While there’s plenty about modern life that makes our day-to-day easier, there’s also a lot of aspects that can make us mentally ill. It is not our brain chemistry that is making us ill. It is modern life. We need to look at mental health through a wider prism – social rather than chemical. What people fail to understand is that mental illness is not a brain disease that can be cured by medication, but a consequence of a toxic society and our damaging lifestyles.
We are basically just lonely and have lost our hopes and desires for a significant future thus we sulk in the social media and electronic screens to fill our voids. No medication will help a person in such a situation.
- Technology-dependent people: Being too much dependent on technology reduces one’s intellectual prowess. Let’s take it this way, earlier when you used to be stuck during any task you really used to put pressure on your brains to come up with creative ideas. Now, you know you have google to tell you thousands of solutions in split seconds. You’re bound to think less due to technology and it’s not good for long term.
- Weakening of relationship ties: The modern world works mysteriously when it comes to having a bond with someone you’re really close to or admire be it family, friends or your partner. Lately, we’ve seen increased divorce rates in and around the world, parents being separated from children at a very young age, old people being ignored quite a lot etc. The modern norms and people being brought up in such an environment is dangerous for the coming generations.
- The misconception of ‘health’ and ‘stress’: The ‘health’ pages go on and on about exercise, a good diet, five a day, eat your greens, do this, don’t do that – but no one ever mentions the sheer stress of modern life. It seems that a modern man, the younger the more so, spends up to a third of life babbling away into a mobile, running to find it before it stops ringing, tapping away on a keypad or staring into a screen, from the small one on a phone through iPad to laptop and on to telly. It’s the obsession to be ‘communicating’ all the time.
- Other super normal addictive temptations: In modern times, the world has become a never-ending series of super normal addictive temptations. Things like Porn, video games, fast food, social media, (online) casinos, Tinder, designer drugs, consumer products, engineered super-cannabis, countless varieties of booze, Netflix, virtual reality, strip clubs, smartphones, cigarettes, the Internet, ubiquitous screens, cryptocurrency, constant new info streams, and so on and so forth.It’s hard to overstate how weird and dangerous all this gets when it’s revolving around you all the time.
Hopefully, this list has helped you to better understand our situation in the modern world and equipped you with an increased capacity to skillfully navigate life in 2020.
If we can be kind to ourselves and develop the wisdom to avoid the peculiar pitfalls of modern life, our time on Earth can be tremendously meaningful and worthwhile.
