Best Of

@Jason Are you up for an experiment? I think it would help. For one week, do not read the news and do not discuss politics or cultural matters. Dedicate yourself to your ordinary daily life and your personal projects. Integrate into these activities your understanding of the Dharma. That's it. After a week, take note if this was helpful or not to your overall state of mind.

I propose this because - especially when I am in negative states of mind, but also in general - the news and political discussions are detrimental to my wellbeing. Dedicating myself to ordinary life, while trying for this ordinary life to be an expression of my deepest understanding of the Dharma - is supportive of my wellbeing.

My take written earlier this year:

I've had a couple of visits about my mental health with my PCP and a student clinical psychologist in the past week and have started buspirone to help with my depression and anxiety. But during those visits, I had trouble expressing some of the conditions and stressors that make it difficult, i.e., a combination of existential crises and material conditions under capitalism that make me feel constantly empty and anxious. As such, I'm both tentatively hopeful and chronically frustrated—hopeful the medication can help but frustrated that the world continues to be the way it is and creates so much unnecessary suffering.

My doctor recommended buspirone to help me weather the increased effects of the depression and anxiety I've been experiencing lately. And while I've been hesitant to take medications like this in the past, I've decided to see if it can help. But it's frustrating that many people, particularly in healthcare, don't seem to consider how our society contributes to the growing issue of depression and anxiety.

It seems like more and more people are struggling with these issues, some silently, some reaching out for help, and others taking their own lives. And while there are certainly physiological and psychological conditions caused by everything from chemical imbalances in the brain to the effects of trauma that healthcare professionals can help with in the form of medications and therapy techniques (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy) that can be life changing, I think there are some deep-seated causes that have gone unaddressed and continue to feed into people's depression and anxiety—most of them being the external stressors weighing heavily on people stemming from the ways we organize our society.

It frustrates me, though, whenever I try to talk about the way I feel and see the world to healthcare providers. Most immediately assume my unhappiness with the world and ambivalence to existence mean I'm an immediate suicide risk, and I have to repeatedly try to express the experience of existential malaise and unsatisfactoriness with the world we've created in a way that they can understand differentiates the two. There's plenty of religious and philosophical vocabulary surrounding this, but little in the medical field because they often start with some general assumptions about society that I don't think are completely true, such as the world is inherently good and life inherently meaningful and worth living as is. If you're not happy with life as it is, it's you who has to change. But if the world and the life we've created are scrutinized in any serious manner, I think it becomes clear that there are material social conditions that actually have a negative impact on our health and well-being.

In this country, for example, which is arguably the wealthiest and most technologically advanced in the world, most people have to work for a wage to survive, or else hustle one way or the other, and oftentimes both. People often have to spend a great deal of time at work (the majority of our waking hours in fact) and commuting to and from work, keeping us away from friends and family and limiting the free time we need to exercise or relax and recharge. Workloads themselves are often full of stress. On top of that, wages for many aren't enough to do more than pay for rent, food, and other bills, and people feel like they're living to work (and this is exacerbated by things like inflation, which is designed to weaken the spending power of wages further and make borrowing harder to slow consumption, thereby lowering demand and prices and all that other stuff to combat inflation without at the same time overly hurting capital and overall market growth). They don't call it "the rat race" for nothing. As if that weren't enough, even more pressures come from trying to make due with what you get, forcing us to make tough financial choices between things like paying for food, rent, and utilities vs. healthcare, childcare, and car repairs. Over half of Americans alone live paycheck to paycheck in a state of perpetual precarity and the threat of unemployment and ruin around every corner. And if you want to gamble, you can put yourself into a lifetime of debt to get a higher education and piece of paper that might get you a little extra cheese, but there are no guarantees. It's also difficult to relax when at least five days are full of going full speed to make someone else rich and two days are left for you to try and do all your personal errands, spend time with friends and family, and do something enjoyable and meaningful. And when we don't have the time or money for that, we often find it easier to self medicate with drugs or alcohol or reality TV or whatever helps us through the day.

And the broader socioeconomic atmosphere across the globe isn't much better, often full of violence and uncertainty, from wars and food shortages to volatile stock markets and imperialist competition between nation states, many of which are trying to catch up to and compete with the hegemony of the US. Combined all of that with the ability to have constant stimulation from news and social commentary on TV, social media, etc., it's little wonder that people are seemingly suffering from depression and anxiety more than ever before.

Certainly not every mental health issue is caused by these material conditions, but a large number are, and the majority almost definitely exacerbated by them. If we want to truly address this growing mental health crisis, we must not only expand access to and normalize mental healthcare and our vocabulary around the experience of mental pain, unsatisfactoriness, and loss or absence of meaning, but also address the omnipresent material conditions giving rise to and exacerbating them. We need more free time. We need to have our basic needs met without having to work ourselves to death. We need more access to the things that make life worthwhile and enjoyable. And we need to share all of that with everyone instead of a system where a few profit disproportionately off of the labour of the many, while the many in turn benefit from the oppression and exploitation of the poor and marginalized. Capitalism is a pyramid of inequality, and the further down you are, the heavier your burden and its negative impacts.

Gabor Maté on the Israel-Palestine conflict… he is Jewish but has also visited Gaza and has Palestinian contacts in Canada, so he has a pretty balanced perspective: