In the last few years inflation has hurt the fuck out of all but the richest Americans. Financial stress leads to depression. Add both political parties are constantly telling us the other side is ruining everything and it's just piling it on. A recession is here/coming.
It's not only related to financial conditions. Loneliness has been increasing, and it's a big contributor to depression. Social media are another massive contributor.
I suspect it has less to do with specific parameters of modern society and more with the general experience of living in it. It's a rat race that, for many, lacks any meaning. another point to consider is the psychological difference between being a big fish in a small pond as opposed to being a small fish in a very large one. With the Internet, we now have the means to compare ourselves with everyone else, and our minds can quickly reach the conclusion that who we are and what we have is simply not good enough. From there, it's an easy slide into a downward spiral.
I think it's complex and hard to breakdown. Modern life may have something to do with it, but it certainly isn't more difficult to live today than it was during the great economic depression. Additionally, the internet should tell us that If you live in the US you are way better off than people in places like Ukraine, Mexico, Argentina, Uganda, etc. Now, if they are comparing themselves to the Kardashians or erroneously to pretend-rich Social media personalities, that's on them.
I think how easy life is has little to do with psychological wellbeing. If life is very hard but you are doing great relative to others you will feel good. Furthermore, a more demanding life often generates a deeper sense of purpose and meaning.
It has to be something else. Lots of people around the world live in dire conditions, in sub-modern conditions, picking garbage dumps bathing in ditch water. And they and their friends are equally poor and living under cramped tin roof dwellings. They're not doing "great" from an economic standpoint, but may be doing well from a social standpoint and mental health standpoint. They may not be individually tougher, but as a social group, they seem tougher.
I've not been to Africa, but several other less developed parts of the world and my take is that it's different being poor in these types of places rather than in the US.
In some countries, other people don't have much of anything, so people just kind of help each other out, others don't judge you for being short on cash and people even tolerate a bit of hustling. Kindness is important.
I find developing countries also often have a kind of homogeneous culture with shared beliefs and practices, which makes everyone feel like they're part of a community.
The USA puts money on a pedestal like nowhere I've ever seen before, ever, so not having money is bad in the USA. We can't even get healthcare without money. It's quite tragic.
Usually people are more depressed if they had something and were forced to give it up than if they never had it at all and are working hard to attain it. Same reason that the American Dream is alive and well among immigrants at the same time that the former American middle-class is dying of despair.
> Usually people are more depressed if they had something and were forced to give it up than if they never had it at all and are working hard to attain it.
Third option: They worked to attain it, they got it, and they found that it was empty.
"I worked my butt off to get a bigger TicTok following. And I got it! Why aren't I happy? Why isn't my life any better?" Because happiness and a better life were never in a bigger TicTok following.
Both advertising and social media sell us on empty goals and rewards. We chase them. We're not just miserable because we can't achieve them; we're also miserable because even when we do, we find that we got nothing meaningful.
My assumption would be that they have something to look forward to. Some parts of Africa have improved a lot over the years, whereas the US, for the most part, had it good and now is seeing it slowly decay in real time.
It is very difficult to compare the numbers directly. I would expect that on many African countries there is less acces to mental health professionals to diagnose people, maybe also more prejudice agains seeking help for mental health. Also it could be that people seek help in their community or religion without a formal medical diagnosis.
Possibly for regions where there is war or food insecurity seeking a diagnosis is less of a priority. I have no idea how much of an impact these have if any, but I don’t think you can just compare numbers directly.
I read a book that suggested some clues, it was a pretty opinionated and cynical book (Dark star safari). So im not an expert. The commentary he had suggested its cultural. They know what they know, kind of accepted how things are. Dont really care about getting ahead, buying, and accumulating wealth. those kinds of are effected by economies. but just one viewpoint someone had
Just spitballing here, but a culture which focuses more on individualism, less emphasis on family and community. People disown their families over petty things like political differences, don't engage in their communities because they're shut up inside watching TV all day, then find themselves without social support networks to help when they're feeling down.
To be fair, political differences are a result of moral and ethical ideology. It's fine to not involve yourself with someone whose ideology is antithetical to goodness as subjective as it may be for some.
I will never understand someone who says political differences are petty. Thinking that the traffic light's hue of yellow is a shade too light or dark is petty. Thinking that pregnant women should die because the unviable fetus their carrying is more important than they are is not petty.
People who are opposed to abortion absolutely don't want anyone to die. It's a trolley problem to them, one with varying degrees of answers and consequences. How would you like it if someone called you an evil murderer (or whatever you're implying they are after calling them "antiethical to goodness") for making a moral choice in the trolley problem?
I can predict your reply, and I will tell you that to pro-life people, a fetus is a human life not unlike a 1 day old baby. If they believed otherwise, they wouldn't be against abortion, they'd agree with you.
A woman carrying an unviable fetus will die if she is forced to continue the pregnancy. The pro-life crowd overwhelmingly puts in place policy that doesn't take anything into consideration about the impact of the pregnancy on the mother. This means that they want her to die to punish her for her decision to have sex.
I'm not in favor of abortion personally but I will always be staunchly pro-choice. It's the only ethical, moral, and logical position one can have. Anything else is punitive and regressive.
See also preventing folks from getting medical care, access to support services, children having food at school, or any other conservative position on anything that drives the welfare of disadvantaged people. It's immoral, unethical, and illogical. You can safely cut those people out of your life without being petty or other vapid argumentative nonsense.
I don't understand this concern about inflation. It was never that high, didn't last very long, and wages kept up pretty well (real wages are higher today than they were a year ago [1]). People are panicking over a problem that has done little real harm.
There still is inflation, but the idea that it's still terribly high is just not true. We are currently below 5% annualized inflation. This is an average over the last year; the rate for the past few months is lower still. The 10%-ish inflation that started this panic is long behind us.
Should everyone just eat cake then? Nobody cares what CNN or any other org says when they can see with their own eyes that milk and eggs and everything else cost more now than they did just a few years ago.
For most people, things cost less than they did a year ago. Real wages are up over the last year. Inflation hasn't been a real problem for most people.
I can't control what conclusions people reach based on incorrect or incomplete information. I can only suggest they read better newspapers.
(CNN is not one of those better newspapers. It just had the relevant numbers.)
I can't believe we're worse off financially than during the great economic depression. Do we have numbers from back then?
Are people today more apt to become depressed, are we conditioned to get more depressed, or is diagnosis better, or are we classifying and identifying more things as depression?
Back then we had no social services, no soup kitchens, "food stamps" etc. There was no governmental help (other than job creation such as WPA). There may have been more social cohesion and more reliance on the (extended) family though.
Anecdote, not data: My father was born into the Great Depression. He said you couldn't buy thread - not because you didn't have money to buy it, but because all the thread factories had closed, and there was literally no thread to buy.
Data: The US unemployment rate peaked at 25%.
So, yeah, things were (much) worse during the Great Depression. I have no data on whether people were depressed then (though the final lines of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, his message to the country, were "Buck up" and then "Smile"). But I know that it left deep marks on people. When there just wasn't stuff, and there was no promise that there ever would be stuff, it affected people for decades after it was over.
1. Media narratives and sites like reddit -> focusing on the extremes is robbing people of the qualities of the life around them.
2. Keeping up with the Jones per se in the world of social media really knocks people down.
i'm sure it's a lot of factors but to your point one could look at this problem from a dozen angles and there's almost no way to conclude that social media and 24/7 race-to-bottom engagement model of news has been a net positive on our mental health.
Social media is destroying society, particularly among those “new” to the internet which is a bimodal distribution of those <30 and >60. There’s nothing special about those in the middle other than the context they may have for how we got here.
You now have a situation where more than half the population doesn’t know what’s real and what’s fake. It’s an, “I don’t know what I don’t know situation.” You can easily identify individuals who don’t know, because they still have a positive view of social media and say things like, “It really depends on how you use it and who you follow.”
What has happened to the internet and social media sort of tortures me, because I spent about 15 years contributing to the current problem in not-so-insignificant ways. I feel dumb for not having had the foresight to see what was happening.
People work twice as much for the same wage. Most households now have two full time workers. Strangers raise our kids. Affordable small houses are no longer built. There're few legal or free places to rest. The rich pay significantly less taxes than when America was in its prime.
Poverty is the cause. The US will only get worse until citizens vote for corporations to pay their historical tax rates and reduce outsourcing.
> People work twice as much for the same wage. Most households now have two full time workers.
It's really absurd how accepted/unnoticed this regression is. And of course it also makes the isolation problem worse as now single person households will be able to afford even less.
And those of us who have to be breadwinners are not in a good spot. I'm responsible for an adult who's bipolar and can't hold down a job. Supporting multiple people on a single income is absurdly difficult right now.
And many families with children are in a no win scenario where they either make due with a single income or one parents' income is completely eaten by child care.
I support UBI but it’s not in the cards any time soon, fine.
Then, we should aim for one overarching economic policy target: most people should be able to land a job that would enable them to generously house, feed and equip one adult and several children without working themselves to the bone. This should include a reasonable amount of leisure and luxuries, and a thorough safety net.
How to achieve this? I’m not sure. I’m open to ideas from all sides of the political spectrum as long as the goal is achieved.
This should really be our bare minimum, if we’re going to insist on thinking of ourselves as an advanced society.
Short of that, I truly don’t know what all of this is really for.
One absolute prerequisite for this would be making the minimum wage a thriving wage. Until and unless that happens, jobs traditionally seen as "bottom of the barrel"—things like fast food, grocery cashier, etc—will remain an important source of jobs for those in dire straits (very much including adults with families), while also still paying so little that even a teenager looking to make some money over the summer might think twice. And that's before seeing how the people working those jobs get treated.
Any non-mandatory "incentives" or "initiatives" to get people jobs that can keep them and their families fed, clothed, and housed will invariably leave tens of thousands to millions of people behind as companies just shrug and say "don't wanna".
What makes you say that someone should be able to "thrive" on the least-paying job? That's like saying that the dumbest person should be able to do get into selective universities, or that the weakest and slowest person should be able to win medals at sporting competitions.
Let me put it another way. Does $66k/year sound like a thriving wage to you? That's a little over $4k/mo after taxes. You won't be able to afford to pay rent, let alone buy a home, in any of the country's most popular cities, or take a family of four to vacation in Paris every year, or buy a nice new car. You could live in a smaller city in a less popular state, drive an older car, and maybe take your family to Disney World every now and then. Would you call that thriving?
That number ($66k/year) is all personal income in this country combined divided by the population; so that's the standard of living you could expect if all income was evenly distributed and it magically had no detrimental effect on the supply of goods and services. It seems like an extraordinary claim that the lowest income should even be able to afford a median lifestyle, let alone a "thriving" one. Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean by that word.
"Deserve" has nothing to do with it. I want everyone to have the opportunity to make something of themselves and keep more of their labor. I recognize that not everyone will succeed at that, and that there are no guarantees that I or anyone else will thrive. I am OK with this tradeoff.
It's not that I think some people deserve to be miserable, but I am confident that no political-economic system is capable of fully eliminating misery, let alone ensuring that everyone thrives. (I assume we agree that there is a middle ground between misery and thriving.)
Consider that even Norway, which is a truly remarkable combination of a monoethnic culture that values hard work, high social trust, and incredible natural wealth, has homeless people to the tune of 0.62 per 1000[0]; vs. the US at 1.8 per 1000[1]. You'd think that homelessness rate in Norway with all its advantages would be one-tenth that of the US.
Moreover, I am confident that a political-economic system that can guarantee everyone's success is not one that is sustainable over the long run, nor one that isn't a few bad generations away from turning into something authoritarian and rapidly worse off for its inhabitants.
I think you may have gotten too hung up on the idea of "guaranteeing" thriving.
A "thriving wage" is not as well-established a concept as a "minimum wage" or a "living wage", but I'm hardly the first to mention it. It basically means a wage at which people will, in general, have enough for all the necessities of life plus enough extra to actually enjoy living.
This does not guarantee thriving, or eliminate misery. Plenty of people are very capable of making themselves miserable no matter what their other circumstances.
A thriving wage, on its own, does not even guarantee no homelessness. (I believe we should be solving that through other means.) For one thing, it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job.
What it does guarantee is that everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make themselves a comfortable life, provided they make reasonably good choices about where to live. (A federal "thriving minimum wage", for instance, would be unlikely to meet my above criteria in downtown SF right now.)
(Personally, I'm more in favor of UBI, but the poster I originally replied to was specifically talking in terms of that being impractical to implement, which I think is likely to be true right now.)
Point taken around the guarantee of thriving. However:
> it doesn't even guarantee everyone a job
> everyone who has a job has a very real opportunity to make themselves a comfortable life
I want to go further on this point. There have been plenty of empirical studies evidencing the Econ 101 maxim that a government-imposed price floor causes a surplus, and conversely a price ceiling a shortage. A minimum wage is a price floor on labor that causes a surplus of it, meaning unemployed people. Rent control is a price ceiling on housing that causes a shortage of it, meaning people on waiting lists for affordable housing. So on and so forth; in every case it's great for the people in the system, and terrible for the people outside.
There's a second-order effect to this, especially deleterious in the case of the minimum wage, which is that the young and the marginalized take the brunt of the impact of missing out on the upskilling, networking, and building experience that comes from having a job, even if it pays very poorly, maybe not even for the necessities of life, let alone the enjoyment of it. So over time, the difference between the ones who were lucky enough to get in and the ones who were unemployed because the economic value of their labor was less than the minimum wage broadens, and you run the risk of the latter group becoming a permanently unemployable underclass.
In other words: even a shitty, poorly-paying job is likely to be better for the employee over the long run than no job at all; and because of this, a high minimum wage is likely to result in an unintentional increase in the disparity of outcomes between the haves and the have-nots.
> The rich pay significantly less taxes than when America was in its prime.
> The US will only get worse until citizens vote for corporations to pay their historical tax rates
When do you consider America at its prime? Because I guarantee both taxation and government expenditure as a fraction of GDP were less than what they are now.
If you're talking about the Gilded Age in the late 1800s, there literally wasn't an income tax on either people or corporations, and federal spend was single-digit percent of GDP. Yet America accomplished many feats like the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and poverty rates fell greatly.
If you're talking about the 80s when the tax rate in the highest income bracket was 70%, the top 1% of income earners actually paid a considerably smaller share of all income tax receipts than they do now. The poverty rate didn't change much between then and now.
> Poverty is the cause.
Sure. But there is no empirical evidence to suggest that more redistributive taxation and bigger government alleviates poverty. The War on Poverty has been about as effective as the War on Drugs or the War on Terror.
The war on drugs was never about drugs. The war on terror was never about terror. The war on poverty was also never about poverty. You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the intent behind these programs. For example, the War on Drugs was to disrupt minority and leftist populations explicitly.
The rates of people diagnosed with depression. Things that were once taboos, had stigma attached to them, or were poorly defined may once have been more often kept under wraps. See ADHD or ASD diagnosis rates, for example.
The observed increase could be attributed to two key factors:
1) The rate may have been constant over time, but we're only now observing the "true" rate because societal taboos have decreased.
2) The diagnostic criteria may have lowered over time. Thus, we may now be diagnosing people who wouldn't have previously met the criteria for diagnosis.
I've been wondering the same about the notable rise in self-identified LGBT+ individuals across generations[0]. Are we witnessing this surge merely because societal acceptance has improved, enabling more people to openly identify as LGBT+? Or could it also be because the definition of what it means to be LGBT+ has broadened and it's increasingly desirable for young people to identify as such?
One change is that bisexual people are more likely to come out. This has actually had some interesting effects on queer spaces over the past 30 years: Most of them used to be populated by homosexuals but now most queer spaces seem to be mostly bi/pan. Basically a lot of people who either only date or settle down with the opposite sex can be openly queer now whereas before there was no social benefit to telling someone you're bisexual.
I still find it weird when queer spaces are full of people in hetero relationships but the demographics make sense.
Not a big fan of this comparison. Just because it was true of left-handedness doesn't mean it's true for other things. It also shows that hitting left-handed kids in schools was actually working, whereas it's not possible to "cure" depression or sexual orientation this way.
Actually sexual orientation is fluid and can be adjusted through acclimatization, it's how pedophilia is treated, it just doesn't work on unwilling participants. People who are straight occasionally do become bi or gay, and vice versa.
It depends what you mean by sexual orientation. For example, I don't think adult pedophiles ever stop being sexually aroused by children. They just learn not to act on their urges.
> People who are straight occasionally do become bi or gay, and vice versa.
Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along? And is it really the result of acclimatization or the result something else, like a biological process? I admit I didn't know that was a thing. Also, a problem is that most of this research is based on self-reporting, which is notoriously unreliable. Ideally researchers would find ways to measure sexual arousal directly, but I guess it would be more difficult to find participants and setup experiments.
>I don't think adult pedophiles ever stop being sexually aroused by children. They just learn not to act on their urges.
Adult pedophiles can stop being sexually aroused by children, because there's still a cognitive component to it. In the same way that you might for example, stop being attracted to your partner if you start associating them with a negative memory, a softcore pedophile might lose their attraction to children if they begin to associate it with a negative emotional response from the child.
>Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along?
They quite literally change sexual orientation. The same way you might stop liking sugary foods if you go off them for a while, or how you might develop a taste for leafy greens if you give them a go enough times.
Sources would improve your claims. Aversion conditioning is understood to change behavior more than desire. And many people do not develop a taste for leafy greens or heterosexuality after decades.
As far as general sexuality, the keyword you can look for is 'sexual fluidity', and as far as pedophiles are concerned, Mashall's "Are pedophiles treatable?" covers current approaches that seem to be successful in attenuating or replacing attraction to children.
>Aversion conditioning is understood to change behavior more than desire
Behavior and desire have a complex relationship, it's not necessarily the case that behavior follows from desire.
>And many people do not develop a taste for leafy greens or heterosexuality after decades.
Many people don't, but some do, and my comment concerns the 'some', hence my saying 'occasionally'.
It's debatable whether that is true for everyone. I know I've tried to make myself like men on several occasions. I was definitely willing and not doing it out of self-hatred.
I'm the opposite, I found that certain mental tools I'd developed in order to overcome my fear of heights and such, had inadvertently also allowed me to adopt just about any sort of sexuality (save for things involving sharp incongruity because my adhd pulls me out of it) with about two weeks to a month of conditioning. I did this a couple of years ago to increase the number of races I'm attracted to, in order to increase my potential dating pool.
Have you tried with acts you don't like or just physical characteristics? I found that I could see attractiveness in men, but I could never engage in PIV intercourse or give them oral. (Which pretty much rules dating them out because that's a shitty thing to do). I can condition myself into most things, but men seem to be one of my sharp incongruities.
I'd bet that a substantial portion of humans are naturally bi and shaped by their environment but there are some humans that really are Kinsey 0s or 6s. We're just rarer. I'd also guess the reputation that conversion therapy has for not working is because anybody in such a hostile environment with even a smidge of opposite-sex attraction is going to act 'straight' and the only people sent off to the conversion camps are the people for whom it wouldn't work.
I still think this is a overall net increase. The stigma wasn't preventing people from getting diagnosed and treated
Zoloft was Pfizer's second best selling drug during most of the 90s. So people were still going to get diagnosed and treated despite the stigma. They just wouldn't tell anyone about it, other than their therapist.
The diagnosis of "hysteria" dropped by two thirds in the mid twentieth century with the diagnosis of "depression" replacing it. People may well have been going to the doctor, but they were not necessarily being diagnosed with the conditions we now associate with their symptoms.
To your final paragraph, that also highlights the flaws in Gallup style polling. Even if people were being diagnosed in equal number, it doesn't mean they would admit to it in a poll.
Depression isn't taboo or stigmatized anymore? There's plenty of government forms you'll have to check a box and explain if you've been depressed still. Maybe it's more of a lack of awareness of the taboo and stigmatization.
There's a third option: depression is not a real disease, it is the correct response to what has been done to you, and there are people who should be held responsible for that.
I don't think that's a real option though, because many people suffering from depression haven't been "done" anything to by anyone, or if they have, it's not out of the ordinary or different to what's been done to other people who are not depressed. Like losing your job, or splitting up with your spouse, or simply just existing.
Some people react with depression to a serious grievance or ill inflicted upon them (this is the form of depression other people are most likely to understand), and some react with extreme depression to the most ordinary and mild of life's occurrences.
>because many people suffering from depression haven't been "done" anything to by anyone
Some may lack the tools to identify the reason for their depression, that's not the same as nothing having happened to them.
>it's not out of the ordinary or different to what's been done to other people who are not depressed
It's entirely possible that the people who are not depressed are in fact the ones who are sick.
>some react with extreme depression to the most ordinary and mild of life's occurrences.
Or, the mild life occurrence just serves as a tipping point that cascades and causes the person to reevaluate their situation and come to the conclusion that they are dissatisfied.
Even if they have had something done to them by someone, … they're still depressed? Holding people accountable is nice (though I agree that not all causes of depression are necessarily from acts we'd consider needing accountability), but the post above seems akin to saying "we need to hold the shooter responsible, but we don't need to treat that gunshot wound"?
Where did you get that idea? (Edit: or did you mean the post above mine?)
I'm saying depression sometimes has an identifiable trigger and sometimes it doesn't. In both cases it's a serious disease.
For many cases of depression, there's no identifiable "trigger" you can point at and say "this, this is the reason this person started suffering from depression".
Even when there is such a trigger, e.g. a divorce, losing their job, or the death of a loved one (say, a parent), people who are not depressed can overcome it. Life goes on, you don't get wrecked forever, you slowly rebuild your life. Whereas a person suffering from depression may never recover, so that a dramatic event in their lives overpowers everything else, forever, and they fail to recover, if they do at all.
The person I'm replying to seems to imply the depressive "let's get wrecked forever, life has no more meaning" is the "correct" response, and on the contrary, that picking up your life is "sick".
There could be numerous factors not normally considere for increases in ADHD diagnosis rates such as the decline of tobacco usage in society that ADHD users were self-medicating with[0].
I also believe that ADHD still carries a stigma in the workplace. I wouldn’t personally discuss it in an interview.
It's right in the article: "The percentage of U.S. adults who report having been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime has reached 29.0%"
To your point on suicide, though. The OECD has some data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/... .. It's hard to say. US is flat. Norway is up a bit. Most countries are down or flat. I don't see any particular upward trend over the past 60 years.
Wow those numbers are counter-intuitive and in stark contrast to the mainstream zeitgeist. I think it's fair to say rates are up somewhat in the US (along with many other social ills) but for many other western countries they have been stable.
Breaking down the US statistics into demographics makes for some disturbing yet interesting reading https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db433.htm. Seems like the bulk of the growth has been older men (trending down) and women aged 15-24 (a shocking 87% increase from 2007).
In the context of the article - and in most conversations - depression is short hand for "clinical depression" or "major depressive episode", i.e. the form where it is a disease, not the normal feeling of short-term depression after a bad event.
> Clinical depression had been slowly rising in the U.S. prior to the COVID-19 pandemic but has jumped notably in its wake.
That finger points at the social isolation hypothesis (though is obviously not hard proof).
I wonder if social media is to socializing what fake sugars are to real. It occupies the same sort of space without the benefits, and is more desirable on the surface while generally being worse for you. It's a discount but more easily obtained substitute.
Working remotely doesn't make you sit at home all day. It doesn't force you to not socialise either (at work or after).
The way the work is organised and other factors that make home and surroundings not social for many people may be a factor. But looking at the remote work specifically here feels like holding the wrong end of the stick.
(source: Working remotely, having nice chats with coworkers, inviting others once a week to my home for work, meeting people otherwise)
Probably true for people whose work is their primary source of social interaction which might be the bigger issue. Maybe it's the way we live that's against our nature, not the way we work.
It is hard to be happy when your physical condition is a mess.
Personally, I never have quite as good of a day as when I start my day with an hour walk. Literally never and I have performed this experiment over a thousand times now.
My social life improved with remote work. Suddenly, I wasn’t mentally exhausted at the end of the day and could go out and hang out with people instead of passing out at 7pm.
Huh? I would say that I am more happier WFH than I was in the office. No more daily stress of driving in rush hour traffic. No more wasted hours spent commuting. Reducing my GHG output.
Get to spend more time with family/friends or personal projects.
Edit: want to add that I also finish my work in less than half an actual work day (2-3 hours). Compared to in office, the same tasks took 4-5 hrs due to constant nagging, interruptions.
This may be due to the excessive use of antidepressants, which can inadvertently exacerbate depression, transforming a temporary episode of sadness into a long-lasting and severe condition.
I think very little of it is related to doomerism. People that buy into all that stuff are angry, raging at phantoms, not sad.
I expect it's because we've gotten so good at being impersonal. Not necessarily in actual day to day relationships, but a lot of the things we do are basically designed to be alienating, because it's marginally more profitable to have them that way than to have them be convenient.
Like a favorite pet peeve of mine is that the Amazon Music app on android has the occasional modal advertisement to upgrade to a different plan or whatever. I literally never want to see those ads, but there's no way to turn them off because the app is designed to make Amazon as much money as possible, not to be convenient for me. Our lives are full of little "Fuck yous" like that one.
There's something about yourself you should evaluate if you can't fathom someone else thinking differently than you, and you let those things affect your mood and happiness.
People publicly display their support for Biden as well: https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tbt/DW.... Worth noting that this photo was from an article about how neighbors get along despite voting and supporting different politicians.
> even after his terrible behavior
I presume that you could equally have voted for Bill Clinton without approving of his infidelity or Obama without approving of his extrajudicial killing of American citizens. A vote for a politician does not imply that you condone everything about that person.
> I worry for the safety of my family
I don't know where you are, but for what it's worth, I am a visible ethnic minority living in stereotypically conservative Deep South state where virtually every state and local office is held by a Republican; I have neighbors of many different colors and creeds and I do not feel unsafe.
It's actually kind of funny -- I used to live in a major coastal metropolis of the kind where BLM signs were on every other lawn, yet approximately zero black people actually lived in the nice parts of town with those lawn signs. Here, there are approximately zero BLM signs, but plenty of white and black people living as neighbors, friends, and coworkers.
> inflation means despite me having a six figure job we have to pinch pennies
Since we're talking about presidents, I have to point out that the CPI rose 7.8% during Trump's four-year term and 15.6% during Biden's term so far, a little over two years in.
I know people like this too. Trump is obviously a flashpoint, but is it really him or is it the constant media narratives being fed to us about "the other side" being a danger to our safety. Many folks on the right that I know have the same (but not to this extent) visceral reaction to say Biden, Newsom, etc.
I agree, jackmott42's problems reflects the entirety of the US problems. Let's make sure only jackmott42's issues in life are resolved, we'll start by eliminating all of those nasty trumpers from society. Then we'll donate $50 each to jackmott42 so their nearly 2 standard deviation from the mean and average income is no longer penny pinching.
Let's also build a fort around jackmott42, so they are completely safe from all their enemies, imagined or not.
As for the rest of us? Who cares. The only thing that matters is jackmott42.
Cal Newport touches on this in Digital Minimalism. But the Media's need to produce incessant clickbait articles (to generate ad revenue) contributes to this. Basically, avoid News Media and social media.
We would expect depression rates to reach new highs in late state capitalism, would we not? I thought we all understood things were going to get worse before they get better? This is similar to getting concerned why so many men having stage IV, terminal cancer are losing their hair. We know why. We also know Rogaine isn't going to help.
To me this is related to the other article on HN earlier today about the dramatic decrease in birthrates since 2007. They're all symptoms of a society in decline.
Six years ago I went to work for a small (~100 employee) startup. Three years ago that startup was acquired by Intel, so for the last three years I've been an Intel employee. Last January Intel cancelled my project and laid me off.
So here I am at 58, seven years from retirement, unemployed, not because I was lazy or bad at my job, but because people I've never laid eyes on, people whose names I don't know, people who don't even know I exist, decided they needed to cut costs. And because I'm 58 and ageism is a real thing in this industry, the odds of anyone else hiring me are very low. 58 is awfully late in life to be forced to start over.
The problem with corporations is that by design they provide a virtually impenetrable barrier between one set of humans (the owners of the corporation) and another set of humans (the employees). This has benefits, of course, but it also has one very serious drawback, which is that it allows the first set of humans to treat the second set like a commodity, no different from wheat or pork bellies, but not the other way around. This asymmetry disempowers employees, robs them of their agency and personhood. And all this happens by design.
It really should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the side effects of this system is a lot of depressed people.
- significantly diminish limited liability. If your corp causes a chemical spill that kills many people, the executives should be put on trial for mass murder.
This change creates a large incentive to do the right thing -- like not implicitly killing.
These corporations are not people. They are run by people. We need to start holding those people accountable for their actions. We need to start naming them and attaching their names to the disasters they are causing.
If you are the head of an oil company when a massive spill occurs, not only should you live in poverty for the rest of your life, but you should probably be in a jail cell for the rest of your life as well for being a danger to society in the pursuit of personal riches.
If we can throw people in prison for carrying certain rocks for all their life, I think this is more than reasonable.
- how these are causing the current status quo and
- explain what you believe are the expected effects.
It's an internet comment, not an academic essay, so you can just refer to things -- but you're in a diverse forum where most people aren't going to instantly recall the established zeitgeist you're trying to evoke. Many of us aren't familiar with your zeitgeist, so sparse references to it mean nothing to us.
I have no idea what you mean by "citizenship". I don't know what problems this is causing, what the change would look like, and why that would be expected to improve the problem.
Corporations are no longer beholden to governmental and regulatory bodies. Educational institutions, news agencies, etc simply echo corporate approved information.
Watch 60 minutes and see a “news” story that is really just an info commercial for a new weight loss drug presented as journalism.
The public discourse is now dominated by corporate safe “progressive” topics. Race, gender, identity .. etc all safe.. progressive issues like unions, wealth inequality, bank reforms … nope those are not okay.
It’s depressing because faith is waning in the U.S. as a society and as a government.
> Watch 60 minutes and see a “news” story that is really just an info commercial for a new weight loss drug presented as journalism.
This has existed since TV was originally invented. Ads used to be content...and often still is. I hate it too but I'm not sure this is what I'd point to for "A-ha! Here's the reason depression is suddenly skyrocketing!", when it's been true for 70 years running.
Ah, yes, the corporations are not in their place...
The world was basically a dystopian hell for the non-elite class and only getting worse from the advent of agriculture until somewhat recently (see the Malthusian Trap)...
But today is the worst because you can look back to sometime post-WW2 in the US (and only the US), where - for a few years - things maybe might have been slightly better if and only if you were a white man.
You are conflating technology improving lives, which it usually does as time advances, with society improving. Society has arguably gotten worse, as things have just become more passively aggressive than outright aggressive as they were in the past.
As much as I disagree with engaging with GP's non-comment, I also don't think this is really steel-manning their assumed point-of-view. Likely they are thinking of a society where corporations are "different" rather than "abolished".
I'm not a mind reader so it is hard to identify their POV, but it matches a popular brand of political sloganeering. In the context of depression, I think it is may be easier for people to project their unhappiness upon these faraway and indistinct entities outside of their control rather than deal with what might be the more immediate causes of their unhappiness. From that point perhaps it is worth asking if this brand of political sloganeering is empowering individuals or using a victimhood narrative to advance a political cause.
We live in a right wing world right now with the USA as the center of right wing capitalism. Trying to blame individuals is a common tactic in the current status quo.
Though you are correct, any sufficiently "different" type of corporation, I would argue is no longer a corporation in the sense we are referring to now.
Could you be a bit more specific about how the corporations are causing depression in the people of the US? Too much social media? Too much advertising? Too low wages? Meaningless work? What, specifically, are corporations doing that is causing this?
I'm not sure you're wrong, but you need more detail for me to be convinced that you're right...
It's not just "corporatations" but capitalism as a whole that strips away any glimpse of hope from current working generations. As long as anywhere you go workplace dictatorships and parasitism are celebrated, and considered natural norms, how can folks project themselves in the future?
I think it is easy to point out one issue like this and blame all of society's ills on it, however, it isn't that simple.
There are many issues at play here. For example: extreme political divisiveness, decreasing real incomes, falling birth rates, increased competition due to globalization, doomscrolling ...and many others.
If I personally had to pick the largest factor, I would blame social media induced anxiety/depression due to the personal issues that arise from comparing your life to the artificial portrayals. That and the dopamine addiction from tiktok, snapchat that causes people to withdraw from applying effort in the real world.
Ultimately individuals are responsible for their own emotions. There are unjust elements in society and there have always been unjust elements in society. Where you lay the blame is besides the point in this discussion about depression.
People need more effective coping mechanisms.
Even with little to no money, happiness is possible for people around the world. Why then is one of the world's richest and most productive economies facing rising depression rates?
Would you say the same to a black enslaved man in the 18th century? Or to a Jewish awaiting his death in a nazi concentration prison? Or to a Palestinian deported from his home? There can always be rules or laws that are directly responsible to people suffering and depression.
No, I wouldn't say that at all. I wouldn't compare working in an Amazon fulfillment center or delivering Uber eats to those scenarios either. In either case I'd encourage the individual to uplift himself and transcend those problems. To accept that the world is unfair and to do something to better their life, regardless of the circumstances. In both cases I wouldn't say it is easy or belittle their struggles, but obviously escaping slavery is more difficult than many modern laments.
Strong claim. Bet it has more to do with trends like polarization or housing costs or something. Most corporations are providing absurdly cheap goods and decent jobs.
Corporations lobby/bribe politicians to implement laws and polities that negatively impact their constituents. The rest of the world has a single-payer healthcare system that is cheaper and better than what we have. Why? Because the healthcare industry has advertized and lobby'd for it to remain as it is.
Most corporations provide "decent jobs" to a limited subset of people. The vast majority of people are not making 100k/year.
This is, quite literally, the best and safest time in the history of the US to be openly LGBT. This sounds like a reddit comment. I suggest getting offline for a bit and actually spending time with other people in real life.
This is a common sentiment that misses the point. Human happiness isn't based on how good or bad things are in absolute terms, it's based on whether things are getting better or worse.
It's not so great if you're a lesbian, unfortunately. Female-only dating and social spaces have been almost entirely eradicated, and women who complain about this get endlessly harassed.
Same-sex marriage wasn't nationally legal until 2015. How can you say that social conditions for LBGT people in America are worse in the present than in the past? Maybe if you're only looking in the past few years, but zoom out to view a few decades and it doesn't make sense. What qualifies as extreme anti-LGBT rhetoric today was very mainstream 20 years ago.
It is just a symptom of youth and social media addiction.
I forget what the stat was in 1999 but it is something absurd. Like 90% of the US was against gay marriage. In 2022, 71% were pro gay marriage.
I am gay and when someone says bullshit like this is just drives me crazy. As if a gay person in high school today can possibly relate to my experience of being gay in high school in the 90s. It is such an ignorant statement and view.
I came out online in the mid 90s and in rural MI in 2000. I also find this maddening and frankly it feels kind of like gaslighting. Corrective rape/assault and violent reactions to my sexuality were things I had to seriously consider every time I met new people/was in a new place/in a new situation. Now I generally don't have to worry that if I tell someone I'm gay they'll beat me up or try to 'fix' me. They might make comments or give me a look, but I don't have that fear of people finding out like I had growing up.
If someone was born post-AIDS (so roughly age 40 and below), they'd have gotten to see things slowly improve until 2016, when they started sliding back.
I really doubt there are statistics to back this up. More likely, the number of people consuming rage-bait (drawing attention to the worst) on social media such as reddit has done up.
Without such social media, an asshole yells abuse in a store and it ruins the day of 20 people in earshot. With social media, it gets uploaded and viewed by 20,000 people.
How many have you seen? How many have you 'seen' on social media?
As for laws, I really think you're missing the bigger picture. Anti-LGBT people had the law on their side a few years ago much more than today (and accordingly, they had less reason to protest.)
Please have some perspective ("touch grass", if you will). I live in one of the most socially conservative states in the union and there are openly married gay people here, gainfully employed and forming a part of society.
Meanwhile, in a full third of all the countries in the world, homosexuality is still illegal (sometimes punishable by death), and the majority of the world population still thinks homosexuality is wrong. There's about twenty in the world that are more friendly to "queerness" than the US[0] -- mostly monoethnic white countries with a couple of exceptions.
You may also be surprised by how socially conservative nonwhite people in this country are in general; even less than a decade ago, the majority of black Americans did not support gay marriage[1].
A leading candidate for the 2024 US presidential election has made a campaign promise to make healthcare that I rely on virtually illegal. Dozens of representatives in congress have cosponsored a bill that would make it illegal to even teach doctors about this form of care. I would not survive without this care. Things may be worse in the rest of the world, but if healthcare I rely on is taken away then there is no way I will stay in this country.
Moving to a heavily blue state may be a better and far cheaper option, they are holding the pro-queer line for the time being. Judging historically on blue states' treatment of some other issues like immigration, I don't expect them to cooperate with any anti-queer laws on the federal level.
> Judging historically on blue states' treatment of some other issues like immigration
Blue states don't have a great history on those other issues, either. Oregon literally prohibited black people from entering its territory. The last Major League Baseball team to integrate was the Red Sox. A quarter of all present-day blue states have never elected a black person to the House of Representatives, and another quarter have only ever elected one.
Actually, even today, most professional athletes point to Boston as the most racist city they'll play in. "Sanctuary cities" in blue states like Chicago and NYC are pushing refugees out to the comparatively redder suburbs right now. In the meantime, college-educated black people are moving back to the South.
Point being, differences are only felt in the extreme margins; red states and blue states are just the difference of 49% vs. 51% one direction or another on almost every divisive issue.
This is a perfect example of first-world privilege in display. I'm really jealous that people live in such good places that anti-queer rhetoric is their major problem.
I think I agree with this in general. And my own experiences line up with this documented rise. But I also wonder if the rates for men, even white men, are undercounted here. My impression is they’re the group least well equipped to recognize some of the more subtle signs of depression or be vulnerable enough to seek help or admit it on record. Suicide rates for white, middle-aged men are the highest for all groups currently. Either they’re more effective at it (possibly?) or this methodology isn’t capturing something.
Not who you responded to, but I'll try and analyze GP's original points. It's up to you whether you decide this is sufficient evidence against the idea that certain demographics should be depressed given the present conditions.
> Women have just experienced the most significant blow against their rights and personal freedoms in 50 years, combined with the intense pressure they're under to try to bring persistent sexual abuse into the light.
The rise of near-total abortion bans in some states is regrettable ("near-total", since every state still has exceptions for threats to the mother's physical health), though I believe that there will be a lot of reversion to the mean over the next few years. No state has a majority of the population that supports a total or near-total ban.
The GP may be surprised to learn, however, that on the subject of elective abortions, presumed socially liberal European countries like Denmark (12 weeks) or France (14 weeks) are closer to socially conservative states like Georgia (6 weeks) or South Carolina (20 weeks) than socially liberal states like Massachusetts (24 weeks) or Oregon (no limit). And of course, globally, fewer than half of all countries allow elective abortions at all.
> Young adults are looking down the barrel of decreased job opportunity combined with crippling debt and rising cost of living.
The median real (as in adjusted for inflation) income has been on an upward trend over the past few decades, with a local peak in 2019[0].
Crippling debt? The average undergrad leaves school with $33k in student loan debt[1], which is substantially less than the average new car purchase at $48k as of March 2023, and nobody calls the latter crippling. Do young people really have a greater debt burden? People 18-26 have the least debt out of all generational groups. Gen-Xers aged 43-58, hardly young, carry the most debt.[2] This all makes sense, since people accumulate more debt as they enter the middle of their lives buying homes and whatnot, and lose debt as they pay it off over time.
> Black people have been trying to convince people not to disproportionately kill and oppress them, and are still experiencing significant pushback.
Well, there's a lot to unpack here. Let me see if I can tackle GP's point in a few ways.
First, "disproportionately" is basically a meaningless concept; literally everything is disproportionate, and one of the strangest facets of the modern social justice movement is the idea that every slice of life should reflect the overall composition of society. Over half of all NFL players are black; 0.1% are Asian[3]. Black people are "disproportionately" overemployed in barbershops and "disproportionately" underemployed in nail salons[4]; 85% of cab drivers and 90% of lumberjacks are men. Yet nobody's out there mustering public support for fewer black NFL players or more women cab drivers.
This isn't limited to this country; anywhere in the world you care to look, whatever subset of the population you choose, you're bound to find disproportionate numbers, because different cultural subgroups have different preferences.
Next, on the subject of black people "trying to convince people [...] not to kill and oppress them", I assume by that wording the GP meant police shootings and hate crimes committed by other races. The most comprehensive study on racial bias in police shootings to date was unable to find racial bias in fatal police shootings[6]. And the overwhelming majority of black homicide victims were killed by a black perpetrator[7]. Black people were "disproportionately" more likely to be a victim of race-motivated hate crimes[8] but also "disproportionately" more likely to be a perpetrator of hate crimes[9].
As for oppression, it's difficult to make the claim of systemic oppression of black people here and now in the present, when they are "disproportionately" more represented in the Supreme Court and about "proportionately" represented in the House of Representatives. Were black people systemically oppressed in the past? Absolutely, and even within living memory. Does that carry an effect to this day? Sure. Are there actual racists today? Yes, but likely not as many as GP thinks. Is the best way forward to apply present discrimination to address past discrimination, as is the current identitarian dogma? I certainly don't believe so, and I suppose that's what GP means by "pushback".
TL;DR: Comparing raw week-numbers is only useful within the same legal and cultural framework. Comparing European and US limits on weeks alone feels pretty misleading because of that.
>The GP may be surprised to learn, however, that on the subject of elective abortions, presumed socially liberal European countries like Denmark (12 weeks) or France (14 weeks) are closer to socially conservative states like Georgia (6 weeks) or South Carolina (20 weeks) than socially liberal states like Massachusetts (24 weeks) or Oregon (no limit). And of course, globally, fewer than half of all countries allow elective abortions at all.
Commenting just on this part, as it's something that really has to be pointed out.
This is a common talking point certain political groups use, but only true on the absolute surface-level - if you look deeper, it becomes clear that it's not that simple.
I know the german legislation the best, so that's what I'll talk about.
The first and most important thing is that you have to see those rules within the larger context of the system they are used in. In germany, visiting your gynocologist every 3 months is pretty normal for people in the relevant age group. There is typically no hesitation in regards to healthcare. Birth control is available from a very young age (because teens tend to mess around with each other).
Then, there's excellent mandatory sex-ed. Much less poverty and overall better median education level. If you get a child, you'll get a significant amount of money from the government every single month until it's 18 or 25.
Healthcare isn't an issue even if you're unemployed. Also, there is no major stigma associated with abortion, making it much more effectively accessible and possible to actually be talked about.
As a result, teen pregnancies are much, much more rare. Generally, there is no abstinence-only bullshit being taught, resulting in teens able to properly decide for themselves. And, importantly, sex-ed is done _before_ puberty, which is absolutely crucial. You want them to be informed before their hormones go batshit crazy.
Because of those points, abortions are generally much more rare, as there's much less undesired pregnancies happening in the first place.
Then, to the general rules: The normal limit is 12 weeks/84 days post-conception. In certain cases up to 24 weeks. If there's serious danger for the mother, it's unlimited. Every hospital does abortions, there aren't any stigmatization-inducing special facilities for this.
Much of that doesn't look far away from the rules in the liberal US states.
The one exception: There is a mandatory counceling session (free of course) you have to do before a non-emergency abortion. After that, you need to wait 3 days. Then it can go on. The idea behind this is to make sure the situation is properly understood and to show ideas how the situation could be resolved differently (for example ways of financial support if finances would be the main reason for abortion, etc). All this in a neutral way, you aren't being guided towards a certain outcome.
A significant amount of people consider this to be over-the-top and infantilizing women - and I certainly see the reasoning. Personally, I haven't experienced this myself, so I can't really have much of an opinion on it.
As far as I know, the situation in france and UK are somewhat similar. Maybe somebody else can elaborate on the others.
Overall, this "abortion restrictive in europe" talking point is generally just that - a talking point, created to fool americans into thinking that the terrible healthcare related to abortion they have is actually super advanced.
It's not all about number limits. It's about healthcare and support. Limits in the US have to be much wider because it gets often spotted later and the alternatives are much worse.
> It's not all about number limits. It's about healthcare and support.
Sure, but numbers can be compared objectively.
> there is no major stigma associated with abortion [in Germany]
I agree, there is a lot more stigma in the US, especially in more socially conservative circles.
> If there's serious danger for the mother, it's unlimited.
This is also true in every US state the last time I checked.
> As far as I know, the situation in france and UK are somewhat similar.
France and UK have an abortion rate twice as high (~17 per 1000 women) as Germany (~8/1000)[0]. So at least there is enough of a difference that Germans get only half as many abortions as the French or the Britons.
For comparison, the US is sandwiched between Bulgaria and Sweden, around ~21/1000.
> a talking point, created to fool americans
I'm not trying to fool anyone. I'm just examining the claim that women in the US, even those in conservative states, are hopelessly oppressed with regards to abortion, so much so that they should be depressed about it.
3. I see Confederate and Blue Lives Matter flags and signs everywhere, today, in every rural community I visit. That is push-back against Black Lives Matter, which is a movement rooted in wanting black people not to be disproportionately killed by police. Luckily, the Blue Lives Matter crap is becoming less and less socially acceptable, but it's still there, still reminding vulnerable and historically oppressed people that their lives are less valuable.
Could also be the increased income disparity, the huge leap in housing costs without associated pay increase, the obvious inability of the US to change the direction it (and the world) is heading...
I mean, it's rising most amongst young adults and minorities; given the political climate alone I can understand the correlation there.
Exactly, lockdowns caused a huge spike in precisely all those things. Income disparity skyrockets as the laptop class gets raises and stock bonuses while the servant class delivers their food while inflation skyrockets. Housing costs explode as the fixed supply in suburbia is swamped with urban exiles working remote and lockdowns cause supply chain disruptions.
I find it hard to detach from work and focus on my well-being. Work from home was convenient and necessary to a certain extent but I miss being able to get off the clock as soon as I left company doors at the end of the day.
As nice as WFH is for many of us (or society at large), the truth is I think that many of us and society at large isn't really set up to do it well. For working from home to be balanced with also living at home, you need some physical separation and space so that work spaces and living spaces are easily compartmentalised.
This requires bigger homes with probably some layout adjustments. Some will already have the homes for such things, but many, not at all.
I always figured from the early days of the pandemic/WFH that distributed/decentralised workspaces would be a nice shift, so that most residential areas could have a not-too-distant workspace with no substantial commute. Then you decouple work's office location and/or personal home ammenities from your actual working conditions. Dunno if this is an actual thing or actually viable.
I set up everything to basically turn off at 6. Close the work laptop, and either set up time based notifications for everything on my phone, or a work profile (Android) that I turn off. While meetings have had a tendency to spread out (due to more spread out teams and trying to make calendars work), so I have a bit less time detached, I still feel like I'm able to detach, even with my work area being the same as my personal PC (though I step away from that for a decent amount of time as well).
Maybe running people out of their jobs for not getting an experimental drug that is no longer recommended in most working age Americans was bad public policy?
