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Something else to keep in mind is that how things are interpreted is not necessarily the same over time.
I was just looking through a small city phone book, the white pages. Oh, so few people listed, that small town feeling.
Of course, we know why there are so few people listed because most have chunked their landline for cell phones and hence, what phone book lists them?
The size of the phone book of "Mayberry" of decades ago does not mean the same thing as the size of the phone book of a small city today. Interpretations of things vary over the decades.
I don't actually think that the underlying mentality is a "keeping up with the Joneses" thing as in, looking at your neighbor and wanting what they have.
I think that the part that is stressing us all to death is shame and judgment stuff.
One of our most strong primitive social-primate needs is to have approval and a place among our own kind. And we can go through life being pushed this way and that way by judgment or perception of judgment or FEAR of judgment by others.
When I was a child, I was unpopular. I felt judged and disapproved of. I wanted to be like the girls who looked and talked and dressed and acted a way, not because I felt greed and envy of what they had, but because I wanted to be accepted and loved by other people. I didn't want to be humiliated, pushed around, shunned...judged and shamed...for being me.
As soon as puberty hit, I discovered one of the first ways in which other people would finally seem to take a positive interest. Sex. It didn't matter the nature of it, someone just looking at me and smiling and nodding and reaching TO me instead of mocking, hating, and shunning and avoiding me... I thought I craved sex, but what I craved was just human connection. Which in fact is a very natural thing to crave.
But "they only wanted to be around you to use you for sex"...sneer, mock, side-eye. How do I feel, when I anticipate the judgment and shaming thoughts that some other posters probably have reading about a girl who had sex with boys, just to feel like not literally every other human being around hated her. Must be something wrong with me I could not find my own worth without that. Must be daddy issues. Must be unlovable/unlikable if you had no friends otherwise.
So I could run the other way from THAT flavor of shame and judgment and end up.... Faithful to an abusive man for a long time.
But I had to try, because what would people think, if I admitted the situation, if I left and was a single mother and worse...a POOR single mother? Others would say, "well you should have left, you would not have starved, the government has programs to help people like that. It would be fine." But if I had, then I'd be judged for getting the help.
Everywhere you turn, someone wants to point a finger and say that you are trash, a bad person, not doing life right.
"You struggle with your student loans? Must have a useless degree, then."
"You are in a bad relationship? Must be something wrong with you that you attract them."
"Don't get anything you can't afford ever! Live within your means! But don't expect your rent to be affordable. Get another job! You don't need sleep, do you? Come on..."
Don't get me started on the thousand ways that you can be a bad partner, bad friend, bad parent... America's notions of cowboy individualism have put us in a minefield of double binds. Any hardship you encounter is grounds for social shaming and shunning. We like to think we don't hold children accountable or responsible but I felt it was my own fault that I was unloved since as far back as I can remember. And if you have had no hardship? Then you are privileged and no one will take you seriously because you've never had it rough.
There is no way to be OK anymore.
Everything I ever accomplished...
Putting on elaborate holiday displays, feasts, heaps of shiny gifts, for my kids
Getting a career in a prestigious company doing office work for good money
Trying to hard for too long to keep my first marriage to the father of my kids intact
Buying a big, beautiful house with him at one point
Educating myself
Expressions of my taste
...so much of it is to plead my case, to my family, to the world..."Look. I'm not trash. I'm not. I am successful adult." Of course, in my case there are still some unusual things that are part of who I am and what I'm about, that others would shame me for and for some reason I don't much care. Maybe because my greatest misery came out of internalizing judgment about that specific area, and I've felt so much happier since I let that go.
But anyways, I just think that for a lot of people, they want to matter and to feel that they are deserving of some kind of love or approval from other human beings. Nothing hurts so much as feeling rejected emotionally by your society, in whatever form that takes. It bites at one of our deepest needs, it has the power to twist and destroy a person.
And don't advertisers sure know it.
This is one of the more insightful posts I've read lately. "No way to be ok anymore" indeed ... it's all your fault, somehow!
I have found as I've gotten older that I give less and less of a fig because pleasing even just the most important people in my life most of the time ends up being a fool's errand -- much less random Internet people, colleagues, clients, extended family, neighbors, etc.
My previous/late wife was a farm girl, socialized to make large meals for hungry men who showed their appreciation by shoveling it in with gusto. She complained that I eat too little, and too slowly. My current wife was raised in an upper class home with an emphasis on specific table manners, and she's equally convinced I eat too much, and too fast. They can't both be "right", can they? Of course not. But I've dutifully reinvented myself yet again to keep the peace and prevent familiarity breeding contempt. You can't really avoid a certain amount of that, because "unconditional" love is just another fantasy ultimately. But I'm confining such accommodations these days to immediate family; the rest can go pound sand. That also keeps the list of things I must remember to always / never do, somewhat manageable!
So yeah I agree that getting the validation and approval you might wish for, and figuring out the sometimes incoherently expressed needs of others in that department, is tough, and nowhere near the organically simple task I once imagined it to be. My childhood was pretty loving and accepting and affirming, so my experience was more one of surprise when I found out how much more exacting virtually everyone but my parents seemed to be ... especially for someone who was once predisposed to be fairly polite / conformist / accommodating, relationships have been, shall we say, a journey.
This is one of the more insightful posts I've read lately. "No way to be ok anymore" indeed ... it's all your fault, somehow!
I have found as I've gotten older that I give less and less of a fig because pleasing even just the most important people in my life most of the time ends up being a fool's errand -- much less random Internet people, colleagues, clients, extended family, neighbors, etc.
My previous/late wife was a farm girl, socialized to make large meals for hungry men who showed their appreciation by shoveling it in with gusto. She complained that I eat too little, and too slowly. My current wife was raised in an upper class home with an emphasis on specific table manners, and she's equally convinced I eat too much, and too fast. They can't both be "right", can they? Of course not. But I've dutifully reinvented myself yet again to keep the peace and prevent familiarity breeding contempt. You can't really avoid a certain amount of that, because "unconditional" love is just another fantasy ultimately. But I'm confining such accommodations these days to immediate family; the rest can go pound sand. That also keeps the list of things I must remember to always / never do, somewhat manageable!
So yeah I agree that getting the validation and approval you might wish for, and figuring out the sometimes incoherently expressed needs of others in that department, is tough, and nowhere near the organically simple task I once imagined it to be. My childhood was pretty loving and accepting and affirming, so my experience was more one of surprise when I found out how much more exacting virtually everyone but my parents seemed to be ... especially for someone who was once predisposed to be fairly polite / conformist / accommodating, relationships have been, shall we say, a journey.
I thought about this a little bit more yesterday and it occurred to me to step back and look at all of this on a spectrum of sorts.
Note that I mentioned "cowboy individualism." America has had a funny way of trying to tell us what the word, "freedom" means. I've shaken my head at times over how some folks use that word to mean, "My freedom to be a jerk to anybody who isn't sufficiently like me so that my community will be homogeneous and non-threatening to me personally." The "freedom" to try and take things back to what...the 50's? They use the word a whole lot but they really mean, a finite resource that they control, and get to say who has it and who doesn't.
I'm saying that some of the nastiest bullies I've ever known throw that word around to describe what they see as their right to behave cruelly to others.
But that's not what freedom means, to me. To me, freedom means that unless you are harming someone else, you get the ability to make choices. As many options as possible. The more options you have for your life in all regards, the more FREEDOM you actually have ultimately.
And as I told my son as he was struggling to transition into early adulthood, freedom sounds like a glorious thing but it comes with obligations and responsibilities. The choices you make will affect your own future and they will affect other people. He wanted to be able to have all the fun with none of the work, and that's just not how life operates. In order to enjoy freedom...you have to handle it responsibly. Or you'll lose it. It is the great balancing act we all have to learn, between doing responsible things we'd rather not have to do...and enjoying our lives. We don't want to tip it all the way in one direction or another. Without balance, there are bad outcomes.
And we see a lot of examples in this forum overall, of people who are either not getting what they want in life or else their lives are alright but they deeply suspect that "society" outside their front door is going to hell in a handbasket....and their conclusion appears to be that SOME people just have way too much freedom. And that the best solution would be to get rid of that, at least for those categories of individuals that they see as not knowing best what to do with it.
That's...interesting. And a bit disappointing to me, honestly, to hear what I presume to be largely Americans saying such things. Even if it comes from a place of vaguely good intentions (~those people~ would be better off letting society tell them what to do for their own good, whoever ~those people~ are)... To bring it back in to my own example I have thought at times, would it not be so much easier to accept my 20 year old son back into my home and just take care of him as a dependent since he's struggling to be a functional adult? Well, but he wants to be able to try drugs and find girls to have sex with and he was doing things I did not appreciate in my house just before he moved out. So what, I either deprive him of the freedom to make adult choices, or let him struggle and deal with the consequences of them, as hard as it is to see? But we cannot all view our neighbors and fellow Americans as foolish children. That is disrespectful to say the least. And unless we are willing to take on the burden of their welfare, those of us who are actually doing alright, then perhaps we need to shut up about taking away their freedom to figure it out on their own.
The big difference being that my kid, aside from being...a kid...also has some mental health struggles. So I have to question how capable he even is of getting to where he needs to be.
I completely oppose the notion that entire segments of American society are in any way deficient in their ability to reason and prosper, by any mechanism of their own nature. Or that there should be any question of depriving them of their freedom for their own good. I reject the entire idea that suppression of free will brings greater happiness and satisfaction, except for the relatively few people who want to do the suppressing.
With more freedom... For every choice we make we may have the idea that someone is waiting to judge us for it. With a hundred choices to make before breakfast, what are the odds that every single one will be "right"...and what yardstick are we even using for that? And for many of us, it's not even just external shame, it's internalized shame. It's the voices of our parents in our heads. Which somehow persist far beyond the point where we learned and understood that our parents were just people, and probably quite flawed ones. We still carry their voices around, though. And those of others that we heard during our formative years.
But there's another notion that must be considered. This thread and many discussions like it posit that people in the "good ol' days" (whenever that was) were happier despite having so much less. Says who? Some would also say that modern society is over-medicated but 150 years ago I think they were still putting cocaine in soft drinks and middle class white women were doped up on all kinds of uppers and downers and whatnot. And the real shift is probably not in whether people were actually happy or unhappy, mentally well or unwell...it's just in whether we as a society are choosing to be honest about such things or not.
I can tell you one thing, though. As a woman, there is no historical period I know of that I would prefer to have been a part of. I never once have thought that I was born in the wrong time. And for all that my life hasn't always been perfect, not one time have I ever thought that it would have been better if only I'd had less freedom. Sure, I wish I'd made different choices here and there along the way...but I never wish that someone else had made them for me, or that I had fewer options than I have. If anything, my worst ones were when I LET someone make a choice for me and I shouldn't have done so, and when I did what "society" (or what I imagine it to be) would point to as the "right" thing.
Well, I know this - happiness doesn't come from looking "over there" judging others, and making attempts to alter their behavior so I can be more comfortable.
I need to keep my internal locus of control or I'll always be tossed and turned by what goes on outside of my control.
Oh look what you posted while I was keyboarding, Sonic!
LOL way too much!
Honestly I think that most of us know better. We cannot honestly sit here like, "hey, the price on flat screen TVs has come down, WHY ISN'T EVERYONE HAPPY??? We live like kings!" Sheesh. Did anyone REALLY think that having lots of stuff was the key to happiness? (Well, obviously yes, but the 1980s were a while ago now. You'd think we'd have learned a thing or two...?)
Who hasn't heard of the experiment where the lab rats would only be drug addicts if they lived in isolation, and those who had a great environment full of enrichment and companionship, were perfectly able to avoid the drugged water bottle!?
So on the one hand I agree that having a strong internal locus of control is important...I think it is also completely reasonable to acknowledge that no one of us is an island, either. Anyone who is experiencing more rejection or cruelty than they are human kindness, has cause to be unhappy. That is an unhappy way for a social animal to live. The question is...what to do about it? I don't think that depriving others of their freedoms is the answer, but that is the nature of what some have suggested as a solution.
Who's to say people 150 years ago weren't even more depressed?
Poor people stress about making ends meet in today's society. No one just gives them a cell phone or microwave, so saying they should be thankful they have them is from a middle-class or higher perspective, by people who can easily afford them. Low income people have to allocate scarce resources for those things. Yes, those make life easier, but they also are stressors. A lot of people don't have enough cash saved to replace the technology they rely on. Often they run into trouble with credit cards just trying to stay ahead. And then they get judged by people who have never been in their shoes.
Really, the only thing I really value in today's world is modern medicine.
Studies I have read show that people’s perception of their affluence is derived from comparison with those around them, not absolute affluence. So life in the past is not relevant and perhaps those who are poorest are not well travelled and have not been to very poor countries to make comparisons.
Clinical depression has a genetic influence and is nothing new. It may be diagnosed more frequently these days.
But I do think that stress is caused by too much choice.
A trivial example; if you go out to breakfast in Sydney, you may be asked what type of bread you prefer for your toast. There will be usually only six or eight items on the menu. I realise that Americans may find that lacking but if you ask for something specific they will try to accomodate you.
When in the US, we would sometimes find it tiring and stressful ordering breakfast, do you want this or that or this or that. I remember one morning thinking just bring me the ***food. Then of course we would have to stress over the correct level of tips.
When your life path was more or less laid out and your choices few, things were calmer in a lot of ways. I grew up with television having three stations, which shut at about 11 o’clock. But they provided great shared experiences. These days people seem to always be whinging that there is nothing to watch from the unlimited selections provided on the tv that I often struggle to use.
North Koreans think South Koreans and Americans are more stressed than N Koreans because they feel they need to 'squeeze in the perfect life before they die and anything less is misery'.
Well ... not in those words. Working on this myself.
And I think especially in America, if your life didn't turn out the way you perhaps idealized, there's no shortage of people around to tell you its because you're lazy or too dumb, but mostly too lazy (in other words, it's your fault, which can be a lot of personal burden). Ahem ... CD Forum W/E, Relationships, Retirement, Real Estate, etc.
In N Korea, you're more likely to accept the circumstances, and probably 10 years ago in the US as well.
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