Hacker News Reader

Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

In the last few years inflation has hurt the fuck out of all but the richest Americans. Financial stress leads to depression. Add both political parties are constantly telling us the other side is ruining everything and it's just piling it on. A recession is here/coming.

View on HN

It's not only related to financial conditions. Loneliness has been increasing, and it's a big contributor to depression. Social media are another massive contributor.

I suspect it has less to do with specific parameters of modern society and more with the general experience of living in it. It's a rat race that, for many, lacks any meaning. another point to consider is the psychological difference between being a big fish in a small pond as opposed to being a small fish in a very large one. With the Internet, we now have the means to compare ourselves with everyone else, and our minds can quickly reach the conclusion that who we are and what we have is simply not good enough. From there, it's an easy slide into a downward spiral.

I think it's complex and hard to breakdown. Modern life may have something to do with it, but it certainly isn't more difficult to live today than it was during the great economic depression. Additionally, the internet should tell us that If you live in the US you are way better off than people in places like Ukraine, Mexico, Argentina, Uganda, etc. Now, if they are comparing themselves to the Kardashians or erroneously to pretend-rich Social media personalities, that's on them.

I think how easy life is has little to do with psychological wellbeing. If life is very hard but you are doing great relative to others you will feel good. Furthermore, a more demanding life often generates a deeper sense of purpose and meaning.

It has to be something else. Lots of people around the world live in dire conditions, in sub-modern conditions, picking garbage dumps bathing in ditch water. And they and their friends are equally poor and living under cramped tin roof dwellings. They're not doing "great" from an economic standpoint, but may be doing well from a social standpoint and mental health standpoint. They may not be individually tougher, but as a social group, they seem tougher.

They didn't say doing great relative to others was the only way to feel good.

Why does the US have higher depression rates than any country in Africa then? Aren't there a lot of people there under financial stress?

My assumption would be that they have something to look forward to. Some parts of Africa have improved a lot over the years, whereas the US, for the most part, had it good and now is seeing it slowly decay in real time.

Just spitballing here, but a culture which focuses more on individualism, less emphasis on family and community. People disown their families over petty things like political differences, don't engage in their communities because they're shut up inside watching TV all day, then find themselves without social support networks to help when they're feeling down.

>petty things like political differences

To be fair, political differences are a result of moral and ethical ideology. It's fine to not involve yourself with someone whose ideology is antithetical to goodness as subjective as it may be for some.

I will never understand someone who says political differences are petty. Thinking that the traffic light's hue of yellow is a shade too light or dark is petty. Thinking that pregnant women should die because the unviable fetus their carrying is more important than they are is not petty.

People who are opposed to abortion absolutely don't want anyone to die. It's a trolley problem to them, one with varying degrees of answers and consequences. How would you like it if someone called you an evil murderer (or whatever you're implying they are after calling them "antiethical to goodness") for making a moral choice in the trolley problem? I can predict your reply, and I will tell you that to pro-life people, a fetus is a human life not unlike a 1 day old baby. If they believed otherwise, they wouldn't be against abortion, they'd agree with you.

A woman carrying an unviable fetus will die if she is forced to continue the pregnancy. The pro-life crowd overwhelmingly puts in place policy that doesn't take anything into consideration about the impact of the pregnancy on the mother. This means that they want her to die to punish her for her decision to have sex.

I'm not in favor of abortion personally but I will always be staunchly pro-choice. It's the only ethical, moral, and logical position one can have. Anything else is punitive and regressive.

See also preventing folks from getting medical care, access to support services, children having food at school, or any other conservative position on anything that drives the welfare of disadvantaged people. It's immoral, unethical, and illogical. You can safely cut those people out of your life without being petty or other vapid argumentative nonsense.

Usually people are more depressed if they had something and were forced to give it up than if they never had it at all and are working hard to attain it. Same reason that the American Dream is alive and well among immigrants at the same time that the former American middle-class is dying of despair.

> Usually people are more depressed if they had something and were forced to give it up than if they never had it at all and are working hard to attain it.

Third option: They worked to attain it, they got it, and they found that it was empty.

"I worked my butt off to get a bigger TicTok following. And I got it! Why aren't I happy? Why isn't my life any better?" Because happiness and a better life were never in a bigger TicTok following.

Both advertising and social media sell us on empty goals and rewards. We chase them. We're not just miserable because we can't achieve them; we're also miserable because even when we do, we find that we got nothing meaningful.

I've not been to Africa, but several other less developed parts of the world and my take is that it's different being poor in these types of places rather than in the US.

In some countries, other people don't have much of anything, so people just kind of help each other out, others don't judge you for being short on cash and people even tolerate a bit of hustling. Kindness is important.

I find developing countries also often have a kind of homogeneous culture with shared beliefs and practices, which makes everyone feel like they're part of a community.

The USA puts money on a pedestal like nowhere I've ever seen before, ever, so not having money is bad in the USA. We can't even get healthcare without money. It's quite tragic.

I read a book that suggested some clues, it was a pretty opinionated and cynical book (Dark star safari). So im not an expert. The commentary he had suggested its cultural. They know what they know, kind of accepted how things are. Dont really care about getting ahead, buying, and accumulating wealth. those kinds of are effected by economies. but just one viewpoint someone had

It is very difficult to compare the numbers directly. I would expect that on many African countries there is less acces to mental health professionals to diagnose people, maybe also more prejudice agains seeking help for mental health. Also it could be that people seek help in their community or religion without a formal medical diagnosis. Possibly for regions where there is war or food insecurity seeking a diagnosis is less of a priority. I have no idea how much of an impact these have if any, but I don’t think you can just compare numbers directly.

In Africa, you can't even afford to be depressed.

I don't understand this concern about inflation. It was never that high, didn't last very long, and wages kept up pretty well (real wages are higher today than they were a year ago [1]). People are panicking over a problem that has done little real harm.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/economy/real-wages-inflation/...

Not everyone got a raise or changed jobs since last year. Everything is still expensive, and continues to get more expensive.

>and continues to get more expensive.

There still is inflation, but the idea that it's still terribly high is just not true. We are currently below 5% annualized inflation. This is an average over the last year; the rate for the past few months is lower still. The 10%-ish inflation that started this panic is long behind us.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUSR0000SA0&output_view=pct_...

Should everyone just eat cake then? Nobody cares what CNN or any other org says when they can see with their own eyes that milk and eggs and everything else cost more now than they did just a few years ago.

For most people, things cost less than they did a year ago. Real wages are up over the last year. Inflation hasn't been a real problem for most people.

I can't control what conclusions people reach based on incorrect or incomplete information. I can only suggest they read better newspapers.

(CNN is not one of those better newspapers. It just had the relevant numbers.)

I can't believe we're worse off financially than during the great economic depression. Do we have numbers from back then?

Are people today more apt to become depressed, are we conditioned to get more depressed, or is diagnosis better, or are we classifying and identifying more things as depression?

Back then we had no social services, no soup kitchens, "food stamps" etc. There was no governmental help (other than job creation such as WPA). There may have been more social cohesion and more reliance on the (extended) family though.

Anecdote, not data: My father was born into the Great Depression. He said you couldn't buy thread - not because you didn't have money to buy it, but because all the thread factories had closed, and there was literally no thread to buy.

Data: The US unemployment rate peaked at 25%.

So, yeah, things were (much) worse during the Great Depression. I have no data on whether people were depressed then (though the final lines of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, his message to the country, were "Buck up" and then "Smile"). But I know that it left deep marks on people. When there just wasn't stuff, and there was no promise that there ever would be stuff, it affected people for decades after it was over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com