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Life is so insane right now that mental illness is the only rational response.

by gtowey 11mo ago

InsideOutSanta 11mo ago
Yeah, I think it's very easy to say that "life being stressful is not an illness." In reality, life is often stressful in ways that can very much lead to mental illness, particularly in a society that drastically values corporate success over human well-being.
- lostmsu 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Esophagus4 11mo ago
    This seems like a bad faith comment. If you truly wanted data, you could so easily Google (as I did), and find the below sources that back up the comment you're responding to. There are myriad papers and sources. But I think your comment doesn't seek insight so much as it seeks to discredit and dismiss... in, frankly, a pretty lazy attempt. If you're going to be dismissive, put some effort in, man! ;) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10710064/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10710064/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976254/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976254/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5137920/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5137920/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/02/11/chronic-stress-predisposes-brain-to-mental-illness/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/02/11/chronic-stress-predispo...
    - lostmsu 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Esophagus4 11mo ago
        I only regret that I have but one downvote to give.
        Craighead 11mo ago
        [dead]
alchemist1e9 11mo ago
Global poverty at 100-year lows, US murder rate half the 90s, you’re more likely to die from obesity than starvation or violence. Objectively the cushiest moment in human history. Yet “mental illness is the only rational response.” Happiness = Reality − Expectations Most of material Reality is fine. The part of Reality that’s broken is spiritual/emotional. The expectations causing unhappiness aren’t for more money or stuff, they’re subconscious, millions of years deep, baked into the species of tribe, offspring, transcendence, cosmic order. Leftism spent half a century screaming that those instincts are bigotry, that family is oppression, that religion is a mental illness, that wanting roots or rituals or a legacy is fascism. You can’t propagandize the human soul out of its own operating system. The subconscious still demands what it demanded in 200,000 BC. We just demolished every institution that used to answer the call and replaced them with therapy, porn, and corporate pride slogans. That’s the real insanity. Not climate change or late-stage capitalism. The soul shows up for duty and the building’s condemned.
- heddelt 11mo ago
  [flagged]
- baubino 11mo ago
  > Global poverty at 100-year lows, US murder rate half the 90s, you’re more likely to die from obesity than starvation or violence. Objectively the cushiest moment in human history. Averages are just that - averages. They say nothing about any given individual’s experience. And probabilities aren’t assurances of a particular outcome. Just because the average person is more likely to face obesity than starvation doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions of people facing starvation in the world. Your argument is based on an incorrect use of statistics.
  - alchemist1e9 11mo ago
    We can use deciles and the story is the same. I was just keeping it simple and my use of statistics for my point is fine. The bottom decile in all western countries has a objectively better material conditions yet I don’t dispute they may feel less “Happiness” which the formula explains and if you drill into the components of Reality which are causing the unhappiness and it’s absolutely non-material as I explained.
chneu 11mo ago
Hard disagree. I think we're convinced life is way harder than it is. Life is fucking easy. One push ordering for almost anything. Cushy houses with hvac. We make life hard by buying into the narrative that it's hard and we're all helpless. This cheats us out of our development and ability to handle real conflict.
- gtowey 11mo ago
  Have you asked your DoorDash or Uber driver how they feel about their future? How about the Amazon warehouse workers and UPS drivers who deliver a mountain of cheap imported goods to your door. Or maybe ask the Walmart cashier if thier current and future projects in life give them a warm fuzzy feeling. This easy life you describe requires mountains of people to support it, who themselves are mostly being crushed by it.
  - alchemist1e9 11mo ago
    I haven’t come across those profiles of people talking about being miserable but somehow I have heard many entitled upper middle class white women claiming those people are miserable. Actually the blue collar males I know are mostly happy people! And the delivery workers I interact with often smile quiet a bit.
    - array_key_first 11mo ago
      I mean, you can be happy and then not be able to retire. Also a lot of low-paying jobs are customer service in some way. Smiling is sort of a prerequisite for getting paid.
  - wenc 11mo ago
    Not Doordash, but I often ask my Lyft drivers. Like for anything in life, it depends on the market you're in, and where you are situated on the acumen distribution (low acumen drivers don't make a lot, while high acumen ones do). Narrative thinking likes cherry picking the worst cases and then representing those stories as normal. But reality is always a bit more complicated. Many Lyft drivers are immigrants, either between jobs, or are doing it full time. I don't directly ask them how much they make, but I tell them in my homeland of Canada, if you're on welfare and disability, you make CAD$x and it's good enough money for a single person. Most Lyft drivers are like: "that's way, way less than what I make doing this." (some tell me they make US$3-4k/month, working 6 day weeks. This might sound like too little, but realize that not all COL is the same, and for an immigrant, this is a great gig with optionality -- you can always turn off the app). Then you might say, oh, they're blind to the depreciation hit their cars are taking. But good, high acumen, Lyft drivers often drive second-hand Priuses which depreciate slowly and have great mileage, and they track expenses like a hawk. If you go to the Lyft subreddit, good drivers know all the tricks -- optimize for high yield windows, avoid dead miles, avoid blind quests, and the cap hours deliberately. It's the ones with less acumen that drive a new car with low MPG on financing, and don't optimize. So don't generalize and catastrophize (catastrophizing amplifies depression -- in cognitive behavioral therapy, they teach you to guard against that). Just stop it. Everything in life is a distribution. I'm not saying driving a Lyft is aspirational, but for some immigrants who are doing it to support their family, it's a less-bad option than many others. I even had a few drivers pushing me to get married (I'm single) because they said, once they get home from a day of driving, they get to go back to family. "It's less lonely," they tell me. In some ways they're happier than I am, even though I make nominally more than them.
mvdtnz 11mo ago
We live in perhaps the most peaceful and prosperous moment in all of human history. You most likely live in one of the top 5 wealthiest nations in the world (probably the top one).
- throwaway-11-1 11mo ago
  I keep hearing this from people who love charts but in the US I see the rate of homelessness rapidly increasing, more people ending up in medical debt, and groups of poorly trained militarized thugs storming neighborhoods to disappear people without trial. So yeah, Bezos and Zuckerberg are putting up great numbers but it's kind of crazy to paint prosperity and peace with such a large brush. It my travels it seems that a lot of less wealthy nations have a better quality of life despite the numbers
  - mvdtnz 11mo ago
    The poverty rate in USA is consistently in decline for several decades. Also, when I say "we" I don't mean America. I mean all of us.
    - tyami94 11mo ago
      That's because the data is inherently flawed. The poverty line this year is $15,650 for an individual. That's not poverty, that's destitution. From personal experience, living in WV, you cannot survive on that amount of money without either sleeping under a bridge/in a car or dumpster-diving/shoplifting all of your meals. Folks say just get on food stamps or medicaid, but it's not that simple. At that level of destitution you may not have a phone, an address, basic ID/documentation, or even a means of getting to the office to apply. Means-testing makes the process so drawn-out and convoluted, that many folks (including myself) don't even bother, because there are more immediate things to worry about (once again speaking from experience). After years of destitution, I finally managed to make a bit more than twice the FPL and I was still struggling (but significantly better off). Just recently I lost that job for reasons outside my control and after my unemployment runs out I'm back where I started. Everyone I know has a similar story. Any data that says that poverty is decreasing in the US is detached from reality.

Life is so insane right now that mental illness is the only rational response.

by gtowey 11mo ago

Life is so insane right now that mental illness is the only rational response.

Yeah, I think it's very easy to say that "life being stressful is not an illness." In reality, life is often stressful in ways that can very much lead to mental illness, particularly in a society that drastically values corporate success over human well-being.

lostmsu 11mo ago
[flagged]
- Esophagus4 11mo ago
  This seems like a bad faith comment. If you truly wanted data, you could so easily Google (as I did), and find the below sources that back up the comment you're responding to. There are myriad papers and sources. But I think your comment doesn't seek insight so much as it seeks to discredit and dismiss... in, frankly, a pretty lazy attempt. If you're going to be dismissive, put some effort in, man! ;) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10710064/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10710064/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976254/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976254/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5137920/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5137920/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/02/11/chronic-stress-predisposes-brain-to-mental-illness/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/02/11/chronic-stress-predispo...
  - lostmsu 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Esophagus4 11mo ago
      I only regret that I have but one downvote to give.
      - Craighead 11mo ago
        [dead]

alchemist1e9 11mo ago

Global poverty at 100-year lows, US murder rate half the 90s, you’re more likely to die from obesity than starvation or violence. Objectively the cushiest moment in human history. Yet “mental illness is the only rational response.” Happiness = Reality − Expectations Most of material Reality is fine. The part of Reality that’s broken is spiritual/emotional. The expectations causing unhappiness aren’t for more money or stuff, they’re subconscious, millions of years deep, baked into the species of tribe, offspring, transcendence, cosmic order. Leftism spent half a century screaming that those instincts are bigotry, that family is oppression, that religion is a mental illness, that wanting roots or rituals or a legacy is fascism. You can’t propagandize the human soul out of its own operating system. The subconscious still demands what it demanded in 200,000 BC. We just demolished every institution that used to answer the call and replaced them with therapy, porn, and corporate pride slogans. That’s the real insanity. Not climate change or late-stage capitalism. The soul shows up for duty and the building’s condemned.

heddelt 11mo ago
[flagged]
baubino 11mo ago
> Global poverty at 100-year lows, US murder rate half the 90s, you’re more likely to die from obesity than starvation or violence. Objectively the cushiest moment in human history. Averages are just that - averages. They say nothing about any given individual’s experience. And probabilities aren’t assurances of a particular outcome. Just because the average person is more likely to face obesity than starvation doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions of people facing starvation in the world. Your argument is based on an incorrect use of statistics.
- alchemist1e9 11mo ago
  We can use deciles and the story is the same. I was just keeping it simple and my use of statistics for my point is fine. The bottom decile in all western countries has a objectively better material conditions yet I don’t dispute they may feel less “Happiness” which the formula explains and if you drill into the components of Reality which are causing the unhappiness and it’s absolutely non-material as I explained.

chneu 11mo ago

Hard disagree. I think we're convinced life is way harder than it is. Life is fucking easy. One push ordering for almost anything. Cushy houses with hvac. We make life hard by buying into the narrative that it's hard and we're all helpless. This cheats us out of our development and ability to handle real conflict.

gtowey 11mo ago
Have you asked your DoorDash or Uber driver how they feel about their future? How about the Amazon warehouse workers and UPS drivers who deliver a mountain of cheap imported goods to your door. Or maybe ask the Walmart cashier if thier current and future projects in life give them a warm fuzzy feeling. This easy life you describe requires mountains of people to support it, who themselves are mostly being crushed by it.
- alchemist1e9 11mo ago
  I haven’t come across those profiles of people talking about being miserable but somehow I have heard many entitled upper middle class white women claiming those people are miserable. Actually the blue collar males I know are mostly happy people! And the delivery workers I interact with often smile quiet a bit.
  - array_key_first 11mo ago
    I mean, you can be happy and then not be able to retire. Also a lot of low-paying jobs are customer service in some way. Smiling is sort of a prerequisite for getting paid.
- wenc 11mo ago
  Not Doordash, but I often ask my Lyft drivers. Like for anything in life, it depends on the market you're in, and where you are situated on the acumen distribution (low acumen drivers don't make a lot, while high acumen ones do). Narrative thinking likes cherry picking the worst cases and then representing those stories as normal. But reality is always a bit more complicated. Many Lyft drivers are immigrants, either between jobs, or are doing it full time. I don't directly ask them how much they make, but I tell them in my homeland of Canada, if you're on welfare and disability, you make CAD$x and it's good enough money for a single person. Most Lyft drivers are like: "that's way, way less than what I make doing this." (some tell me they make US$3-4k/month, working 6 day weeks. This might sound like too little, but realize that not all COL is the same, and for an immigrant, this is a great gig with optionality -- you can always turn off the app). Then you might say, oh, they're blind to the depreciation hit their cars are taking. But good, high acumen, Lyft drivers often drive second-hand Priuses which depreciate slowly and have great mileage, and they track expenses like a hawk. If you go to the Lyft subreddit, good drivers know all the tricks -- optimize for high yield windows, avoid dead miles, avoid blind quests, and the cap hours deliberately. It's the ones with less acumen that drive a new car with low MPG on financing, and don't optimize. So don't generalize and catastrophize (catastrophizing amplifies depression -- in cognitive behavioral therapy, they teach you to guard against that). Just stop it. Everything in life is a distribution. I'm not saying driving a Lyft is aspirational, but for some immigrants who are doing it to support their family, it's a less-bad option than many others. I even had a few drivers pushing me to get married (I'm single) because they said, once they get home from a day of driving, they get to go back to family. "It's less lonely," they tell me. In some ways they're happier than I am, even though I make nominally more than them.

mvdtnz 11mo ago

We live in perhaps the most peaceful and prosperous moment in all of human history. You most likely live in one of the top 5 wealthiest nations in the world (probably the top one).

throwaway-11-1 11mo ago
I keep hearing this from people who love charts but in the US I see the rate of homelessness rapidly increasing, more people ending up in medical debt, and groups of poorly trained militarized thugs storming neighborhoods to disappear people without trial. So yeah, Bezos and Zuckerberg are putting up great numbers but it's kind of crazy to paint prosperity and peace with such a large brush. It my travels it seems that a lot of less wealthy nations have a better quality of life despite the numbers
- mvdtnz 11mo ago
  The poverty rate in USA is consistently in decline for several decades. Also, when I say "we" I don't mean America. I mean all of us.
  - tyami94 11mo ago
    That's because the data is inherently flawed. The poverty line this year is $15,650 for an individual. That's not poverty, that's destitution. From personal experience, living in WV, you cannot survive on that amount of money without either sleeping under a bridge/in a car or dumpster-diving/shoplifting all of your meals. Folks say just get on food stamps or medicaid, but it's not that simple. At that level of destitution you may not have a phone, an address, basic ID/documentation, or even a means of getting to the office to apply. Means-testing makes the process so drawn-out and convoluted, that many folks (including myself) don't even bother, because there are more immediate things to worry about (once again speaking from experience). After years of destitution, I finally managed to make a bit more than twice the FPL and I was still struggling (but significantly better off). Just recently I lost that job for reasons outside my control and after my unemployment runs out I'm back where I started. Everyone I know has a similar story. Any data that says that poverty is decreasing in the US is detached from reality.