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Depression knows no era. It is a medical diagnosis.
If some are ' sullen, /morose, it's temporary and can be circumstantial. Depression isn't a snap out of it matter.
Economic hardships are stressful. Are depressing even.
Sorry to stand in disagreement. Money or economic security DID bring happiness. Yes the true genuine happiness that comes from resting assured each day , heat was paid, food aplenty, home paid. . Health checked and attended to.
I'll take being financially well off over poverty in a heart beat!
Know how to squeeze a quarter out of two nickels! Doesn't mean it's enjoyable to have to constantly live in survival mode.
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.
I disagree with the bold. No idea what age group you are part of or if you spent any of the last 10 years outside of the US (since you seem familiar with opinions in some other countries) but I can tell you that at no point in my lifetime, or my Mom's, or Dad's, or that of my Grandparents (any of them) was life in America so very simple where we all just accepted our lot and happily got on with things.
Ask either of my Grandfathers, or THEIR fathers, who were alcoholics. What were they self medicating for if everything was so happy and simple?
Why did they beat their wives and children, if life was so good? Whose voices were in their heads, if people did not feel judged for failing to achieve something that they felt they were supposed to?
The difference is of course, now, the wives would have the freedom, the option, and the choice, to take the kids and leave this abuse, that they didn't really have back then. At least someone might have been happy.
And that's a big part of my frustration with this thread. I'll put it in plain terms. Women and people of color were not happier back when we had less "choices and options." We don't stress and fret that a white man is not standing there benevolently making our decisions for us, thanks.
(Oh and for the record, ordering breakfast even if there are a dozen kinds of toast is not going to make me sweat...sheesh, really?)
And whether anybody wants to recognize it or not, a lot of this "gosh darn weren't thing easier back when we all knew our places and things weren't so complicated" talk... is code for that. No, it was not a simpler and better world.
And hell, I don't even think that the white men in my family tree were happy either, raging alcoholics usually aren't.
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.
Perhaps the balance between Sonic Spork's points about choices / freedom and your counterpoint is whether we voluntarily choose to limit our options or limitations are imposed on us.
For the most part, no one is obligated to use every choice presented, nor are they forbidden to simplify their lives voluntarily.
It's also true that if you don't know what's possible, it's hard to feel deprived. I feel very deprived if my Internet service goes down, but 25 years ago I didn't even have the concept of an Internet to concern myself with.
To your point about TV channel selections, I also grew up with 3 to 6 channels on tap, and I think the funniest thing I heard in that regard was in a movie about a kid from the 1970s who is transported to the 2000s. He looks in wonder at the modern TV and says, "200 channels, and nothing's on!"
I think about this too. It reminds me of the saying that you can't appreciate the good unless you have some "bad" to compare.
I see a few things missing in our culture - gratitude, a sense of belonging and a sense of meaning in life. They all contribute to satisfaction. Who teaches their children how to acquire these non-tangibles?
I could go on forever about the whys and hows of this happening. But so could everyone else here.
I'll tell a present-day story, instead.
I rented a small living space in the jungle of Yucatan for ten weeks to escape and refuel in relative solitude. Next to me they were building another structure. and weren't much farther along than the base work.
Because all of Yucatan is on a foundation of dead reef it means a lot of rock and rubble must be removed in order to construct a building on top. For this, the lowest level workers were two little boys who arrived at work promptly at six am on one bicycle and sometimes stayed until six at night.
They looked to be around ten-years-old but I imagine they were older just not as well-nourished and with different body growth that was genetic.
I never saw them frown or gripe. The stronger of the two would pedal and sing a cheerful tune while the other balanced precariously, standing up on the axle of the back wheel.
They worked alongside older men among whom it was obvious manual labor was gradually taking its toll. Everything was done with shovels and wheelbarrows.
No one shirked working but there was much joking and laughter and sometimes even singing. At noon wives and mothers arrived in rundown station wagons and opened the rear to lay out meals. People ate, chatted with family, then napped for an hour on the ground and went back to work.
Once I saw the foreman tell the boys he was going to run errands and what to do while he was gone. I thought, Well, let's see how motivated they are when no one is around.
In the early afternoon in the jungle there was no breeze, humidity was high and it was very warm. Yet those two little boys kept right on working at the same pace, loading and hauling rocks, all the while he was gone.
This went on seven days a week the whole time I was there. They didn't miss a day.
I imagined they were contributing to the income of older people who depended upon them for sustenance. Missing an education and therefor continuing what must have seemed like generations of meaningless hand-to-mouth existence. Not to mention, if they knew their family's history, they could have been complaining about what a paradise they could have had if it weren't for the Spanish.
I don't have adequate words to describe the emotions and thoughts I had while I pondered the lives of these two little boys. But I do remember thinking that every teenager in America should have had the opportunity to sit in my seat for an afternoon.
But my observation doesn't apply only to individuals. There seems to be in the indigenous Mexican culture a resilience and a sense of greater purpose and values that we have lost in many "more fortunate" cultures.
Great story!
You may be interested in reading the book "The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost." by Jean Liedloff. The author shares her experience of living in the South American Jungle with Stone Age Indians. It is written from a sociological point of view.
I disagree with the bold. No idea what age group you are part of or if you spent any of the last 10 years outside of the US (since you seem familiar with opinions in some other countries) but I can tell you that at no point in my lifetime, or my Mom's, or Dad's, or that of my Grandparents (any of them) was life in America so very simple where we all just accepted our lot and happily got on with things.
Ask either of my Grandfathers, or THEIR fathers, who were alcoholics. What were they self medicating for if everything was so happy and simple?
Why did they beat their wives and children, if life was so good? Whose voices were in their heads, if people did not feel judged for failing to achieve something that they felt they were supposed to?
The difference is of course, now, the wives would have the freedom, the option, and the choice, to take the kids and leave this abuse, that they didn't really have back then. At least someone might have been happy.
And that's a big part of my frustration with this thread. I'll put it in plain terms. Women and people of color were not happier back when we had less "choices and options." We don't stress and fret that a white man is not standing there benevolently making our decisions for us, thanks.
(Oh and for the record, ordering breakfast even if there are a dozen kinds of toast is not going to make me sweat...sheesh, really?)
And whether anybody wants to recognize it or not, a lot of this "gosh darn weren't thing easier back when we all knew our places and things weren't so complicated" talk... is code for that. No, it was not a simpler and better world.
And hell, I don't even think that the white men in my family tree were happy either, raging alcoholics usually aren't.
Whoops, that was meant to be 150 years.
I also didn't say all that.
I just said what others are saying. People invent first world problems, and places like CD Forum, help them do it more than anything.
I just said what others are saying. People invent first world problems, and places like CD Forum, help them do it more than anything.
Also not white.
This whole thing could also be connected to another bit of something I've been pondering.
I have questioned, which arises first...our thoughts, or our feelings? And which one do we have more control over? I believe that feelings are the mind's way of a shortcut to try and alert us to something somehow. That they arise due to anything from a chemical imbalance in the body or mind, to an external happenstance like something that frightens us, or a happy or sad piece of news. And that we have little control over them. Our thoughts are often something like a scaffolding that we try to build around our nebulous emotions to give them shape and substance and justification.
I believe that I have more control over my thoughts, than I do my feelings. The feelings happen, it can take a great deal of thought to process my way through them at times. And all of that is also quite separate from my words and my actions, which are even more of a choice and even more within my power to control.
I have known people who have what could be termed "anger issues" who claim to have little or no control over their words and actions. I have known many people (hello, Relationships subforum!) who claim to choose their actions carefully in an effort to control their emotions.
So we feel things...we feel depressed for instance...and we do what we can to make sense of it all. Which is what we get up to all over the internet, certainly. My Grandmother might have been depressed because her husband drank too much and beat her, and there was no way out of her situation. I might be depressed because I feel that my life somehow is lacking in purpose. But maybe in the core of it for both of us could have been just a reaching out for the kindness and love of others, which could have perhaps made a difference. Or both of us might get depressed because our brain chemicals are out of whack, and at least now there are pills that may help some people with that.
It is not more or less justified for any person at any time to feel whatever they feel. For whatever the reasons that they feel it. I can think of plenty of perfectly rational cause for people in today's day and age to feel depressed. I'm not sure that we are more depressed than people in general were at any point in history. And beneath a facade of people getting on with their lives may be a whole range of emotions of which the stranger is unaware... Maybe 150 years ago no one talked as much about how they felt. They just went home and tried to cope and survive it.
I just felt a need to push back on the notion that having too many choices, options or freedoms was the "problem" with people in today's society (at least America.) I do hear it as a racist dogwhistle on rare occasion, but more often I hear it from men who just simply wish that women had no choice but be what a man wants, or suffer serious social penalty for it. I wasn't accusing you of that specifically, I was arguing with the idea itself and connotations I've seen attached to it before.
Everything in this country is technically a "first world problem". It's all relative.
As Jay-Z one put it in the song, Kingdom Come:
Indeed. While there's a certain point to the concept of "first world problem", it's technically a subset of the Fallacy of Relative Deprivation. You can't legitimately minimize a problem just by pointing out worse problems -- or minimize benefits by pointing out greater benefits.
We're all on a hierarchy of needs. Yes it's a privilege that I've never known true hunger or poverty or want, such that it frees me up to feel like my Internet is too slow or my TV service costs too much ... but that doesn't mean that it's illegitimate or whiny for me to be upset at losing my job, either.
Put another way, people mourn losses, not necessarily the exact things they lose, and they get to decide what the value of the loss is. If all they have to lose is shady spot out of the sun, that's not somehow more legitimate to experience pain over than to have your $500K home burn down with all your priceless keepsakes in it.
I often hear that people today live in luxury compared to people 150, 200, 400 years ago, etc — but why is it so hard to appreciate this luxury without making relative comparisons to only people around us today?
Even the bottom 20% in the US have luxuries that people 200 years ago couldn’t fathom…television, radio, cell phones, internet, cars, modern medicine, fast food, etc, etc.
Why is it so hard to really appreciate modern times knowing how so many people lived for thousands of years?
I find myself getting fixated on little things I don’t have compared to someone else yet compared to billions of people that came before me I have lived like a king from birth.
I hear someone say this every now and then. It's called progress.
People 400 years ago were far better off than those 1,000 years ago, and so on and so forth.
We don't compare our lifestyle as a single thing, compared to lifestyles 200 years ago. We compare our lifestyle against the lives of others of our era, and usually in our general location. We do this when judging how we've succeeded, prospered (or not), met our goals, etc. We don't say, well I don't have a job, I don't have a vehicle, I don't have health insurance...but I am able to use the modern convenience of a toilet sometimes, so things are great, since 200 years ago there were no modern sewer systems and toilets for the public.
However, many people, myself included, do think about human progress, how far we've come. Especially as a woman, I think about how different my life would've been if I'd been born 100 or 200 years ago. I think about the invention of the automobile, electricity, and other things. I also think about how progress hasn't gotten far in other countries today, where if I lived there, I'd be living like a woman who was born in America 300 or more years ago. I also think about how different my life would be if I'd been born last year, since there are so many more opportunities for women. I also wonder about the climate in future earth, what effect that will have. I've already lived through the devastation of some of those effects.
Maybe you're giving people short shrift in thinking that they're not aware how good we have it over people who lived long ago. But we as a people have progressed since then, so we judge our lifestyles and station in life against where humans are now, not then, particularly in our country.
I think there's a time and place in everyone's life where they may ponder and question the past, well, and the present. At some point if it plagues a person enough to see a racist, a misogynist, a child abuser around every corner or haunting from the past it may be time to lay the struggle with what was or what is to rest for the sake of one's precarious contentedness.
It's good people and bright people who do this to themselves but at what cost and, for heaven's sake, what gain? Sometimes you have to ask yourself, How would I like to feel? and go there. Unless you prefer martyring for a cause. Some people do and they have that right. I consider it a choice.
It's not a sin to choose to be content even though the world is messed up. All the more reason to learn how to do it.
I remember dealing with this during times of intent study of issues and new awareness. But do we really have to bear any of the weight of wrongs as though our knowledge requires some kind of penance? How does that make us better or healthier?
I just really even resist justifying anyone spending long feeling dissatisfied as long as they have the mental capacity and sufficient sustenance to feel ok. Not because I've never been where they are before but because I have and I know you can be better to yourself and others than to settle for a life of dissatisfaction for the way things are.
But someone has to teach that. People who are always affirmed in their misery seldom learn it. There's a narrow window for affirmation and then it's time to do something about it or it becomes a lifestyle.
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