TELL ME ONE THING. Do you feel sad? Or maybe lonely. Or depressed.
Anxious. Tired. Burnt out. Full of dread, or despair.
Maybe you feel alienated from other people; apart, adrift.
If so, you’re not alone. Everyone feels the same way. They are the dominant feelings of our time.
You’ve probably heard this described as a quote “mental health crisis.”
And that is true. Something has gone wrong with our heads, with our “mental health.”
Something is out of whack. Just take a look at the world around us.
We live in an age of overwhelming atomization. More and more people report that they feel
deeply lonely: Americans, especially young Americans, report having fewer friends
and fewer romantic partners or meaningful connections than people of past generations.
Perhaps not coincidentally, rates of depression and anxiety, of behaviors associated with them,
are going up. WAY up. More people than ever are using antidepressant medications, like SSRIs.
And more and more people are committing suicide, or considering it. In June 2020,
a quarter of young Americans seriously considered committing suicide.
Suicides and drug overdoses, classified as “deaths of despair,”
have become so common that they’ve driven down American life expectancy from its peak in 2014.
By 2021, fentanyl overdose was the MOST COMMON form of death among Americans aged 18 to 45.
All around us we detect a mood of pessimism, nihilism, self-destruction.
Fewer people have children; more people kill themselves;
more and more people die from overdoses; more and more people become dependent on pharmaceuticals.
Talk to young people, or students, or really ANYONE and it’s hard to deny the simple truth:
something is very wrong.
But the response to this “mental health crisis” is a very telling one.
Our institutions – our schools, our colleges, our workplaces: what do they do?
They think it’s as simple as “work-life balance.” They encourage you to take regular five-minute
breaks from your work. They give you Zoloft,
and might suggest that you up your subscription. They tell you to install a push notification
on your phone, to let you know if you’ve spent too much time staring at your screen.
They do everything EXCEPT one thing: solve the essential problem.
They will keep you complacent and productive enough for their purposes,
but the problem – the depression, the anxiety, the loneliness: that will not go away.
Because they treat this as an INDIVIDUAL problem, and not a SOCIAL problem.
They turn a social problem, a political problem,
into a BIOLOGICAL one. And while that might
make sense on an individual level, it doesn’t make sense from the perspective of a society.
Because it is NOT NORMAL for so many people to be this depressed.
It is not normal for so many people, especially young people, to be so reliant on antidepressants.
It is not normal for them to feel so alone, for them to kill themselves at such high rates,
for them to report such high rates of anxiety and loneliness and depression.
THAT IS NOT NORMAL. Because there really IS something very wrong.
Mental illness, depression, anxiety – these may manifest neurologically,
but they are SOCIALLY and SPIRITUALLY rooted. If so many people in a society are depressed,
if so many people are killing themselves, if so many are reliant on pills trying to avoid
suicide – that says something, something bad, about the society in question.
Because something is broken about our society. We are the loneliest people in human history.
There has never been a society as ATOMIZED, as ALIENATED, as ALONE as we are now.
It is unprecedented in the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been on earth
for us to be this separated from each other. Because the truth is that, at a basic level, we
need OTHER PEOPLE. We find ourselves, our identities, our meanings, through other people.
We are social animals. We have an urge to love, to be loved, to be recognized, to be respected,
to BELONG. We need other people. We need family; we need friends; we need a COMMUNITY.
And we live in a society now where that is impossible.
Let’s begin with a man named Robert Putnam. A few decades ago, Putnam was a famous professor,
a sociologist who studied the trends and changes in American life.
And in the 1990s, Putnam was taking a look at what had shifted in America since the 1960s.
And as he looked, Putnam began to find something disturbing: American community was falling apart.
If you look back at American history, you find something kind of incredible.
The level of organic community in the United States,
from its creation to just a few decades ago, was REMARKABLY strong.
Go back a hundred years, and look at the communities around you.
Towns and cities in America used to be places with a VIBRANT and THRIVING communal life.
They had labor unions, charity associations, gardening clubs, bridge clubs,
churches, bowling leagues, scout troops. People went to local parades;
they knew their neighbors. They knew what was going on in their community.
And that sense of COMMUNITY is what gave MEANING to their lives.
It’s how they met their friends, their spouses. It’s where they raised their
kids. It’s what filled out the contours of their lives, what made them happy.
You could be any ordinary person, living an ordinary life, and you could find dignity and
community, a sense of WORTH, in these places. You had a social world all around you;
you had a net of support all around you. But by the nineties, as Putnam was looking
at the country around him, he found a social world in decay.
Because starting in the nineteen sixties, accelerating ever since
then – all these communities and institutions had been collapsing.
Church attendance was falling; local clubs were closing down. Local newspapers were
losing readers and being shut down. Unions were losing members. Families were falling apart.
Community was disintegrating. Americans were WITHDRAWING, going inwards.
They stopped knowing who their neighbors were. They stopped going to parades or
civic events. They stopped being a part of any real local community at all.
Even things as simple as local bowling leagues were disappearing. Putnam wrote
that Americans had begun, quote, “BOWLING ALONE.” Americans were now spending more and more time
without other people. They were expressing lower and lower levels of social trust – not
just in their leaders, but in EACH OTHER. The social fabric of American life was unraveling.
And once you understand that basic fact – the decline of organic communities –
the last few decades of American life start to make a lot of sense.
Because without organic communities around them, people were deprived of the support
and comfort and stability they had once enjoyed, not to mention friendship and love.
They regarded each other with more suspicion.
Life became more zero-sum. Everyone was in it for themselves.
When everyone around you is a stranger, life just becomes about you. About getting what’s yours.
About becoming a CEO or a billionaire, getting out on top, screwing over everyone else if necessary.
All of life is consumed by the logic of the market.
Everything becomes a marketplace; everything can be bought and sold; working, earning, competing,
consuming – that becomes the sum total of life. Money became more important than life itself.
And what did you get for it? Life did not get better. It got worse.
You worked longer hours for lower wages. You paid more than your parents or
grandparents did to go to school or see a doctor; owning your own home, raising
children – these became more and more difficult. It got harder just to keep your head above water.
And you would do it without the support that your parents or grandparents had enjoyed:
fewer friends, fewer relationships, less community.
Life became colder, emptier, more unforgiving. More people lived without human companionship.
Even the most successful people were unhappy. They reported high rates of depression, of anxiety;
even THEY were frustrated, and lonely. And young people, just coming into the world:
THEY have been the worst off. Without organic communities, everyone becomes the same:
identity becomes a matter of consumer preference. In the age of the Internet, atomized people drift
into alternate realities, where they can be anyone but themselves: cults, extremism, scams.
Amid the vast meaningless of a society in decay, they forge new identities.
At first it was young people; then it was everyone else.
We spent more time with electronics than we did with humans. Our identities were shaped
by algorithms written by corporations, in order to make us buy stuff we don’t need.
Social media – designed to make you feel angry and alone, but also to addict you:
THAT became the core of our social existence. ASMR videos that simulate intimacy,
internet porn addiction that makes real romance impossible, video streams of people
playing video games and talking: these are all substitutes for the human companionship
that is lacking everywhere else in our society. But the internet didn’t fix it. It only
accelerated the atomization, the loneliness, the depression.
Older people, once treated as sources of guidance and wisdom, began to be viewed as useless, wastes
of space; they are shuffled into nursing homes. High rates of elder loneliness
has led to high rates of elder suicide. This is the world that we created: cold and empty.
And it’s no wonder why more people became dependent on antidepressant drugs;
why more died from overdoses; why more expressed a desire to kill themselves, to not exist at all.
These are what we call “morbid symptoms.” These are reflections of a society in
which the market has taken over all of life, in which human community and human
values have all but disappeared. Traditional forms of community and
solidarity that have given meaning to human life have been dismantled.
Life has become about lines on a graph going up and down. Human community has
not only been neglected, but actively destroyed. All of human life has undergone an impoverishment.
We live in a society that is structurally unable to meet our social needs: the need for community,
for love, for being with other people.
It is a society that whittles your humanity down to statistics.
Stock market lines tick up; so do death tolls, and suicides, and overdoses. The abstraction of money
becomes more real than our actual lives. It becomes a society without meaning.
A society that wants you to be constantly working, constantly consuming.
It does not want you to talk to other people; it does not want you to be a part of a community;
it does not want you to find meaning outside the market.
A society that wants you to be an atomized consumer
so that it can manipulate you. It wants you to be an atomized worker so that it can exploit you.
The reason you feel this way is because you want to live a real life. You want to be with other
people, to join hands with them, to recognize them as a friend, a partner, a child, a person.
And no matter how materially satisfying any society is, we are YEARNING for something:
something that CAN exist, that SHOULD exist, but that our current system cannot ALLOW to exist.
We are yearning for community. We are yearning for other people, for connection,
for friendship. We are yearning for a world where those things can exist.
And that world can exist. In small glimpses, in little moments,
it already DOES exist. It is a world that is struggling to be born.
There is nothing impossible about that world: because the ultimate truth about the world is
that it is something that WE CAN imagine, that WE CAN create: a more beautiful world,
a more wonderful world, a more human world. I’m Marianne Williamson, for the Gravel
Institute.