Barnes and Noble says books on anxiety are soaring
goodereader.com
goodereader.com
https://www.mysanantonio.com/technology/businessinsider/arti...
Recall the experiment where a rat is placed in a cage with a "pleasure button" that stimulates reward centers in its brain. The rat proceeds to never stop pressing the button.
I believe that things like social media act in the same way. Not to mention smartphones, "clickbait", video games. Machine learning algorithms that increase a service's abilities as a pleasure button.
The philosophy behind HN is that popular community websites have lower quality content. In my view, this is simply a "regression towards the mean" of people wanting a dopamine rush.
It'd probably be a better match than those ok cupid algorithms, and an instant ice breaker.
Instead, I wanted to do reading-sentiment showing which parts of the book were exciting by measuring engagement, to learn years later porn-sites had been doing that successfully for a long time.
I guess Freud had a point.
But then again, it's kind of a dick move to question anyone's mental state in such a manner. Because you don't know what's actually going on for the most part. You won't have the whole story most of the time. So if someone says they're anxious or depressed or a third thing, accept it, let them have it. Worst case scenario, they're putting on airs and they get the attention and validation they're craving. Big deal. If this leads to less stigmatization about mental health in general and people who genuinely need help, get it, I don't care if only 0.01% of people who claim it have it.
Not to mention, even if you aren't afflicted to the degree that it negatively impacts your life, learning how to manage anxiety can't be a bad thing.
Why would you question them? If you think they have more capacity to handle life than they think they do, this would probably be a reassuring and helpful thing to state.
This assumption that people would prefer a comfortable self conception to addressing their problems is a dangerous slope to go down. People are not this simple in aggregate or individually.
And I think I explicitly said that I don't question them. I keep it to myself, because if I'm right to question them, the rewards are minimal, but if I'm wrong, then the risks are greater.
I also think you're reading me wrong. It's not "You're stronger than you think you are." It's more like a child over-selling their accident for attention. I don't believe that it's as serious as being made out.
And where did I say anyone is simple in the aggregate or individually? I noted certain trends, that's all. And while people are not simple in aggregate or individually, statistics can't be beat.
How could you possibly distinguish? And my point was that extrapolating a claim on an aggregate from anecdotal evidence seems low value.
Meditations: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html
Seneca's Moral Letters: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius
Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety by Kelly G. Wilson and M. Troy DuFrene
I'll also add Ecclesiastes - there's perennial wisdom in that old book, and it doesn't demand a lick of faith.
You really can't compare that with today's 24/7 cable news and media barrage.
Could also be the people that are bombarding the average citizen with all of the atrocities committed by trump, from how many scoops of ice cream he gets to the trade war.
People love to hate trump, but it also becomes tiresome and stressful when people are constantly bombarded with analysis of tweets, off hand comments, and other decreasingly trivial things, and then finally mix in all of the instability of global politics.
Very refreshing.
They sell toys and legos now. Things you would have found at Toys R Us. Maybe this isn't new and I'm just slightly out of date on these things
I think it has to do a lot with tie-ins. Now bookstores sell movies and music as well. So a book gets adapted into a movie, you can sell the book, the movie, the soundtrack, the tie-in collectibles, etc.
I humbly suggest having a homestead somewhere like Oregon and alternate two weeks of telecommuting, if just to release anxieties about the future, microfarming and gardening are more satisfying than one can imagine.
Nobody with real problems gives a damn about density or the environment. They're too busy trying to cope with the anxieties of losing their job to automation, whether or not they can afford healthcare, and where they are going to live in artificially heated market (while getting reamed over monthly rent). Oh, and we're expected to have saved millions of dollars by the time we're 65, since Social Security may or may not be around.
It is a time of many uncertainties, all of which fuel anxiety. Life is hard and unclear if you aren't privileged.
When and where was that never the case?
Life in America, relative to history, is currently very, very good. For example, there's no famine. Childhood diseases are a thing of the past. Polio was defeated. No armies ravaging the countryside. No cold war. Health care is better than it ever was before. People grow tall and healthy.
Best of all, there is no caste or nobility system. People can, and often do, rise from nothing to wealth.
For very long stretches of time in rural life. Even medieval peasants had it much better than most people think. A lot of people conflate disasters and incidents from millennia of history (1 to 1950 A.D say) and across countries, and create a mix of disasters as if those were constants in the pre-modern era.
If people in those days had less anxiety, it hardly meant they had less adversity and risk. It likely meant they accepted lower expectations of what life was about.
There have been institutions taking care of the disabled and the poor for millennia.
My then 96-year old grandmother put it best: Your generation has a lot more money than my generation, but you have more stress and will never know many of the simply pleasures my generation experienced. Yes, perhaps it is a privileged mindset, but I find myself wondering if/when "Average Joe/Jane" type people are going to decide to get off the roller coaster and seek a different path than the traditional one society / media / politicians / etc push, in their interest.
If you can afford to make that kind of move, you're more privileged than many.
If you can do it and it fails, can you afford to come back and try to re-start your previous city life? Then you're even more privileged than the first subset of people. Those living paycheck to paycheck can't just shove off for greener pastures in today's climate, period, and the few who can would prefer not to take the risk because failure is just too stressful.
The second flawed assertion is that your generation has more money than your grandmother's generation. You might have more dollar bills in your bank account, but they're worth less than ever before and "Real Wages" for the lower and middle class have been flat or falling for decades.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/25/americ...
https://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2012/03/basics...
Now, HN surely has a concentration of workers who live outside of this phenomenon and have experienced increasing wages and live upper-class lifestyles, but hardly true of today's "generations" as a whole.
I think there is a lot of evidence which contradicts this line of reasoning. Being in nature has a relaxing effect. Even just this past week
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180720112806.h...
Although, I would agree that many people are alienated from the biosphere and don't realize how it may help them feel better,
SHHHHH!!! This basically what my family has; don't tell the world, we like the quiet!!!!
Problems that touch you directly like "i have too few resources - money" can be solved mostly by the ones struggling but "the world is fucked and we all are going to die" wont
It's basically the non-drug version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out"
It's really satisfying though, I agree.