Is modern era comfortable, but empty?

[arewethereyet]

How do you know this?

Nearly one-fifth of all American adults have some form of anxiety disorder. Depression is the leading cause of disability for adults. As of 2020, 5.6 million kids (9.2%) had been diagnosed with anxiety problems and 2.4 million (4.0%) had been diagnosed with depression. The past decade has seen a disturbing increase in suicide attempts among American youths with a particularly startling increase in pre-teen children, ages 10 to 12, attempting to take their own lives (from 1,058 in 2010 to 5,606 in 2020 — a fivefold increase).

My point, which I already made earlier in the thread, is that the way our society works now, on a fundamental level, is responsible at least in part for the mass increase of depression and anxiety diagnoses for adults and children. This isn't just doctors catching things they wouldn't have caught before, this is a significant problem that we will deal with for generations to come. I think that the way we've structured modern society is relentlessly fucking with our dopamine levels, and being surrounded by instant gratification -  social media, internet porn, junk food with high sugar content, etc etc. - is causing us more anguish than joy. 

And as someone with ADHD, I have no doubt that many members of Gen Alpha will suffer from ADHD symptoms as a result for being raised on phones and tablets from their infancy years - their executive function will be worthless, just like mine. There's already been a 10% increase in ADHD diagnoses among children since 1997, and the demand for ADHD meds has become so great that it just recently created a supply chain problem. That 10% will grow, I'm sure of it. Are we to think that all of these children truly have ADHD? Or has the instant gratification society around them impressed upon their developing brains to the extent that they are are practically incapable of delayed gratification exercises?

And I haven't even gotten into other mental health disorders like schizophrenia, and the growing evidence of the connection between prevalence of schizophrenia and air pollution in a geographic area... there is so much about modern society that is actively contributing to our mental health in a profoundly negative way. This is a serious question we all need to ponder.

To tie it back to the OP, yeah, sure, modern society is overall better. I have a kidney transplant, that was barely possible when some members of this very forum were born. So that's great. But I think the OP absolutely has a point that our comfortable society brings with it a significant amount of baggage we all need to sift through in the coming century.

You seem to skip over the simplicity of the fact that things that were once accepted and expected now have a name (diagnosis) within the medical/psycological fields.  When I was younger, someone with ADHD was most likely labeled a brat who needed an ass beating.  There were people with ADHD long before the technology we have today.  Anxiety and depression are not new....they used to bring the labels of weird, loner, etc.  

Medicine has helped make some of these things easier to live with though don't provide a cure.

A relative of my husband had a child that was caught up in a custody dispute...as a very young child he was in therapy and one parent wanted him to be medicated and the other did not.  He was with us one day and I took him to the restroom.  As we stood in line I asked how he was doing.  He said that he had to take medicine because his mother had a hard time dealing with him.  He was six. At that time, close to the 1997 year you mentioned, my kids were surrounded by kids who suddenly 'needed' ADHD meds.  Was that the need of these kids or the need of the parents or the latest sales pitch for the pharmaceutical industry?


I don't doubt that some people have ADHD and need treatment but how many prescriptions are written isn't the best indicator of actual need.