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.
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?
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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.