60 years ago you might have ended up in a psychiatric hospital without getting effective treatment, mental health issues were stigmatized and the incentive to seek out help was low. People used to just live a miserable life with their issues.
Nowadays knowledge about mental health issues is widespread in the population, somewhat normalized and leading to people seeking help.
I consider it realistic that depression did not actually increase, its just more people showing up in the statistics.
One anecdote. I had a friend who went from healthy to almost unable to walk through a post viral 'chronic fatigue' type thing. She couldn't really work but chronic fatigue wasn't a recognised condition for benefits so had to claim depression to get state assistance. (Ireland)
I 100% believe there is such an effect, and that it’s confounding the measurement of population level changes. But I want to point out that the existence of such an effect is not really evidence _against_ the changes, it’s just another confounder. Your wording is very accurate — you “consider it realistic that depression did not increase”, ie it is possible that depression didn’t increase. But whether depression actually did increase or actually didn’t, is not possible to determine from these numbers directly. Without controlling for confounders and doing some fun statistics, we largely just have opinions
Depression is related to biological health of the brain. People are exercising less leading to worse biological health of the brain. So you’d expect depression to be increasing.
Exactly. See also statistics for "how many people are left-handed". The incidence of left-handedness didn't go up; acceptance of it went up, and people stopped trying to force other people to hide/mask it.
It is also possible that depression itself is more widespread. But it seems exceedingly likely that acceptance, willingness to talk about it, and general understanding that the correct answer to "chemical imbalance in the brain" is not "cheer up!", have improved substantially.
If privileged people use words like depression (without also accounting for change in diagnosis) to basically say phones should be taken away from their children so they can control their feelings more, it always reminds me of https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-ar...:
> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, which is why the notion of blanket bans come so easily to them.
Inequality, injustice, war, climate change, lack of opportunity, loneliness, destruction of social systems by technology, decay of community values and the promise of a worse not better future. Is it that this generation is less well off than its parents, that housing is no longer affordable, that the world is polluted, that nuclear war has returned as a possibility, that careers once valuable are commoditized by technology? Is that why or is it something else?
Why not? The claim (which I believe is well supported) is that these things hijack some innate impulses to trap us in bad decisions. If you consistently make bad decisions (eg, put off developing your life) your line is less likely to continue.
This is just like animals that didn’t run from humans — they didn’t know to be scared of us and now they’re dead. Even massive things that could crush us can be killed if we slip through their defenses. The ones that survive are the ones that learn to fear the dangerous thing.
Just to be clear, I'm arguing that there _does_ appear to be evolutionary pressure here, so we probably will evolve in response. That argument doesn't require predicting how exactly we will evolve; you're kindof asking an orthogonal question. But I don't mind orthogonal questions, and I can imagine some ways that we might evolve in response:
1. Human reward-seeking becomes longer-term, with less of an emphasis on short term rewards. I'd bet this trend has probably already been ongoing for a long time. But I wonder if there are some negative effects of this -- for example perhaps it takes us longer to learn things that truly do have very quick, direct feedback loops. Maybe it takes us longer to learn how to walk, swim, etc as a result.
2. Screen-avoidant communities start to dominate the human population. Eg, Amish communities, "traditionalist" communities like that, your friends that religiously don't use social media, etc. I'd bet this is already happening too! Would be really interesting to look at the proportion of new births, perhaps controlling for usage of birth control. I wonder if this effect could result in humanity generally becoming more religious (as opposed to the recent trend of becoming less religious). Admittedly, this is more of a cultural change than a change in our dna, but I feel it fits the category -- it's a widespread change across humanity in response to the pressure of distracting apps.
3. Humans grow a stronger distaste for blue light. I suspect this wouldn't be the "end" state, because if it happens we'll probably just start buliding devices that put off less blue light.
The point is that to the extent it causes certain individuals to lose faith in humanity, or become reclusive, and as a result not reproduce -- it has the effect of altering the overall genetic makeup of subsequent generations. The net result being a population "adapted" to this new environment.
We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming.
Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate.
Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We have not yet evolved quickly enough to handle this many choices and decisions, as lame and unimportant as they may seem.
Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago.
Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.
But it was less of a "choice". You could choose between using this or that now vs tomorrow, pulling something from the root cellar, etc, but it was a clear optimization problem even if some of the specifics were subjective or speculative.. No "I don't feel like eating chicken tendies" bullshit.
From Moby-Dick, about spending three years at sea (Chapter 35):
"""There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."""
This is absolute nonsense, for most of history most people were at the edge of starvation, balancing on the knifes edge between "not enough people to work on a farm to provide enough food" and "too many people for the food we grew".
Of course, most of history didn't even have concept of depression or a sizeable count of medical professionals to diagnose it.
Over 90% of your body's serotonin is
manufactured in your gut, meaning severe anxiety and
depression often start in your digestive system, not your
brain.
Turns out houses are getting smaller for most people,and less interest in gardening and outdoor activities, sitting around and playing on there phones all the time will create boredom. And without having goals in there life to keep them motivated is one of the key things to prevent depression.
John kirwin also stated this in his book.
Apart from people with chemical inbalance
Living space per person has tripled since the 1950s for Americans. House sizes have gone up and family sizes down.
I do notice that new houses seem to be built to maximize house size and leave little for the garden. I assume most people want that. Personally I've got a large garden, although it's a lot of work.
Is this like how everyone warned us about an ADHD epidemic and it turned out it was an epidemic of getting extra time on exams? There were lots of explanations from the mental health brigade. These kinds of extra strong effects are like the blue zones situation - there's always something else that creates a formal effect that is nothing like an actual change.
That is a thing people do when they feel a lack of control over other aspects of their life. It's a coping mechanism. Frequently comorbid with depression.
Also it's quite rude of you to dismiss an entire generation with this belittling rhetoric. Mental health is a really, really big deal.
I think the previous generation of Hollywood films was not so egregious on this. There were a lot of normal looking famous actors: Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro etc. Often playing good guys.
Now most actors in popular media are good looking to an uncanny level. Antagonist are beautiful too (in GoT as well).
It's not surprising if this negatively affects the psyche of the everyday person.
That's absolutely not the whole answer and never has been.
- People who crave validation seek good looks. They want to be accepted.
- People who crave status seek good looks. They want to be awarded.
- People who crave admiration seek good looks. They want to be desired.
There are so, so many more possible reasons and motivations, and it highly depends on the individual. Someone could have all of the above or none of the above and still obsess over looks. Someone could obsess for different reasons in different contexts or with different moods.
It's not based on some infantile monkey-see-monkey-do obsession with media.
Yes, but if they only see the people of their small town, they see averages, and get a better idea of their own looks, than if they see best shots of the best actors online/in movies.
Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment is looking more and more real by the day.
> The "Beautiful Ones": Younger mice withdrew entirely from social interaction, spending all day grooming and eating alone without mating or fighting.
> Hyper-Aggression and Apathy: Dominant males attacked others randomly, females neglected or killed their young, and reproduction completely flatlined.
I don't know. I think it's too convenient to blame this solely on devices and internet and such.
I'm certain that they are a symptom, but I am unconvinced that they are a sole cause for this
Edit: Obviously not a psychologist, but just from what I observe: People have had way higher expectations from life than ever before in the past, and life has not really been meeting those expectations.
A lot of people I know simply aren't going to enjoy the same luxury that they grew up expecting, being told they would have, that they were "promised".
But what about "the medium is the message"? I haven't read the book, but I'm remembering a quote mentioning how the technological mediums become extensions of our nervous systems, through this optic, internet and devices maybe really do have this kind of potency...
people don't often understand the integration I have with my devices, and the digital world in general. they are part of me in a very real sense. I learned to operate a computer much the same as someone would learn to move their arm. it is almost something greater than just second nature to me. it feels very similar to how a skilled operator can see heavy machinery as an extension of their body.
Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.
> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense.
Nobody is seeing how the wealthy live. They're seeing caricatures of how people imagine the wealthy live, or sometimes the extravagance of the nouveau riche living out those fictions. And even when they get glimpses of actual wealth, like all forms of entertainment (including rage bait) they're seeing highly compressed slices that only superficially reflect the fictions.
And the same is largely true for every class and group depiction. People forming expectations based on digital content (social media videos, but even "news" stories and narratives) are bound to be confused. Over time their expectations simply won't match the way reality unfolds, but they don't understand why. This helps drive conspiracy theories, both on the left and the right; narratives are concocted to explain the fictitious universes people are living in.
"Wealthy" is extremely relative, which is why people here think of SV oligarchs, but people in a very poor part of the world might see the standard of living of the average middle class person in another country as wealthy.
For example the people in Fnideq, Morocco can see how people in Ceuta are living directly, and media deptiction (including quite accurate ones) of how people live in Spain. Now while you or I would find both to probably be a significant lifestyle downgrade, to a destitute young man in Fnideq it's literally tempting enough to risk their lives to bridge that gap.
Wherever you are in the world you now have a window into the possibilities, the lifestyles, the leisure, the lack of humiliating poverty that others experience. It's not just human nature to see that and want it, it's primate nature.
> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense.
What are they seeing? I admittedly have yet to meet a billionaire (that I know of), but I've seen plenty of deca- and centimillionaires out in the wild. They were just doing mundane things like eating at McDonald's or sitting in the stands watching their children/grandchildren play sports. They were just regular people living regular, every day lives. If I didn't already know who they were before seeing them I'd have never guessed they were so wealthy. My sense after seeing that was that the wealthy are just as boring as I am.
I've known people with net worth in the $100m range and even someone in the three commas range.
They are indeed just people doing their thing with their families. All of them dressed normally and drove upper middle class cars most of the time, leaving the expensive cars at home. Some had expensive hobbies, all traveled a lot.
None of them appeared anything like the ultra-wealthy stereotypes that people develop from watching Shark Tank and Succession while scrolling through Instagram photos of influencers posing on private jets. Most of them were pretty nice people who were actually active in improving their communities, mostly around schools.
I addressed this is an earlier reply, but I'll add that almost by definition if your and their lives are intersecting it's going to be at the level of YOUR life. You're never going to be showing up for a private $20k per plate fundraiser, the Met Gala, various retreats and vacations, or their private residences. You DEFINITELY won't see their healthcare experiences, the options you have to travel or not work, the chances to simply not worry about the ups and downs of the world at large. Knowing that it's in your power to take care of any family member or friend regardless of the magnitude of the financial challenge.
So yes, when you see them, it's because that segment of their life and yours share a common point, but not a common trajectory.
You're right that we won't see everything, but the discussion taking place here was specifically said to be about what we do get to see and the sense that brings. And what I've seen and the sense that gave is that being wealthy is nothing special. I mean, I'd take it over life on skid row, but I'm not sure I'd care to trade it for my modest life. There is no obvious step up, as fun as looking at substantially larger numbers might be. Like you say, the things I don't get to see could change that calculus, but since the original comment being replied to explicitly defined the conversation to be about what we do see, that's moot. No need to change the subject.
I was honestly just talking about "people used to afford a house and family with two vacations per year on a single income, now people can't even afford a house on two incomes" which seems to be a common refrain nowadays
I know a lot of my friends and peers believe they have worse standard of living than their parents did at the same age, and the data does seem to agree with them. Existence of smartphones is a nice convenience but it doesn't seem to offset being able to afford a house or flights and hotels for vacations
I doubt "the data" is anything more than a survey of said people's feelings on the manner, which is basically of zero value. But we live in an age where if enough people say something is true that "makes" it true, objective reality be damned.
While true a lot of subtlety is hidden in those seemingly simple comparisons. For example has the median/average home size grown since then? If so by how much? How about amenities that are expected in a modern home? In the 1950's and 1960's what did a vacation look like for a single-income family with kids back then? What does it look like now?
If you look at the data what you see is that people have more, want more, and spend more. People didn't necessarily fly to Europe, maybe a vacation was a local seaside, a road trip, or something similar. Heck even for the same vacation to the same place you pay more today because supply and demand lets it happen; you'll pay 250% more for a trip to Disney now than you would in the 1970's, but then again the global population has exploded along with the population globally that can afford to go to Disney.
I know that everyone wants to believe in some kind of quick political or economic fix, but it just isn't that simple. If you want to spread out the existing wealth for everyone then the average standard of living would drop. If you want to raise that standard of living while extending it to more people... well, good luck?
Housing is not more expensive because people have granite countertops. If anything it's the other way around. The land houses sit on has grown exponentially in value regardless of the quality of the building itself. Take any modest US suburban house that's been around since the 70s, and check its value over time. Even if the house is still the same building, same square footage, its current value will be much more than its initial value in today's dollars. If you're paying $700k for a house that was worth half that in today's dollars a generation ago, you might as well spend the extra few thousand it takes to get the nice countertops; their value relative to the rest of the house has gone down considerably.
If you're buying a $700k house there are only a few parts of the country where your statement is true, and frankly much of that comes down to a few cities and metro areas. The idea that people buying a house in rural NC today and 30 years ago are somehow facing radically different (inflation adjusted) lot prices doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
But again, if you want to look at houses in the 1970's then you have to remember that the US population has risen by 150,000,000 since then... the land is the same size. The cities that everyone wants to live and work in are mostly the same with some changes in the Pacific coast of course. You're also competing with far more people who have relatively more money to spend, including a willingness to go into serious debt, to live their "dream".
> For example has the median/average home size grown since then
Sure. Let's compare to the 90s.
According to Google, New detached homes are 10-20% larger in square feet today than they were in the 90s.
Also according to Google, new detached homes are 3.3x more expensive, inflation adjusted, than the 90s. Of course mortgage interest rates play a part here too, but that's a really bad starting point
And that's just for starters.
There are also places in the USA where the minimum wage has not increased since the 90s, and there may actually still be people trying to get by on a wage of 5.50 an hour.
I know all of this is oversimplifying things to an extent. Economics is hard. But it's not that hard...
I was around in the 1980's and people weren't buying a home and a yearly family vacation on a single income, that era was long gone. If you're talking about those "Good Old Days" then you're talking about the postwar economy that was decisively long gone by '80s.
They might have been "buying" a home with a long-term mortgage, and by the 1980's you were seeing the rise of individual credit card debt as a way to finance a previously unobtainable lifestyle. The 1980's saw the first "cash back" card and rewards cards followed, along with a culture of assuming debt to consume.
What you saw in the 1980's ended much like it did in 2008, it wasn't sustainable and it went bust just as it would over and over and over since. BUT people want more, they want to pay less for it, and many more people want that. If you're a politician you don't win by fighting against that, you swim with the currents and find scapegoats to blame instead.
I take it from the shift in tone that you understood my point, although you don't particularly care to discuss it. I get it, no one ever wants to hear that biggest changes have been:
More people
More money
More people with more money
More competition for something previously limited to far fewer people historically
Costs rise
Expectations rise
Debt rises
And now if you've been keeping track we're at the "people who can't afford delivery finance their Doordash with a short-term loan" stage of the game.
my partner is a psychiatrist (that's the one with an MD)
in our household we treat all overly broad, trendy statements like this one with a huge grain of salt
the difference between rates of diagnosed major depressive disorder (MDD) vs the past has much more to do with a combination of the diagnostic criteria being refined [1] over the years and the increase of screening [2] during your annual checkup (something physicians were recommended against doing as late as the 90s). you know how your PCP asks you now how you're feeling, if you've had thoughts of self-harm, had any loss in appetite, or have given up your hobbies? that's the one
if you need to blame it on a social trend, there's a sharp correlation between the rates of suicide in the USA [3] with the transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of people to the top 1% [4]. as they say, correlation is not causation but it is one of the best indications that it might be. smarter and much better trained people than I can probably do the in-depth research and analysis needed to make that claim
MDD is the "bread and butter" of psychiatric practice. I'm not really sure how much that's changed over decades. Of course, depression treatment options have evolved greatly since the late 80s, truly a blessing.
You're probably right that increased awareness, reduced stigma and improved attention to diagnosis play a role in apparent population rate increase. Interesting how the comments here put forth quite a few "theories" regarding sources of the increase.
AFAIK there's no definitive explanation of the observation. In passing we should note that many other psychiatric conditions have parallel rising incidences. The factors you cite apply to those conditions as well.
Psychiatric conditions in general are very complex, with associations to a wide array of factors. Most likely many small contributors add up to vulnerability to one or more of these conditions. Our brains are constructed to prefer lumping things into simpler categories. What we call MDD clearly enough is not a unitary disease but outcome of a messy set of myriad "causes" diagnostically lumped together.
The progress made in identifying and treating psychiatric disorders is impressive and gratifying. The more we accept the messy reality, the greater the level of progress we'll make.
As someone living with a lifelong serious melted illness, I say this guy can F off.
Strictly blaming depression on sociological factors is demeaning to those people with mood disorders. What about diet? What about nutrition? What about EMF’s? What about Covid infections?
This blow hard with his three points, always three points by the way, is minimizing depression, and all people with mental illness.
Melted illness, that sounds very serious. He sure loves his brain hemisphere lateralization, wasn't that stuff seriously questioned? Like found to be divided the opposite way around, or not at all. He's also a bore, which according to the trendy theory of the day means he is doing a public service by making us bored.
60 years ago you might have ended up in a psychiatric hospital without getting effective treatment, mental health issues were stigmatized and the incentive to seek out help was low. People used to just live a miserable life with their issues.
Nowadays knowledge about mental health issues is widespread in the population, somewhat normalized and leading to people seeking help.
I consider it realistic that depression did not actually increase, its just more people showing up in the statistics.
One anecdote. I had a friend who went from healthy to almost unable to walk through a post viral 'chronic fatigue' type thing. She couldn't really work but chronic fatigue wasn't a recognised condition for benefits so had to claim depression to get state assistance. (Ireland)
I 100% believe there is such an effect, and that it’s confounding the measurement of population level changes. But I want to point out that the existence of such an effect is not really evidence _against_ the changes, it’s just another confounder. Your wording is very accurate — you “consider it realistic that depression did not increase”, ie it is possible that depression didn’t increase. But whether depression actually did increase or actually didn’t, is not possible to determine from these numbers directly. Without controlling for confounders and doing some fun statistics, we largely just have opinions
Depression is related to biological health of the brain. People are exercising less leading to worse biological health of the brain. So you’d expect depression to be increasing.
Exactly. See also statistics for "how many people are left-handed". The incidence of left-handedness didn't go up; acceptance of it went up, and people stopped trying to force other people to hide/mask it.
It is also possible that depression itself is more widespread. But it seems exceedingly likely that acceptance, willingness to talk about it, and general understanding that the correct answer to "chemical imbalance in the brain" is not "cheer up!", have improved substantially.
[dead]
If privileged people use words like depression (without also accounting for change in diagnosis) to basically say phones should be taken away from their children so they can control their feelings more, it always reminds me of https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-ar...:
> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, which is why the notion of blanket bans come so easily to them.
Is it because the world is more depressing?
Inequality, injustice, war, climate change, lack of opportunity, loneliness, destruction of social systems by technology, decay of community values and the promise of a worse not better future. Is it that this generation is less well off than its parents, that housing is no longer affordable, that the world is polluted, that nuclear war has returned as a possibility, that careers once valuable are commoditized by technology? Is that why or is it something else?
Go read some books about the past lol, my god
Turns out when people can't afford kids, healthcare, housing they are unhappy.
Usually it's rich people who are puzzled as to why others are unhappy.
It’s in quite literally the opposite? That depression and anxiety are rampant in rich communities, cultures, and countries?
*while being unemployed or having the threat of unemployment 24x7
To put it more succinctly: the world is changing too quickly for our biology to adapt.
This has seemed like a compelling idea to me for a while. It’s an interesting thought.
This is what adaptation looks like actually, some organisms not surviving to reproduce.
We have to be genetically adapted to survive food deliveries and TikTok?
Why not? The claim (which I believe is well supported) is that these things hijack some innate impulses to trap us in bad decisions. If you consistently make bad decisions (eg, put off developing your life) your line is less likely to continue.
This is just like animals that didn’t run from humans — they didn’t know to be scared of us and now they’re dead. Even massive things that could crush us can be killed if we slip through their defenses. The ones that survive are the ones that learn to fear the dangerous thing.
So hopefully future generations develop an instinctive fear of food deliveries and TikTok, or what?
Yes. A fear of destructive social/tech, and a fear of vast/easy eating habits that is destructive to their bodies
Just to be clear, I'm arguing that there _does_ appear to be evolutionary pressure here, so we probably will evolve in response. That argument doesn't require predicting how exactly we will evolve; you're kindof asking an orthogonal question. But I don't mind orthogonal questions, and I can imagine some ways that we might evolve in response:
1. Human reward-seeking becomes longer-term, with less of an emphasis on short term rewards. I'd bet this trend has probably already been ongoing for a long time. But I wonder if there are some negative effects of this -- for example perhaps it takes us longer to learn things that truly do have very quick, direct feedback loops. Maybe it takes us longer to learn how to walk, swim, etc as a result.
2. Screen-avoidant communities start to dominate the human population. Eg, Amish communities, "traditionalist" communities like that, your friends that religiously don't use social media, etc. I'd bet this is already happening too! Would be really interesting to look at the proportion of new births, perhaps controlling for usage of birth control. I wonder if this effect could result in humanity generally becoming more religious (as opposed to the recent trend of becoming less religious). Admittedly, this is more of a cultural change than a change in our dna, but I feel it fits the category -- it's a widespread change across humanity in response to the pressure of distracting apps.
3. Humans grow a stronger distaste for blue light. I suspect this wouldn't be the "end" state, because if it happens we'll probably just start buliding devices that put off less blue light.
In the future they'll just 3D-print humans "al gusto".. if they decide it's even worth the trouble.
The point is that to the extent it causes certain individuals to lose faith in humanity, or become reclusive, and as a result not reproduce -- it has the effect of altering the overall genetic makeup of subsequent generations. The net result being a population "adapted" to this new environment.
We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming.
Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We have not yet evolved quickly enough to handle this many choices and decisions, as lame and unimportant as they may seem.
So I did a chronological search for "what's for dinner", here it is in a poem from 1794: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindarian...
Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago.
Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.
But it was less of a "choice". You could choose between using this or that now vs tomorrow, pulling something from the root cellar, etc, but it was a clear optimization problem even if some of the specifics were subjective or speculative.. No "I don't feel like eating chicken tendies" bullshit.
From Moby-Dick, about spending three years at sea (Chapter 35):
"""There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."""
This is absolute nonsense, for most of history most people were at the edge of starvation, balancing on the knifes edge between "not enough people to work on a farm to provide enough food" and "too many people for the food we grew".
Of course, most of history didn't even have concept of depression or a sizeable count of medical professionals to diagnose it.
Over 90% of your body's serotonin is manufactured in your gut, meaning severe anxiety and depression often start in your digestive system, not your brain.
Turns out houses are getting smaller for most people,and less interest in gardening and outdoor activities, sitting around and playing on there phones all the time will create boredom. And without having goals in there life to keep them motivated is one of the key things to prevent depression. John kirwin also stated this in his book. Apart from people with chemical inbalance
Living space per person has tripled since the 1950s for Americans. House sizes have gone up and family sizes down.
I do notice that new houses seem to be built to maximize house size and leave little for the garden. I assume most people want that. Personally I've got a large garden, although it's a lot of work.
Is this like how everyone warned us about an ADHD epidemic and it turned out it was an epidemic of getting extra time on exams? There were lots of explanations from the mental health brigade. These kinds of extra strong effects are like the blue zones situation - there's always something else that creates a formal effect that is nothing like an actual change.
I think the new generation will be alright. From what I've seen, they seem to believe that maximizing their looks is the answer.
That is a thing people do when they feel a lack of control over other aspects of their life. It's a coping mechanism. Frequently comorbid with depression.
Also it's quite rude of you to dismiss an entire generation with this belittling rhetoric. Mental health is a really, really big deal.
Watch any movie, typically the protagonist is good looking and antagonist is ugly. That's the whole answer.
In Game of Thrones director had a chance to make the dwarf (protagonist ) really ugly, like in the books, but they chose a good looking actor.
Same for Harry Potter, Hermione was supposed to be meh.
I think the previous generation of Hollywood films was not so egregious on this. There were a lot of normal looking famous actors: Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro etc. Often playing good guys.
Now most actors in popular media are good looking to an uncanny level. Antagonist are beautiful too (in GoT as well).
It's not surprising if this negatively affects the psyche of the everyday person.
That's absolutely not the whole answer and never has been.
- People who crave validation seek good looks. They want to be accepted.
- People who crave status seek good looks. They want to be awarded.
- People who crave admiration seek good looks. They want to be desired.
There are so, so many more possible reasons and motivations, and it highly depends on the individual. Someone could have all of the above or none of the above and still obsess over looks. Someone could obsess for different reasons in different contexts or with different moods.
It's not based on some infantile monkey-see-monkey-do obsession with media.
Yes, but if they only see the people of their small town, they see averages, and get a better idea of their own looks, than if they see best shots of the best actors online/in movies.
It feels almost disingenuous to claim it's solely caused by beauty standards.
Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment is looking more and more real by the day.
> The "Beautiful Ones": Younger mice withdrew entirely from social interaction, spending all day grooming and eating alone without mating or fighting.
> Hyper-Aggression and Apathy: Dominant males attacked others randomly, females neglected or killed their young, and reproduction completely flatlined.
Remind you of anything?
I don't know. I think it's too convenient to blame this solely on devices and internet and such.
I'm certain that they are a symptom, but I am unconvinced that they are a sole cause for this
Edit: Obviously not a psychologist, but just from what I observe: People have had way higher expectations from life than ever before in the past, and life has not really been meeting those expectations.
A lot of people I know simply aren't going to enjoy the same luxury that they grew up expecting, being told they would have, that they were "promised".
But what about "the medium is the message"? I haven't read the book, but I'm remembering a quote mentioning how the technological mediums become extensions of our nervous systems, through this optic, internet and devices maybe really do have this kind of potency...
people don't often understand the integration I have with my devices, and the digital world in general. they are part of me in a very real sense. I learned to operate a computer much the same as someone would learn to move their arm. it is almost something greater than just second nature to me. it feels very similar to how a skilled operator can see heavy machinery as an extension of their body.
Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.
> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense.
Nobody is seeing how the wealthy live. They're seeing caricatures of how people imagine the wealthy live, or sometimes the extravagance of the nouveau riche living out those fictions. And even when they get glimpses of actual wealth, like all forms of entertainment (including rage bait) they're seeing highly compressed slices that only superficially reflect the fictions.
And the same is largely true for every class and group depiction. People forming expectations based on digital content (social media videos, but even "news" stories and narratives) are bound to be confused. Over time their expectations simply won't match the way reality unfolds, but they don't understand why. This helps drive conspiracy theories, both on the left and the right; narratives are concocted to explain the fictitious universes people are living in.
"Wealthy" is extremely relative, which is why people here think of SV oligarchs, but people in a very poor part of the world might see the standard of living of the average middle class person in another country as wealthy.
For example the people in Fnideq, Morocco can see how people in Ceuta are living directly, and media deptiction (including quite accurate ones) of how people live in Spain. Now while you or I would find both to probably be a significant lifestyle downgrade, to a destitute young man in Fnideq it's literally tempting enough to risk their lives to bridge that gap.
Wherever you are in the world you now have a window into the possibilities, the lifestyles, the leisure, the lack of humiliating poverty that others experience. It's not just human nature to see that and want it, it's primate nature.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2141866/
> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense.
What are they seeing? I admittedly have yet to meet a billionaire (that I know of), but I've seen plenty of deca- and centimillionaires out in the wild. They were just doing mundane things like eating at McDonald's or sitting in the stands watching their children/grandchildren play sports. They were just regular people living regular, every day lives. If I didn't already know who they were before seeing them I'd have never guessed they were so wealthy. My sense after seeing that was that the wealthy are just as boring as I am.
I've known people with net worth in the $100m range and even someone in the three commas range.
They are indeed just people doing their thing with their families. All of them dressed normally and drove upper middle class cars most of the time, leaving the expensive cars at home. Some had expensive hobbies, all traveled a lot.
None of them appeared anything like the ultra-wealthy stereotypes that people develop from watching Shark Tank and Succession while scrolling through Instagram photos of influencers posing on private jets. Most of them were pretty nice people who were actually active in improving their communities, mostly around schools.
Pretty boring, really.
I addressed this is an earlier reply, but I'll add that almost by definition if your and their lives are intersecting it's going to be at the level of YOUR life. You're never going to be showing up for a private $20k per plate fundraiser, the Met Gala, various retreats and vacations, or their private residences. You DEFINITELY won't see their healthcare experiences, the options you have to travel or not work, the chances to simply not worry about the ups and downs of the world at large. Knowing that it's in your power to take care of any family member or friend regardless of the magnitude of the financial challenge.
So yes, when you see them, it's because that segment of their life and yours share a common point, but not a common trajectory.
You're right that we won't see everything, but the discussion taking place here was specifically said to be about what we do get to see and the sense that brings. And what I've seen and the sense that gave is that being wealthy is nothing special. I mean, I'd take it over life on skid row, but I'm not sure I'd care to trade it for my modest life. There is no obvious step up, as fun as looking at substantially larger numbers might be. Like you say, the things I don't get to see could change that calculus, but since the original comment being replied to explicitly defined the conversation to be about what we do see, that's moot. No need to change the subject.
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Yes, that's true too
I was honestly just talking about "people used to afford a house and family with two vacations per year on a single income, now people can't even afford a house on two incomes" which seems to be a common refrain nowadays
I know a lot of my friends and peers believe they have worse standard of living than their parents did at the same age, and the data does seem to agree with them. Existence of smartphones is a nice convenience but it doesn't seem to offset being able to afford a house or flights and hotels for vacations
I doubt "the data" is anything more than a survey of said people's feelings on the manner, which is basically of zero value. But we live in an age where if enough people say something is true that "makes" it true, objective reality be damned.
While true a lot of subtlety is hidden in those seemingly simple comparisons. For example has the median/average home size grown since then? If so by how much? How about amenities that are expected in a modern home? In the 1950's and 1960's what did a vacation look like for a single-income family with kids back then? What does it look like now?
If you look at the data what you see is that people have more, want more, and spend more. People didn't necessarily fly to Europe, maybe a vacation was a local seaside, a road trip, or something similar. Heck even for the same vacation to the same place you pay more today because supply and demand lets it happen; you'll pay 250% more for a trip to Disney now than you would in the 1970's, but then again the global population has exploded along with the population globally that can afford to go to Disney.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...
I know that everyone wants to believe in some kind of quick political or economic fix, but it just isn't that simple. If you want to spread out the existing wealth for everyone then the average standard of living would drop. If you want to raise that standard of living while extending it to more people... well, good luck?
Housing is not more expensive because people have granite countertops. If anything it's the other way around. The land houses sit on has grown exponentially in value regardless of the quality of the building itself. Take any modest US suburban house that's been around since the 70s, and check its value over time. Even if the house is still the same building, same square footage, its current value will be much more than its initial value in today's dollars. If you're paying $700k for a house that was worth half that in today's dollars a generation ago, you might as well spend the extra few thousand it takes to get the nice countertops; their value relative to the rest of the house has gone down considerably.
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2026/08/Median-Lot-Sizes-by-Region...
If you're buying a $700k house there are only a few parts of the country where your statement is true, and frankly much of that comes down to a few cities and metro areas. The idea that people buying a house in rural NC today and 30 years ago are somehow facing radically different (inflation adjusted) lot prices doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
But again, if you want to look at houses in the 1970's then you have to remember that the US population has risen by 150,000,000 since then... the land is the same size. The cities that everyone wants to live and work in are mostly the same with some changes in the Pacific coast of course. You're also competing with far more people who have relatively more money to spend, including a willingness to go into serious debt, to live their "dream".
> For example has the median/average home size grown since then
Sure. Let's compare to the 90s.
According to Google, New detached homes are 10-20% larger in square feet today than they were in the 90s.
Also according to Google, new detached homes are 3.3x more expensive, inflation adjusted, than the 90s. Of course mortgage interest rates play a part here too, but that's a really bad starting point
And that's just for starters.
There are also places in the USA where the minimum wage has not increased since the 90s, and there may actually still be people trying to get by on a wage of 5.50 an hour.
I know all of this is oversimplifying things to an extent. Economics is hard. But it's not that hard...
I was around in the 1980's and people weren't buying a home and a yearly family vacation on a single income, that era was long gone. If you're talking about those "Good Old Days" then you're talking about the postwar economy that was decisively long gone by '80s.
They were buying a home and a yearly family vacation on two modest incomes, though. Try doing that now.
They might have been "buying" a home with a long-term mortgage, and by the 1980's you were seeing the rise of individual credit card debt as a way to finance a previously unobtainable lifestyle. The 1980's saw the first "cash back" card and rewards cards followed, along with a culture of assuming debt to consume.
What you saw in the 1980's ended much like it did in 2008, it wasn't sustainable and it went bust just as it would over and over and over since. BUT people want more, they want to pay less for it, and many more people want that. If you're a politician you don't win by fighting against that, you swim with the currents and find scapegoats to blame instead.
> They might have been "buying" a home with a long-term mortgage
Oh thanks for reminding me, people used to buy houses on 20 year mortgages now to make them remotely affordable they have to be 30-year mortgages
Good catch!
I take it from the shift in tone that you understood my point, although you don't particularly care to discuss it. I get it, no one ever wants to hear that biggest changes have been:
More people
More money
More people with more money
More competition for something previously limited to far fewer people historically
Costs rise
Expectations rise
Debt rises
And now if you've been keeping track we're at the "people who can't afford delivery finance their Doordash with a short-term loan" stage of the game.
my partner is a psychiatrist (that's the one with an MD)
in our household we treat all overly broad, trendy statements like this one with a huge grain of salt
the difference between rates of diagnosed major depressive disorder (MDD) vs the past has much more to do with a combination of the diagnostic criteria being refined [1] over the years and the increase of screening [2] during your annual checkup (something physicians were recommended against doing as late as the 90s). you know how your PCP asks you now how you're feeling, if you've had thoughts of self-harm, had any loss in appetite, or have given up your hobbies? that's the one
if you need to blame it on a social trend, there's a sharp correlation between the rates of suicide in the USA [3] with the transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of people to the top 1% [4]. as they say, correlation is not causation but it is one of the best indications that it might be. smarter and much better trained people than I can probably do the in-depth research and analysis needed to make that claim
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t5/ [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291670/ [3] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/data/index.html [4] http://blog.oxfamamerica.org.s3.amazonaws.com/politicsofpove...
MDD is the "bread and butter" of psychiatric practice. I'm not really sure how much that's changed over decades. Of course, depression treatment options have evolved greatly since the late 80s, truly a blessing.
You're probably right that increased awareness, reduced stigma and improved attention to diagnosis play a role in apparent population rate increase. Interesting how the comments here put forth quite a few "theories" regarding sources of the increase.
AFAIK there's no definitive explanation of the observation. In passing we should note that many other psychiatric conditions have parallel rising incidences. The factors you cite apply to those conditions as well.
Psychiatric conditions in general are very complex, with associations to a wide array of factors. Most likely many small contributors add up to vulnerability to one or more of these conditions. Our brains are constructed to prefer lumping things into simpler categories. What we call MDD clearly enough is not a unitary disease but outcome of a messy set of myriad "causes" diagnostically lumped together.
The progress made in identifying and treating psychiatric disorders is impressive and gratifying. The more we accept the messy reality, the greater the level of progress we'll make.
As someone living with a lifelong serious melted illness, I say this guy can F off.
Strictly blaming depression on sociological factors is demeaning to those people with mood disorders. What about diet? What about nutrition? What about EMF’s? What about Covid infections?
This blow hard with his three points, always three points by the way, is minimizing depression, and all people with mental illness.
Melted illness, that sounds very serious. He sure loves his brain hemisphere lateralization, wasn't that stuff seriously questioned? Like found to be divided the opposite way around, or not at all. He's also a bore, which according to the trendy theory of the day means he is doing a public service by making us bored.
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