I write about mental health a lot, which seems reasonable because I’m sure I have some mix of heightened anxiety and oppositional defiant disorder (although I think that diagnosis is only for people ages 0-18). I guess my central argument on the topic would be that burnout, a close cousin of mental health, is awful — but it’s not a “crisis,” per se. Burnout often is framed in a work context, and executives at work do not care about people burning out. If anything, they see it as “hustle” or “grind,” you know? So, it’s hard to solve mental health when jobs are so important to people, and when they subsequently burn out at jobs, no one seems to care that much.
That’s part of the bigger picture here. Consider a few things about modern society:
We spend a lot of time on screens: This makes us more “connected,” in the vague sense of the word “connected,” but it doesn’t make us more “social.” If anything, it’s probably antisocial. A few years ago I met a guy at a bar in Austin. He had a 15 year-old daughter. He said when boys came to the house, they were staring at their phones and not talking to him and his wife. They couldn’t shake hands or make eye contact. That’s a very small sample size, but is it true? Often it is. If we can’t socially connect in proper ways, mental health will obviously suffer.
Increased focus on identity and tribe: This is where “Culture Wars” took us, be it “It wasn’t an insurrection!” or “Pronouns.” There is so much focus on identity these days, and if you question identity, you are some horrible villain person now. I recently stopped posting on Facebook because it’s generally a cesspool, but a few times I asked what the end goal of pronouns was, and mostly I got told “Google it, you fat fuck.” Doesn’t quite seem like a conversation, but I guess I elicited that in others. Now, I hate quoting right-wing d-bags on here, but I’ll do it. (Sigh.) Years ago, if a kid was a little weird, someone in the family would probably call it a phase, and maybe eventually try to direct them into something that works for them societally. Now we champion these phases, which means perhaps they never end. That’s tough. The focus on identity above all else can create some mental health concerns.
Social comparison: Instagram, Facebook, body images, motherhood, size of house, etc. Constant comparison. Steroid comparison.
Work respect: We have a “window problem” of power these days, whereby those with power currently are realizing “Whoa, stuff is changing. I need to double down here.” I mean, for fuck’s sake, the Colorado River might be dry in 12 years. Good luck, Phoenix! Society’s teetering in many respects, and those with authority are just doubling down on what they know and want to do now, while they have power. As a result, it feels like respect has been in decline — both between people and professionally — for years now. Hell, one time I saw a study that 60% of managers “didn’t have the time” to respect their employees. LOL. We schedule respect? Wow. So that’s a feature of life/society that would contribute to mental health. Feeling you’re respected at work is super important. To wit:
Two-income households: That’s the norm these days, minus trust funds and good investments, especially in urban areas. That means exhaustion. It means less intimacy. It means kids being rushed from A to B in the name of “just deal with it.” Mental health will decline therein.
Stuff is more expensive: Inflation, supply chains, what have you. These are current features of society which are exacerbating mental health. Perhaps over time they will see as bugs of society. That would be the hope.
What else would you add here? Anything? It feels like modernity is actually designed to exhaust and burn you out, not to help shield you from those things.
Ted, you touch it all so correctly, the world is distracted by thing s that did not exist in the past. The government deliberately set up for both spouses to have to work or be expected to work in most places. The government was selfish and did not care of said impact on the children. Families have been split up with children moving all over out of most grow up communities. Grandparents are not involved and so on. My grandparents had it better in terms of life than I do as family and community were with them. I don’t have that other than my immediate family. I want to go back in time and disappear two people the guys that invented Excel and the internet and I want to disappear Suckerbergs parents so that the likes of FB would never happen.