourself:

  • Use fictions as tools, not truths. Example: "Today matters" is a useful lie for productivity.. Savor the lie’s beauty.

  • Keep a "kill switch". When a fiction turns toxic (e.g., nationalism, toxic optimism), discard it like a used syringe.