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What do you make of this video?
Mingle
Veteran
Perhaps I've got it wrong but It kinda implies that we deserve to be unhappy if we haven't done the right things in life and any attempts to lift depression are infact useless.
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Comments
Did we watch the same video @Mingle ?
It's basically saying don't self diagnose, don't use depression as the reason for everytime you're not happy. We are not automatically gong to be happy and we have to make an effort to be happy, successful, enlightened etc. You know, the Second Noble Truth
My personal take on it is - people, don't insult those who actually suffer from depression and don't be entitled enough to think that happiness is going to be dropped in your lap because you were born.
And I completely agree that social media has created a society of precious whiners who expect everything they want when they want.
I think the points he makes are legitimate but he is an asshole. Psychologists talk about developing emotional resilience in dealing with life's troubles, they don't call people pussies and tell them it's all their fault. Also the fact that it looks like it was sponsored by infowars at the end says alot about an agenda that it is pushing, that liberalism is stupid.
My favorite quote is by the ancient Indian Buddhist Shantideva:
Basically, learn how to deal with shit instead of expecting the world to always be nice to you.
Different behaviors and actions lead to different results. It doesn't have to be about blaming anyone but it says that if you want better results learn better habits. This is kind of what Buddhism is about with more kindness and less assholery.
Eh, guess I read into the wrong things and didn't quite get the jist of the whole vid. I would say I'm abit ADDish with these things but I guess that's the point, I'm self diagnosing.
If I exhibit depression symptoms I see it as something to be fixed like perhaps I need more vitamin d, maybe I need to sleep and eat better or perhaps Its hormones. I don't think I'm proud of it, Infact I find it quite unbearable to tell people that I'm feeling miserable.
I don't think social media is entirely to blame for people who feel entitled. And please don't generalize that this is how an entire society or generation is, because it is simply untrue. The people who are that way, in particular young people, are that way because of their parents. Because their parents tried too hard to give their kids everything and protect them from everything based on their experience growing up. The internet influenced their parents long before they were even born, and I know far more middle aged people who are utterly inpatient the second something from Amazon didn't get there in 2 days. They set poor examples. But even in their case, many of those parents were the children of baby boomers who were the first generation to be able to give their children much more than they had. For a long time we thought it was a great thing. Turns out, perhaps it is not. This guy is probably a millennial himself (my husband is) and thinks he's superior to people younger than him because they haven't experienced what he has in his couple of years of extra life. Like my 20 year old arguing with my 8 year old today. Pointless. I get so tired of hearing people rip on young people. The kids I know that are around that age are FAR more aware and engaged in politics, the economy, and their communities than all the middle aged idiots who complain about them all day long.
I think a lot of our values as a society have created a lot of unhealthy mental issues in a lot of people. But, I don't think the # of them with severe, clinical, chemical imbalances is the same. Most people create their own mental health-for good and bad. It's just easier to take drugs than it is to get to the root cause of our discomfort. Which is how we treat every single problem we have in every realm. We treat symptoms, not causes. No one "deserves" to be depressed, anxious or anything else. But we create our own reality most of the time. So in that way, we get what we "deserve" because of the effort we've put in.
In any case, I agree with @person. His message might not be wrong, but the delivery sucks. Another case of someone churning out their mind diarrhea and thinking it's important enough to share with the whole world.
I think depression is a result of modern civilisation and would probably go as far to say its only gonna get worse. Things like processed food, staying indoors too much and odd sleeping patterns are all a deterrence from our biological programming.
Self diagnosing anything is a slippery slope
Thank god/s for that. You're doing better than those self indulgent ones who make YouTube videos on how their life sucks so hard because their fave celebrity got picked on on Twitter and teh feels are too much to cope with
Yeah nah I'm going to have to stop you there and vehemently disagree with most of that.
Now this here ^^ I completely agree with.
Yes me and my workmate have had many a discussion on how sad that is.
@dhammachick if that is how it is in Australia, then that sucks. But it's not that way here, despite the insistence of stupid youtube videos made by people who rail on millennials while being millennials themselves (because they don't even know the difference) and FB memes and old people screaming for people to get off their lawn. When in reality most of those people wouldn't bother to shit on that lawn because they are too busy being involved. I literally can only think of a handful of people that age that I know that isn't doing vastly better than I was at that age. And most of those are in and out of jail or on drugs. And that is in spite of their parents.
We are raising this generation. If they are turning out miserable, it's our fault as collective parents. Not "social media."
@karasti I disagree with you on the fact it's not like that everywhere. Social media is a global phenomena affecting people globally. It can't not affect all countries except one.
But yes, the blame is on those raising them, in all areas.
@dhammachick Oh I don't disagree that social media has an affect. But I don't think it's entirely (or even majorly) to blame for those traits. I think social media is a result of the demands of society, not the other way around. They influence each other, of course. But if so many people have such strong feelings on the negative aspects of it, then why don't they stop using it? It's like people complaining about the business practices of Walmart, but they keep shopping there. Things don't change on that level until the consumer changes. The demand is driven by us.
But most of my point was that I don't think millennials are nearly so dire and awful as this guy, and so many others, make them out to be. I see a lot of hope in our young people here, and I highly doubt that it's exclusive to our small area. I also don't think it's productive in any way to count out an entire age group of people based on a few loud mouths. My parents age group was generally discounted as a bunch of over-sexualized, pot smoking hippies. Which of course isn't at all how most of them turned out. Every generation ahead of the younger one says the same stuff. It's just ignorant to assume that people younger than you are stupid because they don't see the world the same way you (generally speaking) do.
Has any younger generation been thought of as being better by the older generation ever in history?
I'd be curious to know if there ever was a place and time that it was true because it seems like they're always thought of as worse... and they won't get off my lawn!
It's OK, I'm not getting my point across so let's leave it as it is.
_ /\ _
Luxury. You had a lawn!.....
@dhammachick Sorry for the misunderstanding. For whatever reason, suggestions about generations just get my knickers in a twist and it was happening in 3 places last night (in one place it was utter disrespect and awfulness). I just had to walk away. I'm sure I wasn't hearing what you were saying because I was already up in arms from the previous encounter. Apologies.
There is a book that I am reading right now that talks about this exact matter. The name is kinda funny but it teaches the same thing. It's called "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***". It basically talks about how if you expect problems to go away before you can be happy than you will never be happy so suck it up. One problem going away is an invitation for another problem to arrive so which problems do you want. Life isn't perfect and neither are you. Interesting read.
You've probably already seen it, but Dr. Stephen Ilardi makes a great case for depression as a disease of civilization.
In regards to the video in the OP, I think Paul Joseph Watson dances around some valid social criticism that many others (many of them within the mental healthcare industry, for example, like Dr. Steven Hayes whose work in Acceptance and Commitment therapy has been especially helpful to me personally) have voiced already. That said, I don't think he goes deep enough.
On the topic of the how social media is re-engineering our society: social media enshrines and broadcasts people's worst impulses. Why? Because it essentially amounts to screaming out into the crowd of billions and hoping to be heard. People become more and more angry or desperate for attention the less they feel heard. We live in an increasingly socially alienated society (as Ilardi points out) and often use the Internet as a surrogate for social connection. But the Internet is vast. It's overwhelming. Your voice and identity gets lost in the shuffle of literally billions of other people jostling for their fix of attention and connection. It can seem like "me against the world" out there. The result? People become more extreme and sensationalist in their online expression, more unequivocal and categorical, more incendiary, more stubborn, more melodramatic, more hostile and antagonistic when someone disagrees with them (because it's not just one person disagreeing; it's seemingly the entire world)... and more obnoxious, more cruel, less humane, less nuanced, less compassionate.
But the rates of depression among young people have been going up long before Facebook.
In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, spoke to the National Press club about an American depression epidemic: "[W]e discovered two astonishing things about the rate of depression across the century. The first was there now is between ten and twenty times as much of it as there was fifty years ago. And the second is that it has become a young person's problem. When I first started working in depression thirty years ago... the average age of onset was 29.5. Now the average age is between fourteen and fifteen."
You can't blame Facebook or Youtube for that. Jiddu Krishnamurti famously said "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society." PJW pays lip service to "the ills of modern society", but ends up exhorting his listeners to simply buy into the same poisonous mythologies of happiness that are endemic in our society and exacerbate suffering. There's a reason the Buddha warned about the failings of the world, driven by the Eight Worldly Winds. Jesus did this too, and his teaching was radical in its rejection of worldly values. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle (in his Nicomachean Ethics), Seneca, Epicurus, et al. also spoke up against chasing worldly success and sensual pleasure as means to happiness. Yet, PJW doesn't seem to question that the values by which he is judging his depressed viewer are toxic: namely, the values of worldly success and prestige. He just throws his viewer back into the fray of the competitive, worldly rat race.
The other issue is that we as a society have grown increasingly unwilling to be with pain. Part of that are some of the things Ilardi talks about: social isolation, poor nutrition, lack of exercise, etc. Another part of that is that modern life is highly competitive. Ironically, this is a side effect of our material success and freedom in modern times. In the past, most people didn't have the option of jostling to become head honcho. They had their station in life and were basically limited by circumstance. Nowadays, it seems like everyone wants to feel like a venture capitalist or business tycoon. We don't have time to be frail, to be vulnerable, to be limited. If we let our guard down, we're "pussies" or "losers" or "failures" and are doomed to the bottom of the heap. There's a reason that philosophers, spiritual seekers, poets, social critics, and others have opted out of that aspect of society for millennia.
And finally, we have the pathologization of unhappiness. We're afraid to be unhappy. Because there's no salve. Modern life has dispensed with many of the things people used to rely on to bring them contentment and happiness: social connection, reflection, nature, spirituality, etc. Yet we are now more alone than ever, more overworked than ever, and the prevailing values we are constantly propagated in our society are of worldly success, status, and sensual pleasures rather than of personal peace, friendship and fellowship with others, contentment, love, mastery, etc. The only solution many see is to take a pill to adjust one's neurochemistry in such a way that one can re-focus on chasing worldly success again.
I think the video is more opinionated than concrete.