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540 points drankl | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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hresvelgr ◴[] No.44485587[source]
The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.
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Paracompact ◴[] No.44486061[source]
I agree, though possibly for different reasons. Those support systems may or may not be weaker than they were in generations past, but they are certainly more likely to say "I can't help you, go get professional help" than in the past.

In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.

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KolibriFly ◴[] No.44487887[source]
Yeah, calling depression a "disorder" sometimes misses the point entirely when despair is a logical response to how things are
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nradov ◴[] No.44488010[source]
Cheer up! For the average HN user, things are better now than they ever have been in human history.
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bevesce- ◴[] No.44488694[source]
Why is that a reason to cheer up? When I think about it, I’m miserable most of the time—and knowing that life was even worse for most people throughout history only makes me feel sadder.
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scotty79 ◴[] No.44488866[source]
I think he was being sarcastic. But on the internet you can't really tell.

Adopt absurdism. Nothing really matters and it's grotesquely hilarious at the same time. That might cheer you up. Occasionally.

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nradov ◴[] No.44489157[source]
Not sarcastic. Only people who are ignorant about history believe that things are really bad today. If you live in an industrialized country that isn't in the middle of a shooting war then things are objectively pretty awesome compared to the average conditions that humans have endured.
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1. scotty79 ◴[] No.44489236[source]
Only ignorant people think individuals can find comfort in averages.

Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.

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2. gadabout ◴[] No.44490011[source]
> Recently I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson saying that people came up with averages more recently than with calculus. It's not something people find relevant naturally.

Whoa now. That may be true within a strict scope of the "arithmetic mean" definition of "average", however, the idea of average as a 'concept' is much older. As an easy example, early references to agrarian yields (crop farming and how much food they produce) talk about average size of crop harvests, etc. Early tablets from Mesopotamia talk about average yield size, and those are dated 700ish BC.