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Comment by DisruptiveDave | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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