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Comment by holidayacct | Hacker News Reader

Anxiety is a disorder of the nervous system that is a by-product of civilization. We are one of the only mammals that gets anxiety, if you get anxiety in the wild you won't be alive much longer.

Depression and PTSD are not responses to adversity. If you face adversity and suffer depression or PTSD you were raised psychologically weak in a way that is dangerous to you.

There are people who have survived civil wars, drought and mass starvation all over the world that don't have these problems get out of your bubble.

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> There are people who have survived civil wars, drought and mass starvation all over the world that don't have these problems get out of your bubble.

And similarly, there are people who have been traumatized by the same events.

In fact, there are war heroes who have taken bullets for their comrades, saved platoons, jumped at the enemy, and have been stricken with PTSD - if you think these people are "weak", then you probably also consider people who get cancer to be of inferior stock, right?

It is so shocking to me that people do not think genetic diversity exists without the human species.

If you have two people subject to same circumstances and one experiences significantly more distress they are weaker in some sense.

Doesn't mean they're less virtuous in what they have done. But obviously everybody should strive to be the one that comes out unscathed.

Addressing only one of your dubious points, there is a considerable scientific literature on anxiety response in animals.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=anxiety%20response%20an...

There are anxiety-like responses in animals but nothing similar to what we consider anxiety in humans. The key take-away is that most of the anxiety behaviors are found in prey animals. Most predators have a social system that removes members from the genetic pool who get anxiety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Zebras_Don%27t_Get_Ulcers

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