There is one thing I have questioned quite for a long time. When you are actually struggling and fighting with something hard, you don’t really feel stress or a depression. Surviving becomes the number one priority for your life. The thing is after the fight. A soldier deals more with PTSD after the war not during the war. Then what makes an ordinary citizen with no physical danger fall into a depression?
In the world, one person commits suicide every 40 seconds and it is more than the lives in the battle filed. Some people just give up their lives voluntarily without critical hazard while people try hard to survive the day in the bombs and missiles by wars. In this case, can you really say the reality is better than the battle field while people are suffering mentally?
Obsessive Desire ; It Never Gets Enough
Apparently, people are with full of materials and comfort in any other generations. People have houses with electricity and heating system so that they do not need to wake up to drag water from the well or firewoods from a forest to fire their furnace early in the morning. It was really like that a few decades ago in some asian countries and still in undeveloped countries. People drive cars for five minutes distance and call for delivery service whatever they want. People barely feel hunger but rather struggle with obesity with too much food around them.
Still, some people feel misery and desperate than any other time. Depression and suicide were the words I had barely heard when I was little and now it is quite common as the world and technology have progressed exceedingly. Not long ago, people were just happy with family gathering and picnic with friends sharing warm meals and time together. Now things are not that simple and people need more than that. They need to have bigger houses and bigger TV, fancy cell phones, bigger cars than my neighbor. My job title needs to be fancier than my friend. It is not important how much income I get. What really matter is how much I get it more than my collegue.
Nowadays, people are connected closely ever by internet and social networking service which is called ‘Hyper-Connected Society’. They communicate with their cell phones in a house or next room. Or they don’t really know about their family or neighbor but know all about a person who is in the opposite side of the earth. People listen to the updated world news every second. If you listen to the news or media all the time, you will definitely feel a depression as it seems to be full of chaos which never ends. It means, your brain never gets a rest but in full of information, stimulation, and activation.
According to a survey, an adult uses a cell phone for five hours a day in average. Parents scold and restrict their children’s cell phones to use for study and mental health but parents are more addicted to cell phones than their children. Ironically, as long as people stay on cyber space to be connected each other, they feel more loneliness and emptiness in reality by research.
Living in social network service could give a serious mental depression to teenagers as they could not get out of cyber space by IT company marketing strategy in algorithm. Kids usually can not distinguish between reality and cyber space but feel confused regarding it as the whole world believing and trusting whatever on it. It’s like pursuing things that do not really exist. You are a millionaire, a warrior, and a hero in game world but it’s different outside of game. People require time of digital detox staying away from all the devices and media once in a while to give them a peace of mind and sense of reality.
Mental Hazard in Society : Stuck in A Rat Race
More than that, scorching housing price, education fee so that they need to delay their children or marriage are also new kinds of battles. People constantly fear of lay off or being fired without guarantee so they need to have training or education enhancing their skills once in a while. Generally people need to change their career 3-6 times during their whole life when they could live upto 100 yrs old.
People have the highest education level compare to their parents generation but job markets are most competitive ever. You need a college degree, volunteer experience, intern term, tons of licenses, language and career skills but it is still not enough to get a decent job. I’m often amazed how minimum wage job posts require millions of conditions from applicants and more amazingly some applicants with all the demands apply for the jobs.
Nobody has expected the situation that they have to worry and deal for basic stuff such as living under the roof or paying monthly bills in the capitalism which is full of funds and wealth. It took 10 years paying off their mortgages before. Now it takes over 60yrs to buy a house which takes a whole life span. Employees work hard 9-5 everyday but still nothing much left in the bank account on a payday. You finish the college, pay off tuition loan, get married, raise children, buy a car, buy a house, pay off the mortgage, and on and on. People get a burn out and feel a depression in this cycle of rat race.
People may live in the era of full of stuff and enjoy their comfortness of living. Meanwhile, they still fight fiercely to survive in reality to earn basic necessaries for a living. Then it’s hard to say they are in a safe place in lack of primary needs for a daily life.
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