It seems that there aren't many mentally healthy people around these days, with so many people having various struggles, medically diagnosed, or self diagnosed. It is almost like people want to box themselves into a label and then use it as an excuse as to why they can't do, or can't stop doing something. But I get it, because we have created a global environment that doesn't promote health of any kind, and ultimately we are going to suffer mentally as well.
We are adrift in space.
One of the indicators I earmarked as a future problem some time back in the mid-2000s, was loneliness. Even then, I could see the writing on the wall as more people put white earbuds into their ears and scrolled an Ipod list. I remember discussing multiple times with one of my brothers what the consequences might be as people disengage from the world around them and close themselves off to random. Ultimately, this limits conversation, relationships, and degrades social skills - which exacerbates the problems and the downward spiral quickens.
Fast forward a bit over twenty years, and here we are, with a host of mental health crises, that run right along with our generally degrading physical health also. Our emotional health is almost non-existent and as a result of the three - our social health score is rapidly approaching zero.
We live in a world where children are killing themselves, because they can't cope with life. and before the pandemic gets brought up, between 2007 and 2021, suicide of under 20s increased by 62%. And between 2007 and 2018, suicide between ages 10-14 doubled. And if you consider that suicide numbers are the extremes, then there are a whole lot of kids on the edges. So it isn't the pandemic, rather cultural change and behaviours that has led to this outcome.
And of course, it isn't just young people who are struggling, it is just that they have been exposed to decaying conditions their entire lives. They have largely been raised to not only be unhealthy, but focus all of their attention in identifying with their ill-health, self-diagnosing, going to therapy, learning the labels, and applying them liberally to meet their emotional needs of the moment.
And their parents are no better, acting as facilitators and a cheer squad, and using Google to diagnose their children, themselves and to find strategies to deal with largely preventable problems that lead down the road to poor mental health, like using screens as babysitters, rather than learning to talk with their children, and grow together.
Loneliness is just one of the indicators, but it is a big one because for two million odd years, we have evolved to be social creatures that have been successful as a species due to our ability to communicate with each other. Yet, in a few short decades, we have moved heavily away from social interaction and into the realm of "me me me", developing tools to further isolate us from others and still feed our sense of belonging to a group. We are out of sync with reality, but we don't realise it because we have been conditioned so that virtual reality feels real enough. Yet in reality, they are about as similar as a passionate kiss with a lover, and a hot needle in the eye.
The sad thing is, that if anything is to be done to turn it around, it is going to take generations. But, there just isn't the time, nor the will, because instead of dealing with the things that actually matter to the species, we align ourselves with what matters to the economy. Whilst they shouldn't be in conflict, in the current financial world, they are on two very, very different paths.
We all have issues.
All of us.
But more and more, they seem to be dominating our lives and becoming the focus of our attention, rather than a hurdle to cross to get to where we ant to go. The goal for many seems to beat their issues, but with no reason to do so. Life isn't about overcoming, it is about fighting the self over and over, never moving on to anything greater than that - which I suspect is because of the me me me mentality that we have adopted. Despite wanting to be part of something larger, something meaningful, everything gets pushed onto the backburner until we have overcome ourselves. Perhaps we should focus on improving the environment we operate in, and overcome the obstacles along the way instead.
There is no such thing as perfect.
Accept it - and keep improving instead.
Taraz
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It is curious how we tend to treat ‘epidemics’ (whether biological or social) as external events that happen to us, when in reality they are usually the result of incentives that we ourselves have accepted. We prefer the comfort of collective contagion to the friction involved in maintaining immunity based on individual principles.
Ah, by the way… the most contagious thing is not the virus itself, but the speed with which people abandon their critical thinking when fear or the prevailing trend becomes the currency of the day.
Yes. It is our behaviours that are driving this. We are aligning ourselves with economic practices that run counter to our health.
Welcome to the internet.
Maybe if people didn't constantly let you down it would be easier to not be so lonely. It's hard to put your faith or trust in anyone when they constantly crap all over it. That being said, I think people definitely use labels as excuses and sometimes it's better just to go on undiagnosed. At least for the less severe stuff.
I get this and think it is getting worse. Because the more people disengage, the more they will let others down socially. Part of that spiral.
This topic is one of my main concerns. I talk and write a lot about it, mostly here in your community. But beyond writing and talking a lot about it, I think about it even more...
I take some time to look at what’s around me. And more and more, I notice everything you touched on in your post. Even within my family, and among those closest to me, in exchange for a quick interaction (via text), we’ve stopped “caring” about knowing exactly how the other person is doing… We just want to ask a question and hear the answer in a practically automated way.
We give neither time, nor space, nor even attention to what we ask or what we answer. I confess that this robotic way of acting “scares” me. We act on impulse.
We buy, eat, use, consume… all on impulse. Even with the most basic things, like food.
Many people don’t even pay attention to what they’re eating anymore. They don’t want to worry; they just want to fill a void left not by physical hunger, but by emotional hunger—a hunger created when we failed to give space, time, or attention to our thoughts in an integrated way, not from a “me, me, me” perspective, but by looking at and interacting with others as thinking beings who contribute to our well-being.
Almost like we expect relationships to behave like google. We don't need to listen to Google's feelings.
Me too. People smarter than I have talked about it for 100 years, but I don't think they realised how fast it was going to happen.
A bleak glimpse of a society on the verge of change. Indeed.
Having an illness, especially a mental struggle, has been in vogue for quite a while now. We are taught that there is probably something wrong with us, and our children, and that we, and our doctors, must be on the lookout. Of course, with mindsets like that, we will find something. No wonder so many of us are depressed. The cognitive dissonence created by this is profound. We want to be well, but just know we are not.
There is a good article somewhere about how a lot of treated cancers, would be better off going untreated.
Absolutely. I have one client (homeopathic) whose doctor has found a marker for a gastrointestinal autoimmune issue, and told her to get invasive and poisonous GI tests done. She has absolutely NO symptoms of any such thing. He'd then prescribe a drug or two or three, based on numbers and images, for a condition that has no impact on her life at present. Those drugs cause illnesses themselves. This is how disease is manufactured.
I think some people are affected more than others. Those of us who are introverted don't mind lack of social interaction. For me I don't need much outside my family.
But you made it far enough to have a family. Many don't these days.
but for some reason we often select those with biggest issues to be the ones in charge of our lives... A broken logic.
Very broken.
I think loneliness is probably one of the biggest problems of our time. However, people have started embracing it much more after the pandemic, and it has become a new way of life.
For sure they are embracing it. Until they are so lonely they breakdown. And then they blame others.
Just came across these in today's NYTimes
Illness Identities:
We are being made to see ourselves as sick, fodder for the medical cartels.
Yeppp.
We fully agree with what you are telling us.
Is there more than one of you?
How sad that the number of suicides has increased so much
I wish I'd self-diagnosed (or gotten an official) sooner, then I would have (probably?) done something about my complete lack of organisational skills (I'd love to say not from lack of trying but there was definitely a lack of trying because I kept pretending that my memory was amazing despite all irrefutable evidence to the contrary) and might have even been doing much better now.
or not as the stationery addiction would likely be so much worse
There's some things that you can't change or that are really hard to change but using a condition as an excuse to not change (rather than as a reason that you did the thing which you need to change now that you're aware of it) is pretty lame.
Middle only did that when she was 12-14 with an "interesting" group of friends. J always instinctively pushed back REALLY HARD on it which I think actually made it worse/carry on way longer than it needed to go on for. My attitude was basically watch to try to catch any actual problems otherwise I figured they're just being adolescents trying on labels/identities, them being different from the types we were trying on back in our day doesn't make them better or worse and our parents probably had similar conniptions about us doing the same thing as it was probably different to what they were doing back in their day (assuming of course that our parents were attentive enough to us). Anyway as suspected a lot of the stuff passed by on its own without much intervention and definitely after Middle left that group.
my only regret was due to a lot of other nonsense and compounding issues that were happening simultaneously that I didn't nix that group sooner
The boys did the same thing differently.
all my kids were horrible from 12-15
Anyway with the confirmation bias happening around me I feel like there is a shift away from all the doom and gloom you're forecasting but like everything else we'll have to see if it's actually shifted in about two decades.
More to life than the struggles and, struggles are far more manageable with a community. Catch-22