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American Happiness Reaches Five-decade Low

Harrison Bergeron

By Harrison Bergeron
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crash_davis

crash_davis 23078

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happiness is relative. it seems like the wealthier the people, the more unhappy they are. 

poor people are just happy to survive. they have lower suicide rates. they don't have time to come up with bullshit reasons to be unhappy and read self help books on why they are unhappy and what they can do to be happier. it's only when poor people are surrounded by rich people that they become unhappy, just like the rich people. 

chasing things, especially material things, to be happy is a fucked up path. wealth (by 3rd world standars) and free time are not good for many people.

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Doc Reeves

Doc Reeves 6434

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30 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

By reapproaching religion and spirituality through AA, which secularizes (somewhat contrary to popular belief) a lot of "Biblical" teachings, which are actually fairly universal to the world's religions, I have learned that a lot of biblical/religious things aren't just "commandments," but actually really pretty good psychology.

If you look at a lot of religious mandates not so much as rules having a penalty for violation of eternal damnation, but rather guidelines that lead to more contentment, things start to make a lot of sense.

Thou shalt not covet is a good one.  We all know it's bad to covet your neighbor's stuff, that's just good juju.

 

That is defiantly one of the important functions of religious ritual to humans.

If there is something very important we discover as humans, its the most effective way to keep replication of the knowledge exact over generations and avoid a ‘telephone” game of reduced information over time. If you make the information a religious ritual that has ties to all of your ancestors, people will worship the information and replicate it as precisely as possible.

Take the Samuri Sword in Japan. To this day traditional sword smiths treat the steps to making the swords as a Shinto ritual so things are replicated precisely over 600 years. The lessons for a happy life and functional society have been given the same importance by humanity and the threat of punishment is more a function to make sure the information is given respect, followed and exact.

Edited by Doc Reeves
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BabaYaga

BabaYaga 15202

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16 minutes ago, deadshank said:

Would you rather be at one end of the spectrum where you are incredibly intelligent and self-aware, have access to all things good & bad and burdened by the problems of the world affecting you?

OR

Be on the other end of the spectrum where you are not particularly intelligent, live a simple life with access to only the basics and completely unfettered by modern problems?

 

There is a 3rd option:  Boats and Hoe's.  Always choose boats and hoe's

KVIOfC.gif

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23078

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3 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Do you take NFT's?

some fucking idiot paid $430k equivalent for a NFT of this pic. it's all fake money for pic of one of the most popular memes in history but yea....

https://people.com/human-interest/disaster-girl-meme-sells-500000-nft/

7qztmfsfmef81.jpg

 

like i said, people, money, and spare time equals bad decisions. he's probably going to be sad about it and kill himself. 

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Doc Reeves

Doc Reeves 6434

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13 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/suicide-rate-by-country

like i said, poor people in poor countries are too busy living to feel sorry for themselves. 

Well, the problem is that those people are not happy. Lik, at all in any fathomable way. They are “happy” at times in the same way a child from the streets of Calcutta is “happy”. If you ask them would they prefer their life to another, they will literally start breaking down in tears and tug at you pant cuffs begging you to take them with you. There’s a reason The Buddha saw that “Life is suffering”.

i knew some guys who rode motorcycles thru Eastern Europe to South Asia for a coupe months. At times they would stop and say hi to the locals in the fields and take video/pics. No one spoke each others languages but you would see women hunched over working the fields and the land was breathtaking. At first they took pictures because they thought “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago”. Well, the people would be friendly but often would become very excited asking for help, telling the camera to tell the world about how desperate things were there, the crimes that were taking place or handing them some crop they pulled from the earth to give to our scientists to help them. Well, “asking” isn’t the right word, more like hysterically weeping and begging. The stopped talking to locals in the fields and though to themselves “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago…”.

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BabaYaga

BabaYaga 15202

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4 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

some fucking idiot paid $430k equivalent for a NFT of this pic. it's all fake money for pic of one of the most popular memes in history but yea....

https://people.com/human-interest/disaster-girl-meme-sells-500000-nft/

7qztmfsfmef81.jpg

 

like i said, people, money, and spare time equals bad decisions. he's probably going to be sad about it and kill himself. 

People are not fond of history:  Dutch Tulip Bulb bubble out front should have told ya'

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Cheeseweasel

Cheeseweasel 26437

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3 minutes ago, Doc Reeves said:

Well, the problem is that those people are not happy. Lik, at all in any fathomable way. They are “happy” at times in the same way a child from the streets of Calcutta is “happy”. If you ask them would they prefer their life to another, they will literally start breaking down in tears and tug at you pant cuffs begging you to take them with you. There’s a reason The Buddha saw that “Life is suffering”.

i knew some guys who rode motorcycles thru Eastern Europe to South Asia for a coupe months. At times they would stop and say hi to the locals in the fields and take video/pics. No one spoke each others languages but you would see women hunched over working the fields and the land was breathtaking. At first they took pictures because they thought “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago”. Well, the people would be friendly but often would become very excited asking for help, telling the camera to tell the world about how desperate things were there, the crimes that were taking place or handing them some crop they pulled from the earth to give to our scientists to help them. Well, “asking” isn’t the right word, more like hysterically weeping and begging. The stopped talking to locals in the fields and though to themselves “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago…”.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23078

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1 minute ago, Doc Reeves said:

Well, the problem is that those people are not happy. Lik, at all in any fathomable way. They are “happy” at times in the same way a child from the streets of Calcutta is “happy”. If you ask them would they prefer their life to another, they will literally start breaking down in tears and tug at you pant cuffs begging you to take them with you. There’s a reason The Buddha saw that “Life is suffering”.

i knew some guys who rode motorcycles thru Eastern Europe to South Asia for a coupe months. At times they would stop and say hi to the locals in the fields and take video/pics. No one spoke each others languages but you would see women hunched over working the fields and the land was breathtaking. At first they took pictures because they thought “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago”. Well, the people would be friendly but often would become very excited asking for help, telling the camera to tell the world about how desperate things were there, the crimes that were taking place or handing them some crop they pulled from the earth to give to our scientists to help them. Well, “asking” isn’t the right word, more like hysterically weeping and begging. The stopped talking to locals in the fields and though to themselves “damn, this is how things were 100 yrs ago…”.

here's the irony. as bad as that shit is, they aren't offing themselves. the struggle is real, it's not made up. they are willing to fight through that life.

the people offing themselves don't have to work the fields 12 hours a day. they get on the internet, look out their window, see what their friends have that they don't, are doing that they aren't, get sad and off themselves. it's the fucking made up bullshit that is killing people.

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Doc Reeves

Doc Reeves 6434

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5 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

here's the irony. as bad as that shit is, they aren't offing themselves. the struggle is real, it's not made up. they are willing to fight through that life.

the people offing themselves don't have to work the fields 12 hours a day. they get on the internet, look out their window, see what their friends have that they don't, are doing that they aren't, get sad and off themselves. it's the fucking made up bullshit that is killing people.


You’re making the mistake of equating suicide with depression. They are separate events entirely and while suicide can be a way some in chronic depression deal with their depression they are not causal.

People who witnessed the Killing Fields in Cambodia lost their actual will to see and became blind but did not kill themselves. 

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TurkeyChew

TurkeyChew 383

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2 hours ago, Celery Man said:

Not getting keyed up about stuff that doesn't impact you is often good advice, and it's also often good and even important to be able to move past/not stress about things that do effect you but that you have no control over.

However, the sometimes implicit assertion in "people should just unplug" is that "stuff happening out in the world doesn't actually matter", and that's often not true and I believe is part of what you might see in studies like this.

It was pointed out that this was from May 2020, and so fairly early for pandemic stuff to be really dragging on people, but that's a perfect example of... you can't ignore it, it impacts everyone's lives, it's not simply background noise that exists to get people keyed up. "Well I've been living a normal life for the past two years, it hasn't changed me a bit: - that's not something that has been possible for decent people, and that includes a lot of America. There's also a huge degree to which it is easy to simply ignore everything when it comes to social stuff if you, like many of us here, are comfortable and white and male. You can get worked up about guns but otherwise the bogeymen aren't coming for you. The other stuff - there's plenty of extremely unimportant shit on the news that's there to rile you up either because it's good for business or because it's part of a strategy, but the idea that everything that's been going on in America in recent history doesn't matter - that's sticking your head in the sand. I respect the notion of "I can't change it, I'll do the basic things i can do to exert my influence but otherwise I'm living my life", and of course the bluster from people who are obviously just as keyed into this as anyone else is bullshit.

I feel like for millennials (and I wonder how it is for gen z kids) there's a big happiness disconnect between the message and mindset we were raised on and the reality that was there for us upon entering the workforce. Swayze's post about a job search in this thread was making me think about "what is your dream" questions I was getting during interviews in 2020. Is it an acceptable "dream" to simply want to make a comfortable living doing something moderately interesting so you can support a family, build a little wealth, and do some fun/cool shit while you do it? It absolutely fucking should be, but I think a lot of us are broken from the whole... "you can do anything!" "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" "shoot for the moon, if you miss you'll land in the stars" etc etc bullshit we were raised on. It creates a weird toxicity in the work culture, it's of course a massive disappointment for people who were raised on that (to the detriment of practical guidance) and find themselves with tons of debt and no marketable skills, and even for people who have been somewhat successful i think there's a mild discontentedness. Like it's a failure to be moderately successful doing something mundane, like it would be embarrassing to admit that you've moved beyond childish dreams to pedestrian goals, and like doing that is not something that should allow you happiness.

"Assume you are not Jay-Z" is a good life lesson for the youth.

 

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23078

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1 minute ago, Doc Reeves said:


You’re making the mistake of equating suicide with depression. They are separate events entirely and while suicide can be a way some in chronic depression deal with their depression they are not causal.

People who witnessed the Killing Fields in Cambodia lost their actual will to see and became blind but did not kill themselves. 

depression, unhappiness, suicides. it's all degrees of being unhappy. 

if you argument is that suicides are mostly cause by depression, the question still stands. why then are poor people not killing themselves? are they less depressed? if so, why? why are wealthier countries more depressed? what's causing the drastically higher rates of suicide? 

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Celery Man

Celery Man 20874

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21 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

here's the irony. as bad as that shit is, they aren't offing themselves. the struggle is real, it's not made up. they are willing to fight through that life.

the people offing themselves don't have to work the fields 12 hours a day. they get on the internet, look out their window, see what their friends have that they don't, are doing that they aren't, get sad and off themselves. it's the fucking made up bullshit that is killing people.

There's a part where... people in general and certainly people in this country would be well served to do less coveting and be more content with what they have. There's another part where you could read this as anything not related to the bottom two tiers of maslow's hierarchy is madeup bullshit - that's incredibly wrong.

The comparison to people in third world countries is a little weird as well - again, there's an element of "be thankful for what you have" that is good and healthy. I watched a couple of trashy prison netflix shows and every now and then when I'm driving around I have a feeling of "goddamn, what I've got is good" - that's good, that's healthy. That's what people should take away from "look at people in third world countries". The whole idea that they aren't killing themselves (first off, curious about the data, but I'll accept it) - if the leap being made is "people in Eritrea don't kill themselves, and therefore a) they must be happy or b) we should be happy, I don't think so far in this thread there has been any reasoning done to connect those things.  I think someone said "they're too busy living to kill themselves", and I suspect that is correct, but it's not clear what the lesson for us is in the USA suicide - perhaps make changes so that Americans are entirely focused on safety and basic needs?

I do think there is something to the abundance we have when it comes to general safety and physical needs as compared to the scarcity in connection with love, esteem, actualization. We're more and more disconnected, there is an element where we interact through screens and in ways that amplify and reward the worst parts of how we do that. There is opportunity for people who work hard and are smart and capable, there's less and less quality opportunity for thoroughly average and below average people. Package delivery for Amazon and various side hustles doesn't nourish esteem and self worth in the way that the jobs that used to employ those people in this country did. And even if it lets you purchase all manner of flat screen TVs and smart devices and keeps you in cheetos, it doesn't provide what would allow you to own some real property or feed/clothe/shelter a wife and family. Which is way more important when it comes to "should I kill myself today" than an iPhone and Netflix.

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Doc Reeves

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13 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

it's the fucking made up bullshit that is killing people.

If you’re Japanese age 18-34 your brackets leading cause of death is suicide. However Japanese people in that age bracket are rarely clinically depressed. 

Suicide is a function for some people more than others of realizing that the world you expect and believe to be true has ceased to be.

If youre a poor field worker and you loose everything, well that’s just the average Tuesday. Their life is not affected y anything the lose. If you’re perhaps an Emperor who lost his empire, a criminal who was caught and facing jail or your child is in mortal danger, the story is different 

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Cheeseweasel

Cheeseweasel 26437

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2 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

We're more and more disconnected, there is an element where we interact through screens and in ways that amplify and reward the worst parts of how we do that.

Yeah, social media is one big Skinner Box. Hell, look at this site. Cross a few key users here and feel the wrath. 

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Doc Reeves

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5 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

depression, unhappiness, suicides. it's all degrees of being unhappy. 

You are absolutely incorrect.

7 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

you argument is that suicides are mostly cause by depression

I’m saying the opposite and it’s backed up by $ Billions of research trying to figure out why our soldiers were killing themselves.

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23078

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2 minutes ago, Doc Reeves said:

You are absolutely incorrect.

I’m saying the opposite and it’s backed up by $ Billions of research trying to figure out why our soldiers were killing themselves.

again, if depression is a clinical illness (which it is and can be) and exists across the population at the same rate, why are poor people killing themselves less than richer people?

re the soldiers, i'm going to guess they saw, live, and did traumatic shit that they can't un-see, un-live, or un-do? 

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BabaYaga

BabaYaga 15202

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2 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

again, if depression is a clinical illness (which it is and can be) and exists across the population at the same rate, why are poor people killing themselves less than richer people?

re the soldiers, i'm going to guess they saw, live, and did traumatic shit that they can't un-see, un-live, or un-do? 

I think someone nailed it earlier, but Maslow's hierarchy plays into this to an extent.  Basic survival needs are at a lower tier than self-actualization, self-esteem, etc.  

Edited by BabaYaga
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Doc Reeves

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7 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

again, if depression is a clinical illness (which it is and can be) and exists across the population at the same rate, why are poor people killing themselves less than richer people?

re the soldiers, i'm going to guess they saw, live, and did traumatic shit that they can't un-see, un-live, or un-do? 

Because suicide is not a direct symptom of depression. It becomes an option for some people to deal with trauma- chronic depression being one. 
 

Our soldiers have given us a very good window into the phenomenon. If you go case by case it was completely baffling at first. 

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23078

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6 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

I think someone nailed it earlier, but Maslow's hierarchy plays into this to an extent

that's my point. the further you get away from basic survival needs, the more you have time for the i need to feel loved and doing something with my life, the more unhappy you are to the point of offing yourself. you failed in life because you didn't achieve a certain amount of wealth, get that hot model wife, have 2.2 kids, have a nice house and yard in a nice neighborhood, and so on...

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52-80

52-80 19066

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social media is used too much as a pinata.  it shows people what they want to see, and the social values of the country hasnt changed significantly from before and after.  young people always took their cues from celebrity culture if its not from instagram its from tiger beat and print magazine.  students radicalized in college turning mellow and conversative when they get older was always a thing.  heated political discussion at thanksgiving dinner was always a thing. 

the broad characteristics of japanese people in being polite and civil didnt change because all of a sudden there was technology to facechat with grandma over a telephone.

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Celery Man

Celery Man 20874

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13 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

that's my point. the further you get away from basic survival needs, the more you have time for the i need to feel loved and doing something with my life, the more unhappy you are to the point of offing yourself. you failed in life because you didn't achieve a certain amount of wealth, get that hot model wife, have 2.2 kids, have a nice house and yard in a nice neighborhood, and so on...

what lesson are you taking from that

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Celery Man

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52 minutes ago, crash_davis said:

the more first world problems we have, the more unhappy we become.

I think that's kinda true, I think it might look more like "the fewer 3rd world problems we have, the more time we have to examine our happiness", and my general pushback on it is against the leap from "third world people don't kill themselves" to "first world people should simply become happy since they aren't starving to death or being massacred".

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Doc Reeves

Doc Reeves 6434

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Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, crash_davis said:

the more first world problems we have, the more unhappy we become.

You are absolutely correct.

I can’t remember the exact research but basically huge amounts of data were collected to figure out why people who did not experience traumatic events, abuse, sexual slavery were more likely to commit suicide.

It turns out (according to them) that people have a biological switch that is activated if life is perceived by the body to be very difficult at a young age- maybe as young as 12mos.  They equate it to being born during peace or war. This switch is either activated or not and has in incredible effect on the entirety of the person’s psychological development for the rest of their life. In this way being raised in a loving supporting home could actually be a thread in  what is leading to our suicide problem.

Edited by Doc Reeves
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TurkeyChew

TurkeyChew 383

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I read a super interesting article about how Miami is the most important American city today and thought of this thread when I read the following for why that is:
 

Quote

The last time Miami was relevant, it wasn’t important. In the 1980s, Miami provided nothing more than drugs, clubs, pastel blazers, jai alai gambling and, most notably, a hit TV show about all four.

But now Miami is the most important city in America. Not because Miami stopped being a frivolous, regulation-free, climate-doomed tax haven dominated by hot microcelebrities. It became the most important city in America because the country became a frivolous, regulation-free, climate-doomed tax haven dominated by hot microcelebrities.

 

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BabaYaga

BabaYaga 15202

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Have we talked about how many people are medicated out of their literal minds:  opiods, benzos, SSRI's, etc.  

The entire medical community is so quick to pull the trigger on any number of prescribed meds from little children all the way through adulthood.  Another vicious circle of malaise, prescriptions, and addiction.  

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Doc Reeves

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3 hours ago, crash_davis said:

that's my point. the further you get away from basic survival needs, the more you have time for the i need to feel loved and doing something with my life, the more unhappy you are to the point of offing yourself. you failed in life because you didn't achieve a certain amount of wealth, get that hot model wife, have 2.2 kids, have a nice house and yard in a nice neighborhood, and so on...

You are very right in some of your thinking, really. I think that maybe a more general way to state my point would be to say that suicide at its core is a reaction to trauma. Suicide is the symptom. The disease is that our society, self-esteem, social status, and all of our intrinsic worth is now so fragile and in everyone else’s hands besides ours.. 

The pressure we are putting on ourselves to be what we think we should or are “supposed to be” is starting to equate to our society what 1000 years of hard Japanese culture has done to theirs. Kids kill themselves out of high school all the time because they didn’t get the marks they needed and will be in the lower class. Game over, bye mom. While that is still at the end of the spectrum, we are starting to loosed our ability to see just being content as the ideal. Thats bad news.

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TwiceHorn

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5 hours ago, BabaYaga said:

That is because the Bible and other assorted texts are not "books" as we perceive them today like War & Peace.  Rather they are compilations of stories and texts that predated "books" by thousands of years.  They are more consolidated archives of thousands of stories and teachings over thousands of years with people and tribes that co-mingled and with one another and revised via council hundreds of times

 

Well, the thing is, AA works if you do it.  Once it works, you marvel at the insight these guys, with little or no psychological training (and when psychological training barely existed in the first place), came up with this program of practical moral philosophy that can keep addicts clean.

And then you go deeper into it and find that a lot of the program is distilled from religion, the world's religions, not just Judeo-Christian, because these guys tried everything to get and stay sober and a lot of the "programs" for drunks were explicitly religiously affiliated.  And they just tried other religions and philosophies, too.  And they found commonality among them, and some fairly universal principles.

And, those principles are not "don't do this, don't do that, or you're gonna burn," they're more like "if you can teach yourself or learn to be more like this, you'll be more at peace with the world and yourself."

AA embodies selflessness, confession, forgiveness, acceptance, gratitude and some other stuff that people need to one degree or another to be sane and content.  And being an addict itself can teach some lessons on materialism, because most of us lose a good chunk of something, by divorce, job loss, stupid decisions, the cost of the substance itself.  But once recovered, a lot of us find quite a bit of success, to include material success, but the attitude toward it is changed.

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