Category: People

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.

HISTORY. The Rise of Evil : The Time of Hitler

The Series of [ What Do You See? ]

Holocaust : The Cause and Effect of Distorted Cognitive Reception

There is a documentary of Hitler, The Rise of Evil(2003). It explains well how Hitler had been created and well been thrived in the time of chaos for a while.

Learning history, most people are stunned with the fact that Hitler was chosen by people’s vote and the Germans agreed with and joined the mass massacre killing millions of Jewish people. How did that happen? How was it even possible? It could be a lesson to take a look as it still continues from time to time.

Distorted Cognitive Belief ; We Are Superior

German was struggling with many social crisis in the time of Hitler. The unemployment rate was high, economy and poverty index was severe, and most of all, they felt themselves as the second class citizens, inferior, compare to other countries in Europe.

Then Hitler, apparently a passionate patriot, showed up and started saying how the Germans had been superior and need to gain the power back like his ancestors in primitive times. Hitler was charismatic and his speech was powerful to hit people’s mind. He did not only know how to stimulate people’s inferiority and encourage their desire for superiority but also delivered it well using his speech and propaganda skills.

Your own dream may be doubtful and difficult to achieve but it seems to be possible in a group of peers cheering each other. The Germans were in group hypnosis status mentally while they were killing millions of people to make their ideal country.

When your ideal identity or standard and the reality do not match, you feel a depression. Hitler was the cure for their low self esteem. They could forget their complex during the massacre like taking drugs. They took Hitler as their drug. Now German education emphasizes on critical thinking so that they would not make a same mistake leading to a faulted leader without consciousness only because he or she is attractive or speaks a bit emotionally or dramatically.

Disillusive Cognitive Belief ; It Is All because of Them

Then why was Hitler disgusted by Jewish and wanted to clear the ethnic? Jewish people were suffering with stigmas for a long time and discrimination was not a story for yesterday. There are many rumors Hitler hated them because they killed Jesus or Hitler was actually Jewish and wanted to hide his identity. Nobody actually knows what really drove his mentality crazy. People just assume it. The thing is that the Germans agreed with his idea that Jewish must be extinct.

When you set a soft target, it makes everything easier. The reason you don’t have a decent job is because of too many stingy immigrated jewish. The situation you are poor is due to wealthy, greedy Jewish… You could make millions of reasons whatever you want because humans could be very creative, especially bullying others. It may not really solve any problems but at least it gives you a mental peace as nothing is your fault.

These tactics have been used quite often through history. The Middle ages churches killed countless witches. Dictators and demagogue politicians constantly have eliminated their opponents or opponent ethnics through wars. First, they distort people’s image towards certain class, people, minority, or anything to attack. Then they encourage people to arouse anger and resentment hidden in their unconsciousness.

It works best if the social and political situation are messy as people don’t even have enough time to ‘Think’ properly. The targets could be variant as the time changes but the strategies appear with similar patterns by different figures.

Prologue

It all looks different as how you see…

The Relations between Cognitive Ability & Depression

How Cognitive Reception and Social Condition Affect on Depression?

Did you have a perfect childhood with perfect family, parents, friends and beautiful memories? You may or may not. Though there is one common thing in your childhood. You never had a depression when you were a kid. I have a simple memory with this.

My mom used to struggle with a headache due to her sensitive nerves. After a long nap, she used to say ‘I couldn’t sleep for a wink’ or ‘My headache hasn’t got any better because of stress even though I took a nap’. Now I assume she may have had a depression according to her constant nap for a long time. She tried to get help by her short break, nap but it didn’t work out with some reason. On the other hand, I couldn’t get the idea of ‘stress’ or a ‘headache’ as a child. I tried to think hard what kind of those things are and somewhat I even wished to have those things as they looked somewhat fancy to me.

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