
How bad are things? - lkrubner
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/
======
onetwotree
I'm an addict in long term recovery, and I hang out with lots of addicts
trying to get or stay clean. Obviously this crowd has problems!

But what's interesting is that as I've been making friends who aren't addicts,
they have problems that are every bit as messed up as the recovery crowd.
There are two main differences, though: "normal" people are much more
committed to hiding their problems (I feel as though I only learn about them
because people assume I won't judge them), and normal people don't recognize
that their unhappiness is a solvable problem.

Furthermore, most of them aren't really into the solutions: a leveling of ego
and pride, humility, rejection of desire and attachment, and living for
something greater than themselves. Addicts, of course, have no choice -- we
either develop the skills and tools needed to be happy enough to stay clean,
or wallow on in the misery of drug addiction, often to an untimely death.

It's kind of sad, but I have no idea how to convince normal people that they
can be happier by changing themselves instead of acquiring things or
relationships or any other external thing they think will finally make them
happy.

I feel as though erikpukinskis' comment about capitalism is a big part of the
problem, but I'm not sure how to use that observation to help more people be
happy.

Edit: C'mon HN, we're smart -- ideas on solutions to these problems are better
than upvotes :-)

~~~
p4wnc6
I don't mean any offense when I say this, but I kind of resent this type of
perspective.

I can't say for sure but I suspect if we knew each other, I would fall into
the "non-addict friend with problems" type category.

You do correctly point out that a lot of people worry whether they will be
judged for revealing a problem. This has happened to me and my family quite
severely. Long-term, deeply close friends have abandoned me; extended family
scatters like roaches when the lights turn on; goodly people of the working
class like pastors or coworkers just brush you off with annoying platitudes.

Human beings seem pretty hard-wired to pass judgement on other people due to
their associates and circumstances. We absolutely are a "blame the victim"
species through and through. If we can't even stop ourselves from blaming the
victim in matters of rape or child abuse, how can we expect people to see
others' problems clearly?

So, yeah, for people who aspire to some of the fruits of their working class
labor, and who feel great pressure from "blame the victim" thinking, they sure
as shit are paranoid about not coming off as though they "have problems" \--
and it's pretty disingenuous for you or me or anyone else to judge them for
this and roll our eyes while we say they should be more zen and stop "wanting
things" or "clinging to their pride" or whatever.

The other big thing though is that people really, truly can be victims of
circumstance. People can have depression, for example, not because they are
genetically predisposed to have depressive reactions to mostly-normal
circumstances, but because they have normal, sane, healthy reactions to insane
circumstances. Reacting to something by being depressed about it can be, and
often is, totally healthy because it represents your body's correctly
calibrated response to a circumstance that cannot be "lived with" and must be
purged out of your life for survival.

I bring this up because I feel like a lot of people give extremely little
thought to the problems other people have. We rationalize and look for one or
two ways that it might "be their fault" (i.e. blame the victim) and if we
can't find those, then we revert to Plan B which is to rationalize one or two
ways that they could "get better but they won't" (e.g. they aren't currently
seeing a counselor; they aren't currently on anti-depressants; they aren't
currently in a support group; they refuse to have a less materialistic outlook
on life; etc. etc.).

Our brains are wired to find or invent short-circuits out of actually
empathizing with suffering people. Just like we want our shit to be flushed
down the toilet bowl and to Just Stop Being Our Problem, we think along
similar lines about the problems that others tell us, even close friends and
loved ones.

What I can say for sure is that letting go of ego and pride has almost nothing
to do with it; having humility has almost nothing to do with it; "reject
desire and attachment" sounds nice on a poster, but that's just so thoroughly
not human that I don't even know where to begin, let alone that it too has
almost nothing to do with anyone's extrinsic circumstances.

I guess what I am saying is that a lot of people who have problems already are
well aware that there is no "thing" that's going to make them happy. They
aren't searching for that. And yet, being embedded in the life circumstances
they are in causes real, visceral pain, and they have no choice but to try to
find a way to not be in pain. There is no amount of perspective shifting
that's going to just poof make a painful circumstance into a pain-free one.

And, to be quite blunt, for a lot of people, money absolutely would solve a
huge number of their circumstantial problems. I don't want to make this
comment any longer than it already is, so I'll just provide a link to a past
comment that I made. It was on a thread discussing the semi-recent self-
aggrandizing post from DHH about his magical foresight to know that wealth was
never going to "truly" make him happy.

<
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10628129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10628129)
>

Money is just one dimension of all this, sure. But I bring it up because one
of the first things we all rush to bash is someone's "materialism" in the face
of their problems. I have to believe this is some kind of Hansonian signalling
dealie that's secretly about taking stuff from others, because it really is
the case that money can solve a lot of problems in life. And instead of
indoctrinating people with feel-good mantras about being less materialistic,
we ought to be teaching them when and how to strategically employ their
materialism _when it is for their own benefit_ and when to avoid letting it
become excessive. Heuristics that are too sweepingly general, like "never be
materialistic" frankly do more harm than good and probably lead people to
worse living circumstances that feedback into the pressure to look like you're
not having a problem and just magnify the whole thing.

We can probably make similar claims about love and relationships, health and
beauty, intelligence, credential, and status within organizational or social
hierarchies. All of these things, like money, have a slippery slope aspect to
them: you can really fuck yourself over by caring about them too much, but you
can also fuck yourself over by believing some zen bullshit mantra about how
you can "transcend" them and they don't matter at all. Like most things, the
answer is somewhere in the middle, and it's exceedingly hard to get it right,
and it's different for every person, and no one has any magic answer for how
it's going to work out for you or me or any other given person.

~~~
dietrichepp
This response really resonates with me.

There's an experience I had several times when I was growing up and going
through school, where I would ask someone for advice and they'd give me some
well-reasoned, thoughtful answer, then the advice turned out to be unhelpful.
This happened often when I talked to academic advisers. I realized afterwards
that my academic advisers were giving me exactly the kind of advice that would
have suited them when they were my age, and since I was a different person
with different goals, a different background, and different circumstances,
their advice was simply ill-suited.

The thing that really struck me, however, is the realization that they truly
believed in the advice they gave me, and that they had grounds to believe in
it. It wasn't "bad advice" per se, but they talked to hundreds of students
every year and couldn't take the time to understand what my goals were. And I
realized that I was going along a nontraditional path, I had nontraditional
goals, I was deliberately nonconformist, and therefore academic advisers (as
extremely conformist individuals, in general) were the least reliable source
of advice for me.

I've started recognizing the pattern more and more. Someone will give advice,
and they'll be earnest and honest, but it just doesn't apply to everybody. I
had a teacher who thought "happiness" was a fool's dream. I met a recovered
addict who had a sure-fire plan, with five steps, to beat addiction and
improve your life. He wanted to tell everyone that MDMA would ruin your
chances for ever living a happy life. I met a divorcé with some advice which
women to avoid, or how to treat them. It was advice that he needed, years ago,
but I didn't. Same thing over and over again, people claiming to know what
would make other people happy. (Or replace "happy" with adjective of your
choice.)

And I suppose I am repeating the pattern, right here. "You have to learn to
recognize what advice applies to you and what advice doesn't, because you're
smart, and there are a great many mistakes you won't make, even though there
are many you will."

But that's the advice that I needed, fifteen years ago, it's not the advice
you need. And maybe this story won't resonate with you at all, because you
thought it was obvious all along. That's the lesson.

------
erikpukinskis
I think this is a fundamental property of capitalism. People who are happy and
taken care of don't need to spend money and are terrible for the economy. If
you can create problems for someone, you can market solutions to them. Some of
the best selling products in the world, like Coca-Cola, are themselves
creating the the problem they purport to solve.

For a century, companies have been pushing cultural changes that make it
harder for us to take car of ourselves, privatizing public spaces for
socialization, promoting nuclear families over extended families and
neighborhoods, narrowing beauty standards, promoting exotic vacations and
recreational activities, etc. This has fueled economic growth while making us
generally more vulnerable. As the article describes, even if you have enough
money to take care of your basic needs, you have a long distance to go to
happiness.

On the tech side this is quite common too. I would put PowerPoint in this
category, too. And most AAA video games.

The sooner we can get out of this "money is a proxy for everything because
markets are perfect" nonsense the better.

~~~
FussyZeus
I used to be a hardcore capitalist and would've launched into a rant at this
kind of a post. I do disagree in a minor way though: I think Capitalism is
fine and dandy, I think we've just gotten entirely too good at the emotional
manipulative style of marketing products.

Awhile back I started reading a lot about what goes into the creation of a
mainstream big brand product and it's fucking horrifying. Food for example
should scare you to death, how thoroughly engineered it is to make you want to
eat more of it and never feel full. I'm not even talking highly processed
food, I'm talking ALL FUCKING FOOD does this. If it's ever been involved in a
corporation at all, be it for packaging, growing, slaughtering, etc. I promise
you it has been engineered to at least some degree, and probably to a large
degree to be consumed as an addictive thing.

Then you go into just the regular advertising for electronics, cars, on and on
and how they do just tons and tons of things in this little 30 second TV spot
to make you want a thing. You can find BOOK length documents to read about how
to engineer the perfect YouTube ad, we've already figured out how to entice
people to things using a 10 second video that takes up 1/4 of the page.

I still believe capitalism is the best system, but we need to reign in our
marketers across the board. Consumers need to be able to make rational
decisions for Capitalism to truly work, and they can't do that when they're
being barraged with manipulative messaging 14 hours a day.

~~~
ohthehugemanate
While I don't necessarily disagree I have to point out that TFA isn't talking
about the malaise of wanting more to consume. It's talking about much larger
issues: people who are schizophrenic, or victims if physical abuse, or rape.

I don't see any marketers out there enticing more people into the arms of
schizophrenia, food stamps, or prison sentences.

~~~
FussyZeus
True enough, I got a little on a side tangent here. To be honest though I
think this is a little more sad, only because no matter how good as a society
we become we'll always have rapists and whatnot, but we've created an entire
demographic group of people who can't stop consuming as a compulsion, who
otherwise were it not for excessive exposure to marketing messages they don't
understand, would just be (plus or minus) "normal" people.

------
lkrubner
This is a great excerpt:

\--------------------------

This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says “People in
Group X need to realize they have it really good”, or “You’re a Group X
member, so stop pretending like you have real problems.” The town where I
practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn’t save it.
And whenever some online thinkpiece writer laughs about how good people in
Group X have it and how hilarious it is that they sometimes complain about
their lives, it never fails that I have just gotten home from treating a
member of Group X who attempted suicide.

~~~
nirmel
I'm one of those people who say that almost all people in America have it
really good, and everyone should stop complaining. I'm trying to understand
why I'm wrong about the following:

\- Most people in America are struggling

\- Most people outside America are struggling much, much more, to a degree not
fathomable by Americans.

\- Therefore, people in America should acknowledge they have it really good
and stop complaining.

~~~
firebones
I haven't seen your logic nailed specifically as a logical fallacy [1][2], but
there's something _similar_ to a logical fallacy involved in the type of
argument you're making. Namely, that having it relatively good _globally_
should prevent someone from "complaining" (or seeking to improve their
situation) _locally_.

[1]
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppealToWorseProb...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppealToWorseProblems)
[2]
[http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=641605](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=641605)

~~~
nirmel
Appreciate your citing this fallacy. We certainly can complain about problems
that exist, regardless of their severity, perhaps because they affect us or
people we care about.

But I think there is a real problem when worrying about one problem comes at
the expense of caring about another more severe problem.

Contrived thought experiment: You have the magical power of either curing your
own toothache, or curing the world of AIDS. You choose to cure your toothache
because it affects you. I would argue you should have considered the
alternative.

The problem is not that you can't care about problems that are less severe
than others, but given finite availability of "care" in your own mind and in
the world, it is better to direct our "care" to where it can have the biggest
impact.

~~~
firebones
I see where you're going, but "magical powers" take this so far into the realm
of hypothetical that I don't think we can use it as a basis for argument.

But let me allow it, and move it to the real of practicality. Based on the
skills and resources I now have, the contribution I can now make with my
skills and resources (the "magical powers" at my disposal) would only
fractionally help cure AIDS. At best, I might be able to supply a certain
number of people with life-extending HIV meds by contributing all my assets
and future income.

And why AIDS versus a hundred other maladies where my entire wealth and income
improves and extends lives? Or does balancing the ability to build capital
effectively come into play? Would we be better off with the issues the Gates
Foundation is tackling if Bill Gates had decided to spend all his time from
1975 forward working with an NGO trying to eradicate malaria and polio? Or
getting in a position where he focused on first world problems so that he
could address some global issues?

I appreciate your concern--but "care" isn't necessarily a point in time
measurement or a zero sum game--it's possible to care about multiple things at
once, and it's possible to care proportionately more as means allow. (And in
many cases, it might be more efficient to do so.)

~~~
nirmel
I think if you are able to generate a lot of capital you should focus on doing
that, as Gates did, and then donate it all to where you believe it will do the
most before or when you die. That's at least what I'm trying to do.

------
escape_goat
To me, this psychiatrist sounds really depressed and like he may be feeling
burnt out or isolated at his job. A theme in the two typical cases he cites is
that he isn't actually dealing directly with a patient's problems; in both
cases, he's a helpless witness to a serious injustice exacerbating those
problems, and perhaps making his own efforts to assist the patient seem
particularly futile. He seems to be focused on a globalized sense of
precarious life, where almost everyone is nearly overwhelmed with problems,
but doesn't go past caveat with respect to addressing any evidence against
this (i.e. world not collapsing, psychological resiliency of most people).
Struggling with these problems is probably affecting his ability to help
others. He should find a good therapist and start working through some CBT
exercises if he finds himself thinking like this on a routine basis.

Just my two cents based on long-term exposure to psychiatry and depression. I
know these things might be really obvious to most people, but I figured they
should be pointed out for the benefit of anyone to whom they aren't.

~~~
isolate
The name for this in the helping professions is "compassion fatigue",
basically the only way out is to stop trying to help so many people for so
many hours per week.

~~~
trgn
My father in law was a psychiatrist. The "types" described in the article are
all too real.

He got attached to some of his patients, tried to help them outside his
practice. A handful of these people became part of his (and now mine) family's
social circle. A woman on SDI became a nanny, a former factory worker is now
our handy-man, another guy he put up in an apartment he was rehabbing and
still lives there. At some point, some dude lived in my in-laws basement (my
wife just shrugged that off, it apparently happened every few years).

I cringe when I look back on how I thought about psychiatry earlier. I thought
it was rich people just going to complain about how sad they felt instead of
just sucking it up.

Life is a struggle, for everybody. We have no idea how bad it is indeed. And
now, psychiatry to me seems like a terribly lonely profession.

------
wpeterson
Viktor Frankl wrote about understanding human suffering as the one constant in
all our lives and the one thing that binds us all together:

“To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If
a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the
chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering
completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the
suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is
absolutely relative.”

It's a good exercise to enumerate and guess the dramatic maladies of most
people around you, but even that belies the larger truth of all of our shared
suffering. It's the human condition.

------
bloaf
On the "bad old days:"

I think it is important to ask ourselves which of the problems the author is
talking about are uniquely "new." For example, PTSD has always been a thing,
but our awareness of it has changed. In the past, people with PTSD weren't
necessarily thought of as sick even if they were clearly unable to function.

A while ago, there would be no ailing grandma "type" as described in the
article because whatever diseases they were seeing the doctor for would kill
them too quickly. What I'm getting at is that the issues he discusses were
just as relevant and prevalent in olden times, but in olden times you also had
to worry about being hung for witchcraft or starving to death because food
stamps weren't invented yet.

We have to remember that "most people today have it pretty good" is a
comparative statement, and there were times when _everyone_ was a creationist.

~~~
tailgate
I think you're missing the context in which "people have it pretty good" is
said. It's not a statement made by itself out of nowhere, but as part of a
moral judgment, to claim people today have right to complain about whatever
suffering they are feeling. The author's counterpoint is that it still is
pretty terrible even if yesterday was worse.

------
uptownJimmy
This is well-written, and seems to touch on some vital part of our current
cultural dilemma: when we finally manage to make freedom and relative
prosperity available to almost everybody, how do we then handle that freedom
and prosperity? How do we manage our time, when so much of it is our own, as
compared to most people who came before us? What choices do we make, every day
of our lives?

I'm no psychiatrist, but I see bad choices and unhappiness every day. I barely
escaped that fate, myself, and it's an ongoing struggle, of course.

I always thought the admonition should have been rephrased: "With great
freedom comes great responsibility." But that seems laughable in a world where
so many people seem like confused children locked in a vicious cycle of desire
and cheap gratification.

------
SCAQTony
John Watson; 3 November 1850 – 6 May 1907, a Scottish author and theologian:
"Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

------
jokoon
I can notice at times how people refuse pessimism entirely, like it would be
regarded as a bad thing, like it's a crack that triggers other bad things in
your life. It's like the X stages of grief, but people are still in denial
from the fact that things are not good.

Psychiatry is certainly a world I would like to hear more from, I love
articles like that. Psychology and how minds work is really one science humans
are not good enough at. I see a psychiatrist regularly, and I really wish this
science could one day make bigger leaps.

------
draw_down
Excellent post, thank you.

------
krick
Wow, that's powerful. What I was left thinking the most: so how do I go about
coming out of the "bubble"? How do I come to see what "normal people" are?

------
nightspirit
> 3\. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact this unhappy, but they
> never tell anyone except their psychiatrist all of the pieces necessary to
> put their life story together.

4\. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact unhappy, but they never
_explicitly_ tell anyone and I'm not noticing the other obvious signs because
admitting the existence of such would reveal _my_ unhappiness and bring _me_
some questions I wouldn't want to answer.

------
exolymph
Welp, now I feel sad. But I think Scott makes a really good point in this
post.

------
D_Alex
But... from the same site, we have an article entitled "HOLOCAUST GOOD FOR
YOU, RESEARCH FINDS, BUT FREQUENT TAUNTING CAUSES CANCER IN RATS", which
includes this quote, that attempts to explain why holocaust survivors have on
average longer lives:

"One possible explanation for these findings might be the “Posttraumatic
Growth” phenomenon, according to which the traumatic, life-threatening
experiences Holocaust survivors had to face, which engendered high levels of
psychological distress, could have also served as potential stimuli for
developing personal and inter-personal skills, gaining new insights and a
deeper meaning to life."

So taking the 20% that receive food stamps, say, and dumping them wholesale
into "really miserable people" category seems rather misguided.

~~~
harryh
I think an important difference between holocaust survivors and the people
under discussion in this article is that the holocaust ended. One day the
allied army showed up and the camps were shut down and the survivors were
freed. Their lives immediately and dramatically improved. For most of the
people mentions in this blog post there will be no such single & dramatic
event.

~~~
firebones
While I don't think the comparison is perfect, Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking
Fast and Slow" illustrates several examples of cognitive biases where the
expected suffering based on "area under the curve" (e.g., duration of pain in
an non-anesthetized colonoscopy, or pain in a cold water torture test) is
greater than the actual reported pain, mostly because we tend to report based
on the later feelings (liberation, easing of pain) rather than peak pain or
the integral of total pain.

Perhaps another way of putting this is that confirmation of hope is a pretty
powerful antidote to prior pain.

