Color me unsurprised: life sucks for most Americans. The country is divided against itself. Our economy favors a few professions the members of which guard fiercely against entry by outsiders. Pollution, climate change, rising costs of living & healthcare, poor regulatory practices: all of these and other factors combine to ravish the average American's wallet and soul.
What you say is true, but I suspect it’s more lack of social connection because we spend so much time with screens. In the old days you at least watched TV together but now we can go in our own rooms and watch Netflix by ourselves.
I remember visiting my grandparents and people actually went for walks in the evening and chatted with others sitting on their porches. They were poor by today’s standards, but seemed happier to young me. That life sounds amazing now.
The trouble isn't screens or social interaction, it's that there's this existential threat to everything that didn't exist outside of nuclear scares in the 1960s. The wild-eyed optimism that tomorrow would bring about something better and brighter lasted until the 1970s, but is completely and utterly dead now.
Millenials are the first generation to have worse job prospects than their parents. If you want to know why they spend so much time on social media it's because it's the only thing that matters. Everything else is beyond their control and, honestly, utterly depressing.
I’m not sure. To me the threats you mention seem more cerebral since we have to think about them, but don’t feel them (well, I guess one feels pressure from one’s economic sitation). For example, irreversible global warming is a huge concern, but I don’t walk around thinking about it all day. But feeling lonely and disconnected is something that is hard to escape. Lack of human connection is hugely emotional. And in my experience, depression is emotional.
But to be honest, I’m an armchair quarterback here so I’ll see what others have to say :)
You don't have to be actively thinking about something for it to weigh on you and drag you down.
I think people are more connected than you think. Where you used to have to converse with a handful of people in your immediate environment you can now maintain connections with people world-wide.
That also introduces additional stress since we share the pain of others.
Agreed. Add crushing student loans, credit card debt and lack of affordable housing near the few sources of middle class work and you have yourself the ultimate depression cocktail.
This and [0] is also why I support the idea of a universal basic income; letting people detach themselves from the rat race and still have a comfortable life, so more of them can explore, discover, invent and create at their own leisure.
Probably actual rise -- access to the internet and news has increased to nearly e everyone and it's all depressing. You can view the constant stupidity and ignorance of the nation and get upset or ignore it... Those are pretty much your only options.
I choose to mostly ignore it...
Some of us who lived in the 1970s have been subjected to unrelenting psyops for 40+ years, mostly in the service of selling things, including political products.
It surprises me every day that we aren't in full-throated, Molotov-lobbing anarchy or mass suicide.
If I may suggest one more cause for this, to the list of all the other causes suggested by everyone:
I think this rise in collective depression may also be due to the fact that more and more people live their entire life inside cities, from birth to death, with little or no contact with “nature” at all.
All we ever get to interact with are artificial institutions, created by other humans just as fallible as us..
Like building ever smaller boxes inside existing boxes, few people ever get the chance to break out and discover their true potential, let alone achieving that potential.
I think it’s about a sense of freedom. Everything we do is monitored now. Look at a country like Denmark, where everyone is supposed to be happy. The level of surveillance for the sake of bettering society is at DDR level spy operations (just with letter steaming rooms replaced by Mongo databases etc and a consensus that if you don’t do anything wrong you don’t have anything to fear).
The fact no one has mentioned diet baffles me, food, sugar and the imbalance of gut bacteria as proscribed by Hindu Sages in the field of Ayurveda explains everything, Pitta Dosha as its called, the messing up the balance of our system due to basically rubbish food and how it impacts our mood. Google the gut brain axis.
