I've heard more and more people talking along the lines of people feeling mentally not all there. Part of this might be the natural course of aging and being di

I've heard more and more people talking along the lines of people feeling mentally not all there. Part of this might be the natural course of aging and being distracted by more life responsibilities that come with age. I know a lot of people are leaning heavily into the idea of long-Covid as an explanation(which I think is real, but quite likely overblown, but this isn't a Covid thread so I'm not going to go into that further) My personal thinking is that there's a lot of social malaise and hopelessness that's affecting people mentally right now for these and possibly other reasons that's contributing to this mental fog. People are checked out right now. > Whether you're very scared of Covid or not the least bit scared, everybody is frustrated with still dealing with it and the measures they have to go through. > Prices of everything are going up, layoffs are happening, and there's a general sense in the air that the economic calamity that's possible is just getting started and there's nothing you can do about the coming bad times. > For lots of complex reasons, one of the biggest traditional sources of joy (people creating families) has been plummeting and possibly getting worse in this time period. > Everybody, regardless of political idealogy, has some big topic to feel hopeless about. Some people think the world is ending due to climate change, some people think the world is ending due to Putin, some people think the world is ending due to economic migration, etc. This is subjective, but there's a limited real aspirational message of hope for the future that most could agree with and see unambiguous positivity from.