We're experiencing the effect of the Earth's medical doctor saying "Hrm, that doesn't look good" over the past decade, in slow motion. Each person is free to talk about it endlessly, or stick their head in the sand, but all of us are in some way expressing anxiety over the situation we're increasingly realizing we're in. Oh, but how lovely it would be to learn we're just dopes and nothing was wrong at all!
I greatly prefer The Power of Now over his other books. IMO he does not practice what he preaches as much as he used to, and that influences his writing in small ways. Just my unenlightened opinion, though.
Alan Watts was an alcoholic. We're all human and prone to temptation and addiction, and even the ego. Curious about the flaws of Eckhart, or maybe not..
Depending on the source of your anxiety you might find that "Enlightenment Now!" by Steven Pinker is helpful. It was for me with my anxiety about the course of humankind.
Reading the thesis / synopsis of this book, I feel I live on a different planet than Pinker. Not sure how this would make anyone struggling with the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy feel better ...
I am naturally pessimistic, so it is hard for me to swallow that the human experience is improving for people all over the world. However, Pinker presents a large amount of compelling data in "Enlightenment Now" about how we are actually progressing as a species. It is a good counterbalance to incessant negativity of the media.
Sales of books on anxiety are only increasing in places like California and New York. In other parts of the country, sales of such books are decreasing.
I wonder if this means that there's something unique about California and New York, or that these two states are trend setters and other states will soon follow suit.
I just think it's where the country's highest earners are. Higher paid positions usually have higher levels of responsibility, higher levels of responsibility cause higher levels of stress.
Competition, both perceived and real increases as density goes up. We're not wired well to handle it. Especially since so many lack the deep roots to feel truly secure.
Pack more people closer together, damage the earth more and more and reduced resources, life for the average person will be a greater and greater struggle: depression and anxiety will likely be the norm, not the exception. Likely explains the emotional aspects of the opioid crisis as well.
I humbly suggest having a homestead somewhere like Oregon and alternate two weeks of telecommuting, if just to release anxieties about the future, microfarming and gardening are more satisfying than one can imagine.
>I humbly suggest having a homestead somewhere like Oregon and alternate two weeks of telecommuting, if just to release anxieties about the future, microfarming and gardening are more satisfying than one can imagine.
SHHHHH!!! This basically what my family has; don't tell the world, we like the quiet!!!!
This advice is about finding some exception on the edges of society. It won't change anything and certainly doesn't scale past single digit percentages.
It's basically the non-drug version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out"
Moving to Oregon and telecommuting is not an option for most people.
Nobody with real problems gives a damn about density or the environment. They're too busy trying to cope with the anxieties of losing their job to automation, whether or not they can afford healthcare, and where they are going to live in artificially heated market (while getting reamed over monthly rent). Oh, and we're expected to have saved millions of dollars by the time we're 65, since Social Security may or may not be around.
It is a time of many uncertainties, all of which fuel anxiety. Life is hard and unclear if you aren't privileged.
> It is a time of many uncertainties, all of which fuel anxiety. Life is hard and unclear if you aren't privileged.
When and where was that never the case?
Life in America, relative to history, is currently very, very good. For example, there's no famine. Childhood diseases are a thing of the past. Polio was defeated. No armies ravaging the countryside. No cold war. Health care is better than it ever was before. People grow tall and healthy.
Best of all, there is no caste or nobility system. People can, and often do, rise from nothing to wealth.
For very long stretches of time in rural life. Even medieval peasants had it much better than most people think. A lot of people conflate disasters and incidents from millennia of history (1 to 1950 A.D say) and across countries, and create a mix of disasters as if those were constants in the pre-modern era.
I'm not buying it. Famine was a constant and very real threat throughout history until around 1800 in the US. There was no defense against disease. No medical care. No dental care. Get an injury leaving you unable to work? You died.
If people in those days had less anxiety, it hardly meant they had less adversity and risk. It likely meant they accepted lower expectations of what life was about.
I agree with what you are saying, except for perhaps the first line. What I mean is - I would posit that if you aren't privileged, you have almost _more_ incentive to slip out of society and into the middle of nowhere. There is cheap real estate in this country - just not on either coast. There is a cash-driven, barter-heavy economy out there for people who are willing to do ugly, dirty, time-consuming job in places far from the cities. Not an easy life, but perhaps comparatively less stressful or costly than one involving a multi-hour commute in order to work a minimum wage job in an expensive urban area.
My then 96-year old grandmother put it best: Your generation has a lot more money than my generation, but you have more stress and will never know many of the simply pleasures my generation experienced. Yes, perhaps it is a privileged mindset, but I find myself wondering if/when "Average Joe/Jane" type people are going to decide to get off the roller coaster and seek a different path than the traditional one society / media / politicians / etc push, in their interest.
I think there are two flawed assertions here. One is that the non-privileged can even afford to attempt what you're suggesting without putting themselves or their families at immediate risk. You cannot drop your two jobs in the city and take your kids out of kindergarten to drive off toward "cheap real estate" (which you also can't afford, anyway) in a car you may or may not have, using gas you also can't afford without a payday loan.
If you can afford to make that kind of move, you're more privileged than many.
If you can do it and it fails, can you afford to come back and try to re-start your previous city life? Then you're even more privileged than the first subset of people. Those living paycheck to paycheck can't just shove off for greener pastures in today's climate, period, and the few who can would prefer not to take the risk because failure is just too stressful.
The second flawed assertion is that your generation has more money than your grandmother's generation. You might have more dollar bills in your bank account, but they're worth less than ever before and "Real Wages" for the lower and middle class have been flat or falling for decades.
Now, HN surely has a concentration of workers who live outside of this phenomenon and have experienced increasing wages and live upper-class lifestyles, but hardly true of today's "generations" as a whole.
Your model struggles with fitting the preponderance of anxiety for the historically-relatively well off, or even, say, the high anxiety in the upper privileged classes of the US. Particularly compared to low anxiety rates in communities around the world that suffer much more hardship.
you are comparing highly educated and well informed about the world situation people to the ones with no TV or Radio.
Problems that touch you directly like "i have too few resources - money" can be solved mostly by the ones struggling but "the world is fucked and we all are going to die" wont
Romanticized mental disorders probably also have something to do with this. Claiming to have some anxiety and depression is pretty much par for course these days. What's more ironic is that the trend is to suggest that you're secretly depressed and anxious with suicidal thoughts and hiding it with humor by... pretty much telling people that you're secretly depressed and anxious with suicidal thoughts and hide it with humor. Which is kind of contradictory.
But then again, it's kind of a dick move to question anyone's mental state in such a manner. Because you don't know what's actually going on for the most part. You won't have the whole story most of the time. So if someone says they're anxious or depressed or a third thing, accept it, let them have it. Worst case scenario, they're putting on airs and they get the attention and validation they're craving. Big deal. If this leads to less stigmatization about mental health in general and people who genuinely need help, get it, I don't care if only 0.01% of people who claim it have it.
Not to mention, even if you aren't afflicted to the degree that it negatively impacts your life, learning how to manage anxiety can't be a bad thing.
It seems to me you’re painting people with a broad brush. Many people who talk about anxiety (or depression) talk about it because they are dealing with it, successfully or no—awareness does not imply inaction.
Why would you question them? If you think they have more capacity to handle life than they think they do, this would probably be a reassuring and helpful thing to state.
This assumption that people would prefer a comfortable self conception to addressing their problems is a dangerous slope to go down. People are not this simple in aggregate or individually.
Either I know far more depressed and anxious people than is statistically likely or there is some degree of over-reporting going on.
And I think I explicitly said that I don't question them. I keep it to myself, because if I'm right to question them, the rewards are minimal, but if I'm wrong, then the risks are greater.
I also think you're reading me wrong. It's not "You're stronger than you think you are." It's more like a child over-selling their accident for attention. I don't believe that it's as serious as being made out.
And where did I say anyone is simple in the aggregate or individually? I noted certain trends, that's all. And while people are not simple in aggregate or individually, statistics can't be beat.
Given the status of the media and political discourse right now, can you blame anyone for being anxious? If you went on what the former say about Trump (or randoms on social media sites say about anything) you'd think we were on the verge of World War 3. See another articles and internet posters screaming about how the 'other side' will destroy the world and all you hold dear, and well, I'd want a few books on anxiety too.
Slightly off topic, but given Amazon is off conquering the world, does anyone else feel as though Barnes & Noble could put together a data driven blog regarding trending books, topics, how different books are read, etc. much like OkCupid did for dating a while back? It might not be as sexy of a topic, but it could captivate an audience to think about Barnes & Noble when you buy a book?
Instead, I wanted to do reading-sentiment showing which parts of the book were exciting by measuring engagement, to learn years later porn-sites had been doing that successfully for a long time.
Could also be the people that are bombarding the average citizen with all of the atrocities committed by trump, from how many scoops of ice cream he gets to the trade war.
People love to hate trump, but it also becomes tiresome and stressful when people are constantly bombarded with analysis of tweets, off hand comments, and other decreasingly trivial things, and then finally mix in all of the instability of global politics.
Spending 2+ weeks abroad on vacation reduced my anxiety levels significantly - partly due to the fact that noone talked about Trump much at all (and when they did I simply ignored or changed the subject).
Not a surprise with what the media has been doing. They've done it for every (R) President, but it gets worse every time. They protested Reagan, worried he was going to start a nuclear war with Soviet Russia. Worried he was going to take away rights from women. Worried what he was going to do in Central America. They called Bush 43 worse then Bin Laden, the worlds greatest terrorist. Hollywood commissioned movies like Fahrenheit 9/11 to try and conflate national tragedies with certain political views. Now with Trump, you have straight out suppression of certain viewpoints, implicit acceptance of violence against those in power, implicit acceptance of 'acceptable' racism, and constant ratcheting up of rhetoric by those who lost.
I remember what Jon Stewart said on the Daily Show in 2012, to Republicans. "You LOST, it's SUPPOSED to taste like a shit sandwich!"
Does anyone else think technology has a lot to do with this?
Recall the experiment where a rat is placed in a cage with a "pleasure button" that stimulates reward centers in its brain. The rat proceeds to never stop pressing the button.
I believe that things like social media act in the same way. Not to mention smartphones, "clickbait", video games. Machine learning algorithms that increase a service's abilities as a pleasure button.
The philosophy behind HN is that popular community websites have lower quality content. In my view, this is simply a "regression towards the mean" of people wanting a dopamine rush.
Not entirely new. Bookstores have been slowly expanding their ancillary offerings.
I think it has to do a lot with tie-ins. Now bookstores sell movies and music as well. So a book gets adapted into a movie, you can sell the book, the movie, the soundtrack, the tie-in collectibles, etc.
68 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadYou really can't compare that with today's 24/7 cable news and media barrage.
Meditations: http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html
Seneca's Moral Letters: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius
Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety by Kelly G. Wilson and M. Troy DuFrene
I'll also add Ecclesiastes - there's perennial wisdom in that old book, and it doesn't demand a lick of faith.
https://www.mysanantonio.com/technology/businessinsider/arti...
I humbly suggest having a homestead somewhere like Oregon and alternate two weeks of telecommuting, if just to release anxieties about the future, microfarming and gardening are more satisfying than one can imagine.
SHHHHH!!! This basically what my family has; don't tell the world, we like the quiet!!!!
It's basically the non-drug version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out"
Nobody with real problems gives a damn about density or the environment. They're too busy trying to cope with the anxieties of losing their job to automation, whether or not they can afford healthcare, and where they are going to live in artificially heated market (while getting reamed over monthly rent). Oh, and we're expected to have saved millions of dollars by the time we're 65, since Social Security may or may not be around.
It is a time of many uncertainties, all of which fuel anxiety. Life is hard and unclear if you aren't privileged.
When and where was that never the case?
Life in America, relative to history, is currently very, very good. For example, there's no famine. Childhood diseases are a thing of the past. Polio was defeated. No armies ravaging the countryside. No cold war. Health care is better than it ever was before. People grow tall and healthy.
Best of all, there is no caste or nobility system. People can, and often do, rise from nothing to wealth.
For very long stretches of time in rural life. Even medieval peasants had it much better than most people think. A lot of people conflate disasters and incidents from millennia of history (1 to 1950 A.D say) and across countries, and create a mix of disasters as if those were constants in the pre-modern era.
If people in those days had less anxiety, it hardly meant they had less adversity and risk. It likely meant they accepted lower expectations of what life was about.
There have been institutions taking care of the disabled and the poor for millennia.
My then 96-year old grandmother put it best: Your generation has a lot more money than my generation, but you have more stress and will never know many of the simply pleasures my generation experienced. Yes, perhaps it is a privileged mindset, but I find myself wondering if/when "Average Joe/Jane" type people are going to decide to get off the roller coaster and seek a different path than the traditional one society / media / politicians / etc push, in their interest.
If you can afford to make that kind of move, you're more privileged than many.
If you can do it and it fails, can you afford to come back and try to re-start your previous city life? Then you're even more privileged than the first subset of people. Those living paycheck to paycheck can't just shove off for greener pastures in today's climate, period, and the few who can would prefer not to take the risk because failure is just too stressful.
The second flawed assertion is that your generation has more money than your grandmother's generation. You might have more dollar bills in your bank account, but they're worth less than ever before and "Real Wages" for the lower and middle class have been flat or falling for decades.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/25/americ...
https://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2012/03/basics...
Now, HN surely has a concentration of workers who live outside of this phenomenon and have experienced increasing wages and live upper-class lifestyles, but hardly true of today's "generations" as a whole.
I think there is a lot of evidence which contradicts this line of reasoning. Being in nature has a relaxing effect. Even just this past week
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180720112806.h...
Although, I would agree that many people are alienated from the biosphere and don't realize how it may help them feel better,
It's really satisfying though, I agree.
Problems that touch you directly like "i have too few resources - money" can be solved mostly by the ones struggling but "the world is fucked and we all are going to die" wont
But then again, it's kind of a dick move to question anyone's mental state in such a manner. Because you don't know what's actually going on for the most part. You won't have the whole story most of the time. So if someone says they're anxious or depressed or a third thing, accept it, let them have it. Worst case scenario, they're putting on airs and they get the attention and validation they're craving. Big deal. If this leads to less stigmatization about mental health in general and people who genuinely need help, get it, I don't care if only 0.01% of people who claim it have it.
Not to mention, even if you aren't afflicted to the degree that it negatively impacts your life, learning how to manage anxiety can't be a bad thing.
Why would you question them? If you think they have more capacity to handle life than they think they do, this would probably be a reassuring and helpful thing to state.
This assumption that people would prefer a comfortable self conception to addressing their problems is a dangerous slope to go down. People are not this simple in aggregate or individually.
And I think I explicitly said that I don't question them. I keep it to myself, because if I'm right to question them, the rewards are minimal, but if I'm wrong, then the risks are greater.
I also think you're reading me wrong. It's not "You're stronger than you think you are." It's more like a child over-selling their accident for attention. I don't believe that it's as serious as being made out.
And where did I say anyone is simple in the aggregate or individually? I noted certain trends, that's all. And while people are not simple in aggregate or individually, statistics can't be beat.
How could you possibly distinguish? And my point was that extrapolating a claim on an aggregate from anecdotal evidence seems low value.
It'd probably be a better match than those ok cupid algorithms, and an instant ice breaker.
Instead, I wanted to do reading-sentiment showing which parts of the book were exciting by measuring engagement, to learn years later porn-sites had been doing that successfully for a long time.
I guess Freud had a point.
Could also be the people that are bombarding the average citizen with all of the atrocities committed by trump, from how many scoops of ice cream he gets to the trade war.
People love to hate trump, but it also becomes tiresome and stressful when people are constantly bombarded with analysis of tweets, off hand comments, and other decreasingly trivial things, and then finally mix in all of the instability of global politics.
Very refreshing.
Recall the experiment where a rat is placed in a cage with a "pleasure button" that stimulates reward centers in its brain. The rat proceeds to never stop pressing the button.
I believe that things like social media act in the same way. Not to mention smartphones, "clickbait", video games. Machine learning algorithms that increase a service's abilities as a pleasure button.
The philosophy behind HN is that popular community websites have lower quality content. In my view, this is simply a "regression towards the mean" of people wanting a dopamine rush.
They sell toys and legos now. Things you would have found at Toys R Us. Maybe this isn't new and I'm just slightly out of date on these things
I think it has to do a lot with tie-ins. Now bookstores sell movies and music as well. So a book gets adapted into a movie, you can sell the book, the movie, the soundtrack, the tie-in collectibles, etc.