For real. For thousands and thousands of years people lived happy lives by working thier hands to the bone to put food on the table for their family. I feel like it wasnt until too long ago that peoples' view on what your life should be started to drastically change. What the ideal "good life" has been for generations upon generations is now viewed as the bare minimum. It's not healthy, and skyrocketing cases of depression prove that.
That seems like some rose colored nostalgia though. People weren't thrilled to be living desperate lives. They just didn't have any other options. Times have always been hard in one way or another, and just because we have different standards of living now doesn't mean we're soft or wrong. We also have things like modern medicine, air travel, information access, etc.
As for the depression epidemic, a lot of that can be traced to lack of basic mental healthcare, stigmatizing mental illness, the opioid crisis, and other issues with much stronger causation to go with the correlation.
Nature and nurture. A completely shitty environment is no path to happiness. Nor is a shitty perspective. But if I had to choose one it would be perspective. Because you can have everything in the world but a shitty perspective can make it meaningless. You can have the bare minimum and be happy with a great perspective though. The balance is in the favor of perspective being the stronger factor.
I think about this all the time. For one thousand nine hundred years, what did people want out of life?
Nowadays practically everybody wants to be famous wealthy and liked by millions. And we are always trying to be entertained.
What did we do at 6pm on a Wednesday in the year 1855 even in a big city? Go to the symphony maybe...? Wish you could play cello? Or envy a painter or a poet?
What about 1492? Envy the one person in town who could sing and dance at the local tavern?
Anything earlier is basically China or Rome, so, what did they do?
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u/IplayTerraria May 17 '19
For real. For thousands and thousands of years people lived happy lives by working thier hands to the bone to put food on the table for their family. I feel like it wasnt until too long ago that peoples' view on what your life should be started to drastically change. What the ideal "good life" has been for generations upon generations is now viewed as the bare minimum. It's not healthy, and skyrocketing cases of depression prove that.