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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Ah, but we maximized profit extraction from those units!

Also, remember that old millenials are pushing middle age (late 30's). Their mortgages have been used to fund a bunch of boomer retirements, they can't afford to see a doctor, they watch a lucky few (including many readers here) collect a huge chunk of the output of human labor, and they were left a dying world where the thought we might literally see the collapse of civilisation is not completely outlandish.

I mean, hell, I'm not diagnosed but I've had points where I'm pretty fucking depressed. I'm trying to check out of the system (cheap house, no commute, etc.) because it seems purpose-built to make other people happy. but I still worry my kid will need to learn to shoot, trap, grow, organize, and hide in order to get by in the world we're leaving her.

Maybe people feel depressed because the world is depressing?

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Everywhere there is evidence that we have overshot as a civilization.

In the garden there aren't as many insects anymore. They're in decline worldwide.

The weather isn't how it used to be when you were growing up. It's hotter, colder, harsher.

We are inundated with articles about the collapse of nature- how half the animals that existed in 1970 are now gone, the coral reefs are dead, and there is no end in sight. We are adding yet more people every day.

It's very easy to fall into despair that regardless of what you do today the collapse we are careening towards will erase all of it and more.

It's frustrating that with all this talk of famine, collapse, etc. almost nobody will say "billions of people will die and it could be very very very horrible".

You think you're going to be able to do permaculture on your plot? You'll be fine, until someone with more guns than you takes it from you.

This is why, as a bleeding-heart lefty greeny hippie who moved to Europe for largely philosophical reasons, I desperately want the EU to get its act together and build a credible military defence.

> It's very easy to fall into despair that regardless of what you do today the collapse we are careening towards will erase all of it and more.

The demographic of boomers are to blame for the shift and the lack of response to said threats.

Forgive me if i'm not sympathetic to their depression.

The boomers are mostly retired, with the exception of some senior executives, senior government officials, etc. They are truly pulling the strings now. The Gen-Xers are the mid-40s folks getting maximum whiplash from the string-pulling.

The boomers are well past middle age.

> I still worry my kid will need to learn to shoot, trap, grow, organize, and hide in order to get by in the world we're leaving her

I've thought about this exact thing (teaching this as a prudent backup plan for my kids) not because I necessarily think things will be impossible for them, but if the wage vs cost of living trajectory continues in the same direction, living a more difficult life in nature might be preferable (more rewarding, all things considered) to living an easier life in our increasingly dystopian societies.

And the only solution is to suffer even more.

We have to turn down air conditioners, then We have to stop buying air conditioners We have to stop buying new cars we have to stop buying new phones new tvs new computers We have to learn how to fix things We have to learn how to grow things We have to learn how to kill and eat things

We have to wind the clock back and go backwards in our lifestyles to a time when we didn't have cheap oil. We'll ride horses again. Take trains again.

That's what the future looks like -- the past.

Perhaps I am naive, but in the ways that matter, I don't think it _does_ mean suffering more.

Don't live in the middle of Arizona if you don't like heat. Eat less meat - you'll get used to it.

Honestly just living in a well-insulated flat a walk or bike ride from most amenities, eating little meat, and using renewably-sourced electricity would get us a long ways there.

Our entire society is _designed_ to trap you.

You either start life with no educational debt BUT no job prospects, OR you have the prospect of a decent job BUT massive student loans.

You are "free" to do what you like, unless you decide you don't want to be in debt for housing (or owe money to a landlord).

Homelessness is increasingly illegal and we let homeowners create a housing cartel, so you're forced to buy whether you want or not.

A huge part of the value people generate is captured by others, and living a life where you opt out of this is increasingly illegal.

Of course, this isn't new. One of the silver linings of the black plague was helping to end feudalism. It was pretty damn brutal though.

It's not suffering to some of us. But those of us, like in another thread who feel like we should have the right to own multiple homes and big cars and keep the A/C too high or low -- or at all.

Those who want steak every day. Those who want fully automated houses. They are going to suffer more. Lots of them.

Ummm, yeah, how much is that real estate that’s a walk or bike ride from most amenities costing ya?

It's pretty cheap _if_ you let people build on it! Let me have a 12 story apartment building next to transit instead of insisting every neighborhood stay a leafy suburb FOREVER.

Also, you realize we can make more of these, right? It's not like the laws of physics decided it was impossible to build nice neighborhoods ca. 1950. The laws of boomers bitching about their parking welfare (aka free street parking) every time somebody wanted to put in apartments did.

It hinges on how you want to define "most amenities", but lots of small towns have reasonably priced housing within a mile of plenty of amenities (with low or moderate vehicle traffic and so on).

> the thought we might literally see the collapse of civilisation is not completely outlandish.

To be honest, as someone that the world has decided is worthless, that thought is the most uplifting thought around.

Let it all burn.

I don't know your situation, but I'm sad you feel that way. I'm not even saying your feelings, or experience of them, are wrong, but it can get better.

> Let it all burn.

The rich westerner who never had to struggle to survive wants chaos. I wonder what a person raised in chaos has to say about that..?

The world is depressing? That's obviously subjective. There's nothing special about me or my circumstances and the only way I can label the world as depressing is if I choose to see it that way, consciously or not. A lot of what you outlined above is purely your mind fucking with itself, because those things, quite literally, are not reality. By no means do I think it is an entirely fruitless endeavor to consider the future, but anyone who lets that lead them into anything negative - nevermind life altering - has themselves to blame.

Why? When my parents were working, a simple factory job by one person in the family unit was enough to get them a house. Nowadays, professionals don't have health insurance, they have a failing justice system, they have high crime and low paying jobs.

Today the American Dream is impossible to attain for, I'd say, the majority of people.

> When my parents were working, a simple factory job by one person in the family unit was enough to get them a house.

It may be that it was just a complete anomaly - in human history, it was never possible to achieve this, barring a couple of decades in one country (USA). And after it, even in the US, things got back to normal. It may be that your parents' generation was the luckiest generation in history.

It's still totally possible to achieve this (at least in the US, and likely the world), but as a society we've decided it's more important that the top x% get a larger share of the pie than they did in those "couple of decades".

We didn't decide anything. Globalization happened because the same technology the US deployed to raise their standard of living (from the industrial revolution on) eventually ended up distributed to the rest of the world. Now everyone competes with each other and the US has been normalized. Post WWII USA was definitely an anomaly that won't be happening again anytime soon. That's probably a good thing since it was built on the back of the destruction of most of the rest of the first world.

There's tons and tons of space that we could build affordable homes on. I don't mean token "affordable housing" that distracts so many people, I mean "10,000 people want to live here, so let the market build 10,000 apartments".

Instead, we let a housing cartel (boomers) forbid any new homes.

This thread is about being able to buy a single family home on a single income. There's a lot more to that than zoning issues.

> as a society we've decided

Hardly. The people who are not yet on the wrong end of it play nice with it in order to not end up on the wrong end of it, those on the wrong end of it would actually prefer to suffer less, have a decent life and all that. It's just that we're standing on their throats and don't have very good ears, so it can be hard to hear.

Since antiquity, the spoils of war have always led to prosperous times for the victorious. I don't see why the aftermath of WWII should be any different.

There's a factory in town here that starts people with a high school education at better than the national median household income (COL is not high). They have their pick of that labor force though, and the employee count has come down over the decades.

So those jobs exist, just not enough of them.

I would say only for people who went to college without wealthy parents.

Being steadily employed directly out of high-school makes it much easier to obtain a mortgage and find a home in a low CoL area.

Implicit in your view is the assumption that depression is a choice. Current medical understanding of depression doesn't support that assumption.

Your last sentence shows how readily that assumption leads to dismissive blame. That doesn't seem like a road to progress for anyone.

>Current medical understanding of depression doesn't support that assumption.

Learned helplessness can be unlearned but a burden alone

Negative thoughts are one’s own fault because nothing is bad?

If your only way to argue with parent's comment is to extrapolate it to an extreme s/he did not articulate then maybe you should give it another read.

Well nuanced response, this is. Perhaps you'd like to read my comment again and address something I actually said? Would be happy to discuss.

So basically you're arguing that the perceived (or real) precariousness of one's environment should or does have no bearing on one's mental state. It's their fault for not having an overly optimistic perspective. While I agree that it's almost laudable to have an unshakably optimistic outlook on life, its also not very conducive to making the hard decisions and sacrifices that history teaches us must often be made in the pursuit of a brighter future. Getting down to brass tacks, (and I know I'll have a lot of boomers screaming about the cold war and mutually-assured-destruction, which is actually why I believe the cold war wasn't as scary as they thought) the world seems to me, and a lot of the most learned people out there, to be in an unprecedentedly dangerous state due to what can only be described as a global pollution epidemic and the apparent beginnings of large-scale ecosystem collapse.

There's also an element to your original post of "why don't depressed people just snap out of it?" which is, as always, risible.

This. Precisely this.

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