The site of million dollar houses, snobby empty people will increase your depression, even if you yourself are rich. It doesn't matter.
This is one of the reasons why the West is so depressing. They think richness makes people happy. It doesn't. I like puddles, dirt, commotion and disorder. It cures my soul.
You don't always have to be clean, orderly in EVERYTHING!
Thats why people like Marylin Monroe, Robin Williams, Michael Jackson and Elvis commit suicide. If they went to a place like Russia and started a farm, they would've met people who make them happy.
Meh, even going to a places like Canada, Iowa or Wisconsin would've helped them.
Living around cold calculating rich assholes will make you DEPRESSED.
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[–] chirogonemd ago (edited ago)
I think it depends on your values. If your values don't align with that culture, then it becomes depressing. I think there is sort of a revival happening in parallel with the conservative movement, and it has to do with the value of hard work, blue collar lifestyles, and appreciation of the working class that represents the foundation of the country.
Along with that, there is this realization through our vicarious experience of wealth and the upper echelons of society, that money/fame aren't as glamorous as all of us had been hypnotized to believe they were, from years of celebrity lifestyle adoration. The internet has caused their world to become more transparent over the years, and exposed the ivory towers as less desirable than they used to be.
Because the innate core needs of the human, on a philosophical and meaning level are still there, and the money isn't solving that. There are tradeoffs to everything. Fame and richness has its perks. No doubt. Adoration and importance are probably highly satisfying. But we are also realizing they trade a lot of the awesome aspects of simple life in exchange for those perks.
For someone who has values that don't center on wealth accumulation and social status, then being immersed in a culture that does will cause depression. You will feel "othered" in that group, and struggling to still find an identity/role within a group that you really don't care about. It's a recipe for being lost.
The key is to recognize it, decide now what your actual values are, and defend them. I think the "feeling lost" part comes when you get wishy washy on your values. You let social pressures, or some misconception about expectations of yourself (to play the game), shake your "value tree" and cause you to pursue things that really don't have that meaning for you, because everyone else is doing it. You've got to find your own values, set up boundaries around them, defend them, and pursue the places/jobs/people who share those. And what I mean by defending them is the ability to resist social pressures to mold your values for you. Many in my generation fell prey to this. Even if they had held blue collar values, they wouldn't admit it. You've got to go to college. Get out of the rural area. Get a fancy desk job in a high-rise office. That was the portrait of success. If you had values without boundaries to defend, then you were susceptible to being manipulated to feel shame/guilt about what you actually wanted.
You need tribe. Make no mistake. And you need a defined role or sense of self-identity within that tribe. Those are probably the most basic keys to being happy. People who aren't happy are probably in the wrong tribe, or they are lost without a defined/accepted role in that tribe. Where society comes in and tries to guide you is by telling you WHAT tribe is the desirable one. Forget that.
For pure and simple human happiness, what tribe it is is actually irrelevant. You take a blue collar guy with a family in a small town, who has a defined role there, people know him and appreciate him for that role, and he recognizes he does it well, he is probably one of the happiest humans on the planet and he could be relatively poor. Of course, if your values ARE wealth accumulation and power, then you have to imagine that there are people who are happy in that environment too. The rudiments of happiness are pretty universal across human beings, but the tribe and the values are what change. Society has just told you that everyone but the rich are worse off and less happy, which is a massive lie.