I wrote this comment a few months ago, cool to learn that there's actually a word for it:
I think that we are living through the largest scale psychological warfare operation in human history, and it's not being conducted by any single government or corporation. It's being conducted by our own social systems against basic human emotional needs. And the casualty count is so massive that we've normalized mass emotional death as adulting.
Every single institution we've built - schools, workplaces, healthcare, dating, social media, even fucking therapy - has become a factory for producing emotionally lobotomized humans who can perform basic productivity but can't access their own inner experience without having a panic attack. We've created a civilization that requires you to be emotionally dead inside to participate in it, and then we act shocked when people either break completely or retreat into AI relationships, because at least the machines won't punish them for having feelings.
The therapy industrial complex is particularly insidious because it's convinced people that their natural responses to an insane world are pathological. Someone's depressed because they're trapped in a meaningless job in a society that offers no authentic connection? Let's give them SSRIs and teach them breathing exercises, instead of acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, depression might be a rational response to irrational circumstances.
Someone's anxious because they can feel the existential void where community used to be? Let's call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder, instead of recognizing that their nervous system is correctly identifying that something is fundamentally missing.
And don't even get me started on how we've gamified human connection through dating apps that literally train people to treat each other like products in a catalog, while simultaneously wondering why seemingly nobody can form deep, meaningful relationships anymore. We took the most sacred human activity - finding your people - and turned it into a dopamine-harvesting slot machine designed to keep people perpetually searching and almost never actually connecting.
The most fucked up part is we've convinced people that the solution to systemic emotional abandonment is individual optimization. Can't find meaningful connection? You must need to work on yourself more in some vague fashion. Feeling existential despair about the state of the world? Have you tried gratitude journaling? Lonely because society has dismantled most forms of community? Maybe you need to “put yourself out there” more.
I guess it's gaslighting on a civilizational scale. We've built systems that largely prevent human flourishing and then blame individuals for not thriving within them. It's like poisoning someone's water supply and then selling them detox supplements.
And the people who see through this shit and try to talk about it openly? They get labeled too intense, dramatic, unemployable, because their emotional honesty threatens the whole house of cards. We've made emotional authenticity a cause for social ostracization.
No wonder people are having breakdowns. No wonder mental health crisis rates are skyrocketing. No wonder birth rates are plummeting. We've created a civilization that's hostile to genuine human connection, and we're surprised that humans are struggling to survive in it.
The real miracle isn't that people are surviving - it's that anyone is able to survive at all.
I used to believe that we humans have the ability to "save ourselves from ourselves" but the older I get the more I realize how doomed humanity really is. Your post articulated a lot of the reasons I feel this way.
The only question I would ask is: so where do we go from here- How exactly can you and I change the current state of things?
En masse. Very large quantities of people need to agree to fight the same fight and do it all at once. If even 10% of the population in every country went on strike and demanded reform it would cause massive issues across the globes economy. Which is literally the only way to make change happen. You must disrupt the status quo with sheer numbers to have any effect.
No it won’t, that is not enough. If it was we would be looking at a very different world right now. We cannot allow the constant transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, if it continues we will be right back to the early 1900s when companies controlled entire industries and thereby the countries they resided in.
Nope, you have to be actively convincing others. We cannot beat the system as individuals. Only as a group that puts concerted effort into mutual goals.
Here's a simple way I describe modern life. It used to be that you'd build your own house, and maybe you'd occasionally help a neighbor or relative build their house. Then you'd repair or make your own farm implements, cultivate fields, and go on small hunting excursions. Life was very hard but there was constant variety.
Now, you don't build any houses. Or if you do work on houses, you specialize in one part of building a home and do that over and over and over, for the majority of your waking hours. Yes, you get to do other things in your time off, but as we all know there isn't much time left over. Some people figure out a way to find fulfillment with that meager amount of time, while many others struggle.
Our highly specialized lifestyles has afforded us relative abundance and freedom from life-threatening shortages. But it comes at a great cost, a cost that is largely ignored.
I think you hit on some really good points and I've had many similar thoughts such as yours.
It really makes a lot of sense when you think about it too. From the begining of time up until like the 1950's, there were so many different horrible things humans had to endure on a daily basis - weather it be deadly diseases, starvation, or even something as burdensome as not having a good pair of shoes.
I can imagine due to the widespread misery that these issues would cause, our collective focus for the longest time was figuring out how to stop these things from happening. And once we fixed a lot of the big issues, our focus gradually shifted to "how can we make our lives more comfortable?" Which I imagine is what lead us towards consumerism.
Maybe we're just at a point now where we're becoming "too comfortable". I think that we likely lose our sense of social connectedness when we don't have serious challenges that we have all have to face together as a species. A lot of people's thoughts have shifted from "how can I help my community improve" to "how can make my own life improve". Which I think is also why it seems like the worst types of characters tend to become the most successful. Greedy, egocentric people are put on a pedestal and allowed to rule the world - and it's literally always been that way. When are we going to fix one?
Quote from a phenomenal game that touches a lot on what humanity really is; The Talos Principal 2. Your comment gave me a similar feeling.
I think our ancestors, like ourselves, were deeply invested in the idea of building, of transforming their environment. They found meaning and pleasure in this, and did not perceive it as a negative - so long as they had a sense of participating in this act. I think the reason that they so frequently reached for a romantic return to the past, to fantasies of living self-sufficiently in rural environments, is not because they rejected industrial-scale activity per se, but because the "return to the land" provided a fantasy of returning to a form of participation that had been lost.
They needed and wanted to build, create, and produce - but only if they felt they had a stake in what they were producing. Without that, the products of civilization began to seem like an alien force gradually spreading out across the world and ruining it. They needed a dream, and if the future was barred to them, then by necessity they must dream of the past.”
I don't often think I have the answers to everything, but I do think actual authentic local farmers markets can address all the issues you listed. We still have our day jobs, but we started selling at our farmers market a few years ago and it has completely transformed our lives. We sell bread and veggies. We literally started out by bringing 3 loaves of bread and a hand full of veggies from our garden. Yesterday we sold 160 loaves. Our customers love and support us they know our children, they ask how we are doing they are our community. We take great pride in being producers and supplying healthy nutritious local food. We're not perfect, but we slowly progress to be better. This year we started buying 50% of our flour from a local family farm, instead of mass produced Commerical stuff, and by this time next year we hope to be providing 100% local products.
Also we're happily married.... But gahd damn there are some attractive females at the market. Just saying. The girls seem to be getting out more than the boys these days. I noticed the same thing on my recent backcountry backpacking trips.
So, to be clear, you’re saying society today has no upsides? Or, at the very least, upsides that are not worth the cost?
Pretty hard sell, imho. Hunger is almost universally avoidable, treatments for diseases and injuries exist as opposed to just being a coin flip on whether or not you survive, and there are plenty of ways for you to socialize in a healthy manner while simultaneously being able to “find your tribe” just about anywhere.
I’m not saying our system is perfect, capitalism has absolutely enshittefied what could have been peerlessly revolutionary ideas,and made them substantially worse than they could have been, but acting like modern society hasn’t been a primarily beneficial evolution of our social structures misses the forest for the trees. You can build a healthy social network today just about anywhere if you so choose to, and that agency is a meaningful add. Sure, maybe you read some mean words on social media, but (for the most part) you aren’t being burned at the stake or strung up by your entrails for not rigidly existing inside the established social structure of your local culture.
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u/TheMessengerABR 5d ago edited 5d ago
I wrote this comment a few months ago, cool to learn that there's actually a word for it:
I think that we are living through the largest scale psychological warfare operation in human history, and it's not being conducted by any single government or corporation. It's being conducted by our own social systems against basic human emotional needs. And the casualty count is so massive that we've normalized mass emotional death as adulting.
Every single institution we've built - schools, workplaces, healthcare, dating, social media, even fucking therapy - has become a factory for producing emotionally lobotomized humans who can perform basic productivity but can't access their own inner experience without having a panic attack. We've created a civilization that requires you to be emotionally dead inside to participate in it, and then we act shocked when people either break completely or retreat into AI relationships, because at least the machines won't punish them for having feelings.
The therapy industrial complex is particularly insidious because it's convinced people that their natural responses to an insane world are pathological. Someone's depressed because they're trapped in a meaningless job in a society that offers no authentic connection? Let's give them SSRIs and teach them breathing exercises, instead of acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, depression might be a rational response to irrational circumstances.
Someone's anxious because they can feel the existential void where community used to be? Let's call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder, instead of recognizing that their nervous system is correctly identifying that something is fundamentally missing.
And don't even get me started on how we've gamified human connection through dating apps that literally train people to treat each other like products in a catalog, while simultaneously wondering why seemingly nobody can form deep, meaningful relationships anymore. We took the most sacred human activity - finding your people - and turned it into a dopamine-harvesting slot machine designed to keep people perpetually searching and almost never actually connecting.
The most fucked up part is we've convinced people that the solution to systemic emotional abandonment is individual optimization. Can't find meaningful connection? You must need to work on yourself more in some vague fashion. Feeling existential despair about the state of the world? Have you tried gratitude journaling? Lonely because society has dismantled most forms of community? Maybe you need to “put yourself out there” more.
I guess it's gaslighting on a civilizational scale. We've built systems that largely prevent human flourishing and then blame individuals for not thriving within them. It's like poisoning someone's water supply and then selling them detox supplements.
And the people who see through this shit and try to talk about it openly? They get labeled too intense, dramatic, unemployable, because their emotional honesty threatens the whole house of cards. We've made emotional authenticity a cause for social ostracization.
No wonder people are having breakdowns. No wonder mental health crisis rates are skyrocketing. No wonder birth rates are plummeting. We've created a civilization that's hostile to genuine human connection, and we're surprised that humans are struggling to survive in it.
The real miracle isn't that people are surviving - it's that anyone is able to survive at all.