Not to throw shade but where is this magical time in history with no worries or existential threats?
Amazingly, youthful angst and depression have been steadily increasing for several decades, with no puzzlingly large blip in recent years. You can jump to a conclusion that the problem is the one thing that personally bothers you the most, but maybe it's a spectrum - for example, a lot of psychologists have been blaming teenage depression on too much screen time and not enough in-person social contact.
I remember a time where we were hoping that it didn't snow until after Halloween.
Now, we're lucky to get snow in January in my area.
A white Christmas is basically a pipe dream.
We stopped doing anything for Christmas because we can't afford to be merry and give gifts. We must work and CONSUME
While on one hand I completely agree. On the other hand most generations in human history saw difficult times. One thing we have now is easy access to extra layers of constant despair by always being able to see any bad thing that is happening every minute of every day, on the news, on social media, from our politicians, etc. Then it even creeps into discussions with friends. The general dispare has crept into the discussion and taken over. But at the end of the day, most people have food, shelter, water, family, friends, and some level of healthcare (all be it problematic in the US).
For those of us lucky enough to not be destitute, or a current or future target of a repressive regime, it is important to remember to take some time to actually enjoy life instead of always feeling helpless about a profoundly imperfect world. Depression caused by the status of the world can also be avoided by taking action. Those that help, rarely let the status of the world get them down. Because, they know they did their part to move it in the right direction.
I will grant that social media has given us access to all of the misery we want all of the time, and that those algorithms also prioritize content that makes us angry.
However, it would be toxic positivity to say that things are actually fine or even pretty good.
Things are objectively getting worse. Income inequality is somewhere between near gilded age levels and worse. The planet is dying in front of our eyes. Fascists are taking power in many governments.
Things are actually pretty bleak. That doesn't mean there's no hope. But burying your head in the sand and pretending things are fine ... well, I can understand that impulse. And I can understand that for some, it's a coping mechanism. And for sure, do what you gotta to get by and all. But it's not helpful in the broader sense.
I don't disagree with a single word you said. But having perspective and leaving time to be human is not burying your head in the sand.
The last things I tried to say was that taking action is one thing you can do to mitigate your sense of helplessness. People who help others or try to make the world a better place often end up in a better mental space. It has the added benefit of working against all of the bad shit that is happening. Pick something, anything you care about, and try to make a difference. Even if you only make a tiny difference, if a thousand other people go out there and make the same tiny difference, suddenly you've moved the needle. In my experience, despair is nearly always coupled with paralyzed inaction.
Have they tried becoming billionaires?
Love to become the world's richest man, use my money to buy the world's most annoying social media site, then drive myself insane tinkering with it to feed my ego.
Alternatively, I can be rolling in Facebook money and still feel so insecure that I need to jack myself up with steroids and do Fight Club shit as I settle into middle age
Better yet, maybe I get into snake oil remedies for aging and start paying people to drink their blood. Or perhaps I try and beat cancer with grapefruit enemas and die in agony because I've convinced myself I'm smarter than the nation's leading oncologists.
Even the astronomically wealthy seem incapable of happiness.
They just need to work more hours so they have less time to think about it
snacks head of course, the answer is obvious. Just don't be poor.
Paris Hilton was right all along!
Someone said to me once "if you really wanted to do X, you would have done it".
Your post reminded me of that, because many people might really want to be rich, but they don't become rich because it's a difficult thing to achieve. So maybe wanting something isn't enough. Maybe you need luck or other advantages on your side too.
many people might really want to be rich, but they don’t become rich because it’s a difficult thing to achieve
Wealth compounds easily, practically in a country that rewards the wealthy with cheap credit and subsidizes high risk investment.
When your mom is on the board at IBM, when your best friends are the children of millionaires and billionaires, or when you have access to hedge fund levels of start up money, becoming rich isn't that hard.
It's a cringe thing to say, but your Network really is your Net Worth. Just being a Kennedy is worth it's weight, as evidenced by our future HHS Secretary's history.
Wanting something is the first step towards accomplishing anything
The second step is asking for a small loan of $20-30 million dollars from your family's colonial heritage trust fund.
And then, hard work and pulling yourself up by your boot str--
What? Why are you all looking at me like that?
"Mental illness" (as it's used in pop culture today) is a made-up term designed to gaslight people into believing that their natural, healthy reaction to the 21st century is somehow wrong and a pathology.
To be depressed in [current year] is no more normal than itching yourself when you're wearing a wool sweater. Nobody would call that an "illness," would they?
Careful now, that much salt in your diet will lead to all sorts of problems...
It’s fine to critique how “mental illness” is portrayed in pop culture, but the medical term is important. Yes, society is tough, but that doesn’t mean your struggles aren’t real or treatable. You can’t fight for change if you can’t get out of bed. Taking care of yourself is never something to feel bad about. <3
I take issue with calling it "treatable." From personal experience, the treatment doesn't really fix anything - it just makes it noticeably easier to bypass your natural reaction to being in an extremely unfavorable environment. That's not treating the problem, it's masking it akin to slapping a fresh coat of paint on walls with a serious mold infestation inside.
It's addressing the symptom instead of the actual problem, and our entire society is geared towards doing this because it allows people to keep being used to better the lives of those one-percenters running everything while pushing the cost of keeping the people doing so back onto those same people. It's disgusting, and it's nearing a breaking point that's gonna be very ugly when everything snaps.
I mean the can't-get-out-of-bed part probably isn't some quick fix if-only-someone-had-told-me-doctors-exist-sort-of-thing. It probably points to larger, unchanging issues.
In some cases, the answer could be "move"... but again that is not viable for many, even if we're just talking about housing cost.
I think you're misrepresenting the comment.
Depression as a medical term only applies to people who have objectively nothing to be depressed about. Nobody would (to turn it up to 11) argue that a concentration camp inmate has depression when he's feeling like everything's fucked, because very objectively, everything is fucked in his environment.
The comment is instead about people who are thrown into a depressing, pointless situation they can't escape, just like the prisoner, only much much milder. They see no future, because there truly is no future for them. Now, that would be horrible for society, because those people might start to question why exactly they're in this situation. So as a bandaid, they get diagnosed. It's not actually shit, you just see it like that, because you are sick. Here, take a pill. It's gaslighting.
The rolling Stones had a song about mother's little helper 50 years ago. It's not exactly new.
mental injury might be a better term.
You can look at it like that, or you get excited at the thought of engaging in gladiatorial combat for the right to purchase the last 49 dollar pre-lit 6.5' Christmas tree at Home Depot
