Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

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That I never understood. US is an extremely rich country. Of course there are poor people, but there are lots of not poor people. In my country we don't have money if one does not work. He'll die from starvation. Well, probably some friends will help him not to die, but you got the idea. If you don't have a house, you don't really have any recourse, you have to live in basements under buildings and you'll eventually die as usual temperatures at winter are around -20 Celsius degrees. You can be beaten to death by some crazy person (well, at least you can't be shot, as guns are prohibited). People drive like crazy, so you can be killed by a car accident. If something unjust happens, you can't really rely on police, it might be corrupt and it happens in everyday life. If you need something from government, you might need to bribe the officials and I'm talking about ordinary person needs, not some enterprise stuff. I don't think that there are many grown-up people who did not bribe officials in their life.

Life is miserable here. And people don't run to hang themselves. They are trying to find happy moments and relish in those moments.

It's absolutely normal for a man to live in misery. Our humanity lived in misery for thousands of years and billions of people are living in misery right now. Our brain should be adapted to it by now.

Agreed, but depression in modern wealthy countries could potentially be less due to objectively comparable misery and pain on average and more due to a combined physiological, neurological, and psychological stagnation effect. It's very common to feel a profound dearth of meaning, purpose, higher goals, terminal goals, interpersonal connection, physical ambulation, sunlight, fresh air, or any idea of anything they should be doing but mindlessly scrolling some stream of text and projected imagery like a drug addict taking their 9th hit of the day while not actually feeling anything from it.

I know it's a tired trope to throw around at this point, but it just shows there are countless variables that factor into one's mood and disposition and sense of motivation even before you dig down to the neurological and biological levels. Leave a healthy, well-fed, "rich" rat or chimpanzee alone in a low-stimuli, not very large room for long enough and they'll often become depressed. Embed someone born in a wealthy country into an indigenous group and they often report feeling more alive and not depressed. Do the reverse and you often get the reverse.

And of course many people feel all these things not due to any sort of stagnation they have any personal control over but due to neurological systems which may be difficult to alter. Or both.

I think the original reply post may have partly misinterpreted what the commenter was trying to say. The hypothesis being discussed is something like that even if you reintroduce the rat back to its previous happy environment, their potential predictive processing dysfunction may cause them to not be able to do anything but treat all stimuli the same: not worth caring about or trying to derive enjoyment from.

> Life is miserable here. And people don't run to hang themselves. They are trying to find happy moments and relish in those moments.

What country is this? Your domain seems to indicate Kazakhstan, but they have one of the highest suicide rates in the world, so I suppose that's not it?

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