Is modern era comfortable, but empty?

[Angrboda]

People today have more psychological disorders because they have doctors for mental help. In the past you just got yelled at by others to shut up and suffer - or today in less developed countries, where they get less or no mental help, undiagnosed lunatics are walking around, teaching in schools, being cops, politicians, etc.

That cannot possibly account for the intense rise in mental health issues.

How do you know this?

[Ahriman]

Lately I have been thinking about the kind of lives that most people lead nowadays, and can’t help but thinking that we are living in such a way that is fundamentally incompatible with our nature.

Nowadays most of our necessities are satisfied, and there is a lot of entertainment available, nowadays pretty much 24/7 thanks to our phones. Work is another factor that comes into play, since we spend most of our day, and perhaps life, working usually meaningless jobs.
Add to that an education that only exists to brainwash us, and teach us a lot of meaningless things.

I think this environment has made us forget what is of most importance in life, and stops us from exploring ourselves, and the world around us. There is more to life than this.

Now I am not romanticizing the past. I know there was a lot of awful stuff around. But those who managed to live (and not be slaves), many lived very fulfilling and adventurous lives, achieved great things. And I think that living through hardships leads to a more fulfilling life and wisdom than scrolling through Tik Tok or Instagram.

Many examples can be mentioned. Writers such as Dante Alighieri, Miguel de Cervantes, scientists such as Galileo, artists such as Da Vinci, philosophers such as Spinoza, and the list goes.

Nowadays too many institutions control how we live, the state and companies together dictate how we live, how we socialize, how we think, where we work, where we live, etc.

Yes modern medicine and anestesia is nice. But there must be more to life than the avoidance of pain (which in some cases is still not possible nowadays).

Indeed there was more to life back then.   They had grinding poverty, overarching iniquity, numbing ignorance, General illiteracy, and early grave to enrich most of their lives,   These have all been sadly lost in the modern world and we now survive for no purpose without them.

Don't be a smart ass, life was much better back then.

[Fake Messiah]

Don't be a smart ass, life was much better back then.

Oh, come on, Ahriman, back then you would have been abandoned on a dungheap as a baby.

[Anomalocaris]

Indeed there was more to life back then.   They had grinding poverty, overarching iniquity, numbing ignorance, General illiteracy, and early grave to enrich most of their lives,   These have all been sadly lost in the modern world and we now survive for no purpose without them.

Don't be a smart ass, life was much better back then.

there are places now where life is just like it was back then.   you should move to those places and never come back.

[Aegon]

That cannot possibly account for the intense rise in mental health issues.

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.

[Fake Messiah]

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.

Not only do you have a kidney transplant but you didn't watch most of your siblings die in childhood and you didn't have to bury most of your kids as your wife was constantly pregnat and doing backbreaking jobs all day long. Again, the only reason why people in the past may seem happier is because nobody asked them how they feel because no one cared.

Take for instance the life of 17th century Massachusetts judge, Samuel Sewall, which he recorded in his diary. Sewall started his diaries in 1674, a few years after he got out from Harvard.

Dead children form a grim garland around all the volumes of his diary. He fathers sons and daughters regularly, and as often as not they die in early childhood. The reader becomes accustomed to lyings-in and funerals coming within a few pages of each other.

On Monday, December 7, 1685: "About One in the Night my Wife is brought to Bed of a Son, of which Mother Hull brings me the first News: Mrs. Weeden Midwife." This was Henry, who would live for just fifteen days. Sewall describes his funeral on Christmas Eve, carefully listing the mourners and ceremonies.

The drama of Henry's birth and death is repeated over and over. A year later the baby is named Stephen; he survives for six months. Sewall's continual fatherings and buryings are eventually benumbing. There are too many to take in. It is only after his wife has delivered her fourteenth child, in January 1702, that Sewall ends an entry of thanksgiving with the words: "And it may be my dear wife may now leave off bearing."

The terrors of birth rival the terrors of the plague, measles and smallpox. One day, Sewall tells his eleven-year-old son Samuel that he should be ready to die from the smallpox, as nine-year-old Richard Dumer just has. Sam eats an apple as he listens, seeming "not much to mind" — until he says the Lord's Prayer his father prescribes and bursts into terrifying cries.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Indeed there was more to life back then.   They had grinding poverty, overarching iniquity, numbing ignorance, General illiteracy, and early grave to enrich most of their lives,   These have all been sadly lost in the modern world and we now survive for no purpose without them.

Don't be a smart ass, life was much better back then.

Really name one thing that was better back then....

[Anomalocaris]

Don't be a smart ass, life was much better back then.

Really name one thing that was better back then....

An Ahriman born back then would likely have died in his infancy,

[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.

[Mister Agenda]

Before antipsychotic drugs, the fate of most schizophrenics was to wind up barking mad in an asylum. Those drugs not only alleviate the symptoms of schizophrenia, they slow down or even stop the progression of the disease.