181–190 of 195 posts
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wealth creates a system in which you need to have money to survive.
Do you have any viable alternative?
So that people can go to work out of personal choice and not out of desperation.
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Some people's brain chemistry makes feeling happiness much more difficult. Some people with clinical depression will physically never experience happiness the same way others do. That's true and valid. But does that really mean that being happy is not a choice? A paraplegic is unable to choose to move their legs due to a medical condition - would they assert that 'moving your legs is not a choice'?
I'm extremely skeptical of the brain chemistry narrative. It doesn't explain why depression is growing rapidly in the Western world. It doesn't explain why antidepressants vary so widely in their efficacy between persons. I'm far more apt to believe that people's lives are getting worse and that they're depressed as a result. People are lonelier than ever and society's problems are bigger and more abstract than ever.…
Then there is the depression you get after a bad relationship, or as you said, an increasingly individualistic and adversarial consumer society that goers against our social instincts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill We spend a lot of our time trying to add pleasure to our lives to (temporarily) boost us above our baseline happiness level, when really we should be spending that time learning how to change the baseline level itself. Isn't it odd that there are monks who live with nothing who are probably happier than any of us?
I've dreamed quite often about becoming a monk. It's not odd at all that if you limit your input your overall self is better for it. It's not really a reachable goal though, to remove all of my responsibilities and become so selfish as to become a monk. Here is the issue, you have a responsibility to the rest of the human race, to become self contained and not give back, is breaking the social contract don't you thin…
They've traded a life of materialism and conflict for self-reflection, asceticism and charity. They don't just hide away and do nothing but take care of themselves.
> Here is the issue, you have a responsibility to the rest of the human race, to become self contained and not give back
This is not a truism and is open to philisophical debate.
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Do you have any viable alternative?
Yes: free healthcare, unemployment checks, public housing like in various countries in Europe. So that people can go to work out of personal choice and not out of desperation.
Or maybe I am the one misunderstanding, in which case - you can be sure I am a supporter of social safety net.
However as someone experienced not only with the excellent public healthcare system in the north of Europe or in Germany, but with the more average ones in the union as well, IMO you should look at Switzerland more than at the EU. You talk of the EU system as if it is awesome everywhere - it's not. Answer for yourself - are your local governments as efficient, robust and not corrupt as the German is?
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I've dreamed quite often about becoming a monk. It's not odd at all that if you limit your input your overall self is better for it. It's not really a reachable goal though, to remove all of my responsibilities and become so selfish as to become a monk. Here is the issue, you have a responsibility to the rest of the human race, to become self contained and not give back, is breaking the social contract don't you thin…
Monks are some of the least selfish people alive. They've traded a life of materialism and conflict for self-reflection, asceticism and charity. They don't just hide away and do nothing but take care of themselves. > Here is the issue, you have a responsibility to the rest of the human race, to become self contained and not give back This is not a truism and is open to philisophical debate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people's brain chemistry makes feeling happiness much more difficult. Some people with clinical depression will physically never experience happiness the same way others do. That's true and valid. But does that really mean that being happy is not a choice? A paraplegic is unable to choose to move their legs due to a medical condition - would they assert that 'moving your legs is not a choice'?
I'm extremely skeptical of the brain chemistry narrative. It doesn't explain why depression is growing rapidly in the Western world. It doesn't explain why antidepressants vary so widely in their efficacy between persons. I'm far more apt to believe that people's lives are getting worse and that they're depressed as a result. People are lonelier than ever and society's problems are bigger and more abstract than ever.…
> “Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”
Some good articles on the political-economic phenomenon of depression, the response of mainstream treatment techniques and mental health in general:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...
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Happiness is not a choice. If you think it is, try learning more about clinical depression.
Some people's brain chemistry makes feeling happiness much more difficult. Some people with clinical depression will physically never experience happiness the same way others do. That's true and valid. But does that really mean that being happy is not a choice? A paraplegic is unable to choose to move their legs due to a medical condition - would they assert that 'moving your legs is not a choice'?
> “The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”
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I completely agree. As Chamath Palihapitiya (ex-Facebook) eloquently puts it, our technology culture is 'ripping apart the social fabric of how society works' [0]. We're social creatures who thrive on human interaction and sharing genuine moments - social media gives us the exact opposite [1]. The really insidious thing is that many of the big players and driving forces behind these trends saw it coming, knew that wh…
Not trying to sound smart here, but if that's your position, why did you go with Some people's brain chemistry... ?
There is nothing which will make you happy. You must choose to be happy. There is no job, no amount of money, no relationship, which will make you feel whole and happy and content and done. The opposite doesn't hold - there are jobs and relationships and financial strains which will certainly keep you from being happy. The goal isn't for a job or a relationship to make you happy. It's to enable other things which are…
It's not a choice.