Charting the Land of Great Loneliness | Hacker News Reader

Charting the Land of Great Loneliness

guernicamag.com

32 pointsbingden8 comments

Reading this article made me wonder what proportion of the 40 to 50% of US marriages that end in divorce are due to mental health issues. Thinking through many of the divorces among people I know, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, etc. seem to be very common themes.

Johns Hopkins says that 1 in 4 Americans will suffer from a diagnosable mental health disorder in a given year [1]. That means for any two randomly selected people getting married, there is a 44% chance that at least one of them will experience mental health issues in a year. It seems likely to me then that a majority of divorces in the US could be the result of mental health disorders - many of which might be temporary or treatable.

[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...

As a piece of anecdata, I moved from a country with a common theme of really long hours and overtime as a culturally accepted thing, to another country where by in large most companies are family friend, everyone works exactly their prescribed hours and overtime is rare. Also a very large chunk of the population works (voluntarily) between 28 and 40 hours.

My relation with my partner was under a lot of strain in the previous country, we were coping but definitely not in love.

Now we actually have time for ourselves, we've had children together, we actually have time to enjoy our money and just have fun. I don't have to unwind from work, I don't take work home and we are truly in love.

I am absolutely certain that the move although hard at first vastly contributed to us being happily together now.

Corporations are just squeezing the best from us and leaving anyone less resilient to bite the dust. There absolutely is a better way, the company I work for is vastly profitable even during COVID times, nothing is actually lost, just ever so slightly decelerated from that tech company relentless pace of 'do it all today not tomorrow'.

Care to name the countries?

UK to NL.

And many of them might actually be _caused_ by marriage, though.

Sometimes a potato is just a potato, and it makes no sense trying to talk it into being a unicorn.

> Two men squat in a small tent on the Antarctic plateau, hungrily watching their Primus stove. With no hope of rescue, they’re trying to cross more than two hundred miles of treacherous terrain to base camp before they starve to death.

It sounds like the type of expedition that can turn an earnest Shackleton into a sarcastic Shackleton.

If you just skip the part about the lady and her relationship and read the stuff about the explorer the article is way better and shorter.

Same but opposite: I kept scrolling past the arctic stuff.

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