So, I know this is weird, but I was thinking about how everybody nowadays is mentally ill to one degree or another, and I started to wonder if it's always been like this. Have people always been this depressed? Did they just not talk about it?
Like back in the days of the Great Depression, don't you think people were pretty fucking depressed? It makes me wonder what the suicide rate was back then. Would you wake up one morning, look around your dust bowl and decide to just off yourself?
And farther back than that, even. Back to the ancient times, when life was really tough. Weren't those people depressed? How did the human race even survive, I wonder. How could they bare their own existence?
I said it was weird.
6 comments:
Major difference between "then" and "now"- they didn't feel "entitled" to happiness, or have Madison Avenue telling them that "everyone else is happy, whatever's wrong with you, buy this and it will fix everything!"
Hedy Lamarr in her autobiography wrote of lamenting the thousands of dollars she had spent on therapy because she finally figured out one day that everyone else WASN'T happy, that that was an advertising illusion. She said she finally learned that life was like the pendulum on an old clock, always swinging back and forth between happiness and not, never farther to one side or the other, never staying longer on one side than the other, never stopping on one side or the other, and not stopping in the middle until our time here is done.
I was in my early 40's when I read those words, and they made a big difference in how I viewed the world and my life. I wish I had found them in my teens!
That's not saying that there aren't reasons for therapists and medications and all the other things we have to help people who need it; those for whom the pendulum is broken or even missing.
But Hedy's words are most likely why I haven't tried walkiing out of any windows lately...
alan
i think ppl back in the old days were too damn busy surviving and working sunup to sundown to have time to kill themselves...
nowadays we all feel entitled and are used to instant gratification and blah blah blah so we are all depressed, and what with the medical community instantly willing to label and drug up everyone, including kids its no wonder were all nutso....even me...i can barely handle my temper sometimes....before joe and i broke up it took all my will power not to try and bash his head in with something hard and heavy...ive never felt homicidal before till that moment...guess i shoulda stayed on prozac....
Not weird at all.
I would have probably offed myself back then.
I think one reason why people are so depressed now is because nobody cares anymore. Everyone seems to be out for themselves.
People just stopped giving a fuck.
I put other's before myself, more than I should. Because I feel like I'm a caring person. I attract the people who realize that and take me for granted. And I'm still there. I'm a fool.
I'm depressed because I was fucked up from birth, because I'm tired of struggling just to live, I have nobody to truly love or love me back, etc.
Yes, we all want that. And I don't know if I'd really be happy if I had that, but it's the simple things I want.
I'm mentally ill. Not to the extent of talking to my shoes or anything, but to the extent I'm just fucking sad. I want inner piece.
What keeps me from suicide... People like you. People like you that I know feels the same way I do. God. And HOPE. I'm always hoping.
I love you, Hoo. I really wish we could meet sometime. We'd have a lot to talk about.
*big hugs*
inner peace...
not piece
ha!
I dig Alan's comment.
Hugs to you my sweet.
Just stopping by...thinking of you..
alan
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