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Comment by modells | Hacker News Reader

Pack more people closer together, damage the earth more and more and reduced resources, life for the average person will be a greater and greater struggle: depression and anxiety will likely be the norm, not the exception. Likely explains the emotional aspects of the opioid crisis as well.

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.

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Moving to Oregon and telecommuting is not an option for most people.

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.

> 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.

>When and where was that never the case?

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.

I'm not buying it. Famine was a constant and very real threat throughout history until around 1800 in the US. There was no defense against disease. No medical care. No dental care. Get an injury leaving you unable to work? You died.

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.

>Get an injury leaving you unable to work? You died.

There have been institutions taking care of the disabled and the poor for millennia.

They exist today, too.

I agree with what you are saying, except for perhaps the first line. What I mean is - I would posit that if you aren't privileged, you have almost _more_ incentive to slip out of society and into the middle of nowhere. There is cheap real estate in this country - just not on either coast. There is a cash-driven, barter-heavy economy out there for people who are willing to do ugly, dirty, time-consuming job in places far from the cities. Not an easy life, but perhaps comparatively less stressful or costly than one involving a multi-hour commute in order to work a minimum wage job in an expensive urban area.

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.

I think there are two flawed assertions here. One is that the non-privileged can even afford to attempt what you're suggesting without putting themselves or their families at immediate risk. You cannot drop your two jobs in the city and take your kids out of kindergarten to drive off toward "cheap real estate" (which you also can't afford, anyway) in a car you may or may not have, using gas you also can't afford without a payday loan.

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.

> Nobody with real problems gives a damn about density or the environment.

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,

>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.

SHHHHH!!! This basically what my family has; don't tell the world, we like the quiet!!!!

Your model struggles with fitting the preponderance of anxiety for the historically-relatively well off, or even, say, the high anxiety in the upper privileged classes of the US. Particularly compared to low anxiety rates in communities around the world that suffer much more hardship.

you are comparing highly educated and well informed about the world situation people to the ones with no TV or Radio.

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

This advice is about finding some exception on the edges of society. It won't change anything and certainly doesn't scale past single digit percentages.

It's basically the non-drug version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out"

I garden in my suburban backyard just fine. You don't need to move to the middle of nowhere.

It's really satisfying though, I agree.

Unfortunately a suburban back yard isn't a thing that I can realistically have anywhere in Silicon Valley.

Fair. Garden up then? I haven't really looked into "urban gardening" but I know it's a thing.

Doesn't scale.

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