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The Great Depression
Sibyl
Nicci used to tell me she didn't want to live past 35 and that one day, I'd understand why.
Thanks H
I am the wife of a family doctor and the mother of a 32-year-old suicide victim. For those reasons and more, this subject is relevant to me and mine. You seem reluctant to call out the proliferation of the smart phone as the top of the leaderboard for causation. Is it the only variable…of course not, but social media in the palm of your hand has led to mountains of data that show it’s highly addictive and ironically, highly isolating. If I led the world, no kid would own anything other than a flip phone until they were 18, and I’d make Congress pass legislation that required age verification at the time of purchase. It sounds draconian, I know. But this sadness epidemic is (relatively) new, remarkably wide-spread, and can be traced back to the advent of the smart phone. It’s not only making kids sad….they’re also becoming unmotivated and antisocial. Adults have to step up to the plate.
I’m not reluctant to call out smartphones. I despise smartphones and the only social media I have is “X” and that only to post article links. I have no personal social media accounts whatsoever. And if I were a parent, my kids wouldn’t either.
And why the hell are they allowed in school?!
Hey, teacher here. Can’t resist an opening to talk about phones in the classroom. It’s a plague. You’re right – as far as I can tell they’re destroying childrens’ brains – but banning them is surprisingly thorny. Also fwif when I was in grad school ten years ago everyone was making fun of schools for being behind the curve in integrating tech (how will they know how to code!?!?!?!). The director of the school of education at the large, semi-prestigious university where I got my MS was out there talking about how she “wanted to see MORE phones in classrooms,” as in how can we bring them into the fold. Turns out they bring us into their fold. So like I think we are just still figuring out how to adapt to this tech as a society. It’s been fifteen years and the evil nerds are winning. It’s bigger than school. It IS our culture now.
9/11 the parents
Incredibly thoughtful and insightful piece so well written and so touching thank you!
All we can hope for in life…and I’m a lot older than you…is be relevant.
Despite the miasma since January…you are relevant…at least to me…and btw I have grandchildren so I should care…
But as my grandmother from Chernobyl said to me when I was 16 and concerned about something very existential.
Marc …the future will take care of itself…it’s tomorrow I’m worried about
As a soon to be parent this one really hit home. Thank you H! Always look forward to the monthly!
U.S. Suicide rates are twice the homicide rates.
When the Buddha set out to find true happiness he discovered the biggest obstacles to be greed, hate, and delusion.
First, I must comment on the amazing quality of your research. Every month you find a new topic and mine it better than any academic colleague I ever had in 40 years in the academy. I love these monthly essays. Thanks especially for the link to the paper on the Economics of mental health. As I read these things I find it interesting to follow the trail you leave as you find a kernel of a topic you find interesting and begin to unwind and synthesize it into a terrific essay. Then on to the next. My problem as an academic was that I became easily bored. I would find a topic or question that was really interesting, do the research, find the answer and that was it. I had found out what I wanted to know. Then it was time for the next question. Publishing drove me nuts. Idiot editors and stupid reviewers. (I am one of that tribe still. I was a journal editor for ten years. Since 1974 I have done pre-publication reviews for 40 or 50 books, along with 400 or more articles, case studies, and other stuff. I also graded about 100,000 student papers. I even took a course in how to be a proper theatrical reviewer, one of the three most important I ever took.) I only wanted to study things no one else had studied (the role of dark humor in the work place, the reason the French assign masculine pronouns to some technologies and feminine to others, that sort of thing). After awhile my wife and I moved on to mostly writing teaching case studies designed for student learning. We were very good at that and I enjoyed it.
This topic was interesting. I helped matriculate 12,500 students in my career and my my wife had another 11,000. We co-authored dozens of pieces over the years. She was also a prolific editor and reviewer as well. If we weren’t working, reading, or playing golf or bridge, we were likely asleep. Happiness, especially for my wife, was never much of an option. I won’t say she was clinically depressed, but she was never happy. She never celebrated anything, not even the birth of our only daughter. After nearly dying in childbirth, she passed the care of our newborn on to me. She never really found “happiness,” only work. When I started teaching in 1967 kids worked and played hard and learned things. Years later, especially after the tension of Viet Nam was gone and college started to get expensive, students got bored and depressed. Thinking about graduation and a long work life suddenly became a real bogie for most of my students. Slacking was so much easier. At 80 the boredom is once again on me and I have no bucket list. Suddenly, I understand my former students better. I saw a headline for an editorial in Newsweek once. It said, “Kids today don’t want the perfect job; they want the perfect life.” That is an impossible goal. Managing a career is a difficult and stressful job in and of itself.
hunger artist; nightmarish ridiculous man; would the scream paint hauntingly; some enter, all fear; darkened tent, plato cave, all forms of depression; pain; self-inflicted, or simply inclined for deep dives. embrace the nothingness; from yourself you cannot hide; find nothing, life resides.
At the end of the day, I believe that the only question that matters is “Do you feel alive to yourself?”.
Short of a chemical imbalance, I have always thought of depression as occurring as one (but not the only) of the potential outcomes resulting from the gap that occurs between “expectations” and “reality”. The bigger the gap, the bigger the potential for depression.
Other alternatives to succumbing to depression include: reset one’s “reality” to better match expectations and/or set more realistic “expectations”. Both can be very, very hard to do.
Vitamin D? https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/depression-and-vitamin-d
I won’t even get started on listing everything I think is going wrong in our country/society that incorrectly sets unrealistic expectations for children and also how inadequately we equip children to deal with reality during their lifetime. That list is very long.
I started noticing problems back in 1996, when I had my first child. As much as I was aware of these types of problems when we were raising our children, two (out of 3) of my children (now in their twenties) are currently dealing with mild depression. Life is not always easy.
On You Tube, Patrick Boyle recently had a post that goes into the global drop in fertility rates. He suggested that social media, being the only common link between rich and poor countries, is likely the common cause of that phenomenon. The ‘why’ of course remains the big question which Heisenberg alludes to as incongruity and confusion. I used to be on Facebook and Twitter, but into the 2016 election, I deleted my accounts on both and committed myself to finance where I remain well-informed, shocked and just as pissed off. I just signed up for online therapy, and looked up the company that is the provider to see a hundred 1 star reviews with no other reviews higher! I decided, I’m sad for a reason, not because my brain itself is betraying me.
Back in the early Trump years I also found an interesting video called “Hypernormalization” by Adam Curtis. I recommend both videos for those willing to explore all these ideas more.
After paragraphs 3 and 4, I was hooked without having any idea where this was heading, save for an earlier spoiler that the topic was depression in it’s non-economic form. But it whet my appetite for something more fanciful if not more fictional, but you have my vote for more of this type of content.
I feel more depressed than I used to and there are many reasons for that, but I think the biggest one is my own expectations — I have them now and I didn’t always used to. Maybe those expectations are a form of “control,” as referenced by one of the Palestinian students shot and mentioned above. Because it seems to me having expectations is antithetical to the approach of “whatever happens, happens.” That’s a lot easier to pull of when you’ve either lost all hope or have no expectations. I’m trying hard to get back in the latter camp and stay there.
Thank you.
I was impressed by the science that backed the book that Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey wrote, Build the Life You Want: The art and science of getting happier. To quote, “The pillars to construct a much better life are: Family, Friendship, Work, and Faith. …The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment (from communion with others and being consciously present in what you are doing), satisfaction (from accomplishing goals), and purpose (from a strong sense of the meaning of life).
I think you have touched on the many things that contribute to the lack of these pillars.
I found your article quite informative. I experienced suicidal ideation in my teens, during the 80’s well before smartphones. After speaking to a priest about it, his advice, which I took was to volunteer for a suicde hotline, which I did. It solved the two things that I think caused it: 1. First not being able to see the forest through the trees. Learning that the best way to cope with depression is to not focus on yourself. But on helping others. 2. Learning to appreciate what you did have and not focus on what you didn’t have.