I came across an interesting topic in the Finnish news today, about how the number of people between 25-34 years claiming disability pensions has increased. It was just a headline, but the first thought that came to my mind was that it had to be due to mental health problems. After clicking into the story, lo and behold, my hunch was correct. The majority were indeed mental health related. Like many these days, mental health is something that I am interested in, but I reckon I have a bit of a different opinion than many on the topic.
In many ways, life is harder than it was earlier, because there is a lot more complication to deal with. However, a lot of the issues seem self-inflicted in the sense that rather than people learning to make choices themselves, they are outsourcing their decisions, which leads to increasing conditioning. Everything from the algorithms that feed content through the various platforms, to the adherence to group ideals that aren't based in reality, many keep deciding not to reflect, not to explore, not to look at alternatives to what they have already come to believe.
We should be happy.
I consider this a harmful belief, because just like I have explained about the problems with making learning fun leading to addiction to the dopamine hit, not the learning process, life being fun leads to avoidance of difficulty. We are evolved to follow the easiest path, so in an environment of increasingly easy paths to follow, we are going to end up where we are led. And, we aren't actually choosing that for ourselves, even though each step of the way, we feel like we are making a decision. There is a feedback loop that engages our sense of progress, like that of going up levels in a game, but we may be getting nowhere.
One more episode. One more concert. One more high.
Then I'll be happy.
But happiness doesn't come, but for most, the opposite expands. This is because like eating only junk food, we aren't getting the mental and emotional nutrition we need to be healthy, but we are still eating. The expanding waistline from poor nutrition, is akin to the widening void in people's lives that they are looking to fill. No matter how many dates, how many bedroom conquests, a lot of people are still lonely. The intimacy hole they are trying to fill can never be filled with what they are throwing in there, because it is not the right fit.
If you need vitamin C, eat an orange, not a brick.
It doesn't matter how many bricks you eat and how full your stomach becomes with rubble, it isn't going to provide the body with the right balance of nutrients and vitamins, and it is going to make a person feel bad. It should be obvious to us all, yet we haven't been conditioned to actually look at where we are headed, because we have been encouraged to only think about satisfying our short-term needs.
Short-term needs are usually desires.
There is what I want now, and what I need to be healthy in the future. But, we aren't built to think too much about the future anyway, so if what I want now is available, I will choose that, because it gives me the instant gratification reward now, making me feel like I am progressing. What I would need for later health, generally comes at an immediate cost, is uncomfortable, and there is a delayed reward. We might want that future, but we aren't able to make ourselves feel that future enough to forego or overcome the immediate feeling of getting what we want now.
Investing for the future, isn't fun.
It doesn't make most people immediately happy.
What is interesting perhaps is that while younger generations are less committed to the products they consume or indeed to other people in general, they are very much attached to their ideals. The problem is, there is a major discrepancy between what is held as ideal, and the reality of the world. We do not live in our ideals, we live in reality, but if we attach ourselves to what we believe, then reality becomes the problem, the thing that needs correcting - not the ideal. As noted many times earlier, the younger generations and indeed all people now, seem to have a much greater sense of entitlement, as if reality owes them something.
But, reality doesn't care.
So, there is a conflict between what one believes they deserve in their own evaluation, and what one is getting from reality. This leads to all kinds of bad outcomes, where people believe that there should be no assholes, so have no strategies or thick enough skin to deal with them in reality. People believe that they should be able to get what they want when they want it, so end up getting more and more into debt, as they buy what they what makes them happy for a moment, but increase the obligation they have that limits purchasing power later. People believe they should have meaning at work, so flit from one job to another whenever the reality hits that no job is great all of the time. And they believe that they deserve to be loved, to be accepted for themselves, yet are unwilling to accept others as they are, and love them.
It is not just the young who are struggling, it is the majority of people most likely. Whenever we are unable to overcome the conflicts, or put up with the imperfection when our idealistic view and reality clash, we will struggle. If our strategy is to avoid, rather to explore reality and change as necessary, we are going to start to breakdown, fall apart. We can follow all the trends, see all the therapists in the world, but the fact of the matter is, no one can save us, we have to do our own work.
The work that needs to be done however is not fun, it is not easy, it is difficult, uncomfortable and there is a lot of uncertainty. It isn't the kind of proposition that the average person wants to take up, especially when there are so many other alternative distractions that can be chosen now to deliver a quick fix, a patch over the would that keeps it out of sight a little longer, but doesn't heal the underlying cause.
The problems fester.
And, if you look into society at the moment, there are more indicators than just disability pensions for mental issues. Just remember that for a few decades now people have been convinced to show their emotions, to release what is inside, to let it all out, uncontrolled, without any techniques taught on how to manage emotions at all - and what are we seeing? The festering wounds that have laid dormant are peeling away and the raw emotions are seeping out into society in a thousand ways, from the violence in the streets, the political temperatures, to the psychotic breaks, drug addictions, and a litany of suicides from influencers who were selling ideals.
Emotional control isn't about just burying emotions, nor is it about just sucking it up and getting on with it, although at times, they are both legitimate strategies depending on circumstances. Emotional control is emotional wisdom, not just emotional intelligence. It takes more than reading books, meditation and collecting ideals - it is about being able to emotionally interact with the reality of the environment, and the reality of other people who will never live to their own ideals, let alone up to anyone else's.
Everyone thinks that they are broken in some way, because they aren't getting the results they want. But, like an overweight person feeling depressed and eating cream buns, because their two weeks of gym work didn't deliver a sixpack, if we aren't consistently doing what we need to do to get the results that we want to have, we just can't get them. The thing is, we are all "who we are" in the given moment, and we are all going to change from moment to moment also. This means, we are always us, and we are always changing, so why are we so attached to our ideals? Shouldn't they change too?
There are lots of reasons for mental health problems, but a lot of the problems are likely to be environmental and behavioral learning that has lead to so many of the mental health issues today, and the many that people are using as excuses as to why they can't do something. And yes, I do think a lot of them are excuses at the core, even though the person might not recognize it themselves. We tend not to be very good at identifying our real motivations, when we have time to justify our behaviors.
We might want to be healthy, but if there is an easier path to take,
we will take it.
Sounds hard. Is there a pill available?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]