That is nice for you. I hope you never have to experience something so awful, which can effect someone without their control no matter how much their current circumstances might seem positive.
On "easier & safer", I'm not sure the metric you'd use for safer. As for easier, millions of people have lost their jobs, millions more have their lives in upheaval as they are left to figure out difficult tradeoffs while watching their children descend into loneliness & poorer quality education through the massive disruptions in their lives.
I am glad that you and, apparently, your social circles are going through a particularly good time at the moment. It's heartening to know that not everyone is losing out in the current circumstances.
I have certainly experienced many awful things in life, but I have not become depressed. Maybe I am just resilient, but I don’t think I am that unusual.
It is interesting that the response to my post has been to vote it down to oblivion. I posted hoping to see if the 2/3rd clinical depressed number is just a self selecting aberration, or HN really has become this bad.
You may have a misconception of the causes of depression.
I am sorry awful things have happened to you in life, but fortunately, as your example shows, negative external stimuli are not a 1:1 correlation with depression. Unfortunately, positive circumstances are also not a 1:1 correlation with the lack of depression. While stress, trauma, tragedy, loss, adversity may all push some people into depression, there are plenty more who, for no discernible external cause, find themselves in irrational states of despair or other forms of depression, and it is no more solvable through self-motivated resilience than the hallucinations of a more tangible mental illness like schizophrenia could be solved through resilience. Perhaps a useful way of thinking about it if you don't quite understand depression ( though maybe not neurologically accurate ) is to also think of depression as a form of involuntary hallucination. Only instead of an auditory or visual hallucination, the brain is producing an emotional hallucination.
As for the downvotes, it's probably because the tone of your comment, perhaps unintentionally, comes off as skeptical & dismissive of the miserable reality that many people experience first hand.
Finally, & unrelated, it looks like you do some very fascinating work!
A few members in my distant family died in the last few months. One of whom I was close with (grandparent) but it barely affected me negatively yet I had been forced into shell for months due to otherwise small things in the past. It's not the severity of the outcome. I recovered faster from those. I require medicine when that happens and the triggers are always small non obvious.
Please don't judge people based on the severity of their situation as to whether they are suffering or not. It doesn't help. It misleds bystanders reading your comment into a pit instead of seeking help.
As for the comparison to the world getting better, it's not linear and same for everyone. While on average, people are living better life than they did before. Life for people in some countries have gotten worse, not better. Maybe life for people which this forum self selects have gotten worse in the last few years.
I guess I am an optimist by nature and I certainly prefer to look at the positive rather than the negative.
I am not sure it is helpful for most people to focus on the negatives in their lives rather than the positive. I have yet to see anyone’s life improved by brooding on what is wrong rather than what is right.
I wasn’t actually judging anyone’s situation, just questioning how we have got to the situation where 2/3rd of the people answering the poll claim to be clinically depressed. If this is correct something is seriously wrong with HC.
how we have got to the situation where 2/3rd of the people answering the poll claim to be clinically depressed.
Well, they might not be claiming clinical depression, which technically would require a clinician to render a diagnosis. Though many people may also not understand that distinction.
As for the large number, it may simply be that people who see the title of the post & aren't depressed just say to themselves in a slit second "nope not relevant to me, not clicking on it". In that case, most of the people who answered "yes" to depression were self-selecting as people for whom it was already relevant, i.e., people experiencing what they consider depression.
It's a problem with surveys in general. I hate doing surveys, but a huge portion of my job is data analysis, and most people are bad at creating surveys especially the design of individual questions. But the initial problem is "How do I get a representative sample when people that choose to do the survey may not be the same as people that won't". There's ways to minimize that effect, none of them great-- look at the the presidential polls as an example.
And yes, it is not helpful to look negatively. I think people with depression understand this too. They can't help it. If they had more control over their thoughts and life, it wouldn't be a disease or require medical treatment.
As per the link I posted in the comment, pessimism has been rising in developed and rich countries. So I wouldn't be surprised to find more pessimistic people on tech forums today. Tech filters out middle class people likely in developed countries or parts of the world. HN is dominated by Americans who have had a rough year. Protests, political unrest, they are currently leading in covid cases worldwide, etc. Other comments explain different reasons, I agree with them too so I won't repeat.
One thing I noticed is the rate of not depressed at all votes. It gradually increased towards late night in US.
These polls are self selecting. People round here aren’t into polls generally (evidenced by that the feature is largely unknown) and probably rarely respond to them. An exception to that is when the poll positives speak directly to something you care deeply about and identify strongly with. On top of that people who are going through this may be inclined to share not least because it’s always comforting to those going through an issue to know that they aren’t alone.
In sum, this poll is more an opportunity to share and participate in discussion about this issue than it is about determining the proportion of hn readers who are dealing with this issue
With respect, which planet do you live on where a pandemic that is killing millions and putting millions more out of work, confining people globally to their houses and murdering some large swathes of the economy for an invisible disease is the same as an 'easier & safer life for most people'.
The K-shaped recovery is a real bubble, don't get caught in either side, they're both blind.
Millions of people die from diseases like malaria and HIV every year. Wallowing around in self pity because of COVID-19 is not going to change a thing.
Life has been getting better every year I have been alive. Billions of people have been moved out of extreme poverty and the average person lives a easier and safer life than almost anyone in history - I would rather be a poor man today than a king of the past.
Your comparison to other diseases might be apt if the current pandemic & resulting fallout were replacing one of those other problems. Instead, it is in addition to them. Comparing them as you have done is akin to looking at a horse loaded down with 400lbs of weight on it. Then another 100lbs of weight is added, and the horse whinnies in complaint. And you're saying "Why is the horse complaining? It already had 400 lbs of weight. 100 lbs is less than that, so it shouldn't be an issue."
Ah I thought it was the Steven Pinker pattern. I don't see it as self-pity, or pity at all. The world is a dark place and our children are the bright lights of the future. It's the older generation that enjoyed the bright life and the millennial/z-gen is dealing with the world for what it is.
This is the cold, severe reality of the day. I can't hand-wave away facts of my community for the tail end of the industrial revolution applied in Africa.
I have my optimism that in the darkness life will be conserved and born anew. We don't need another aphorism extolling the virtues of how bright some corner of the planet is and how that is a worthy trade-off for personal or collective suffering.
I'd prefer to live in the '90s when you could keep a secret and have a life that was not inside a panopticon. That was safety, not this metaphysical slavery to a set of advertising megacorps that pushes our behaviour around by statistical application of recommendations. I miss going on holiday and coming back with stories of the new world, rather than being able to bring up a 4k photo of every location within 250ms. I miss being able to fight people and gentlemen's agreements on the back of a handshake and a word. We have lost a lot, I pity those that forget so easily.
Living in the 50s with a stable job that can support two adults and some kids with appliances that never die and vaguely drive-able cars seems a hell of a lot easier and safer than now. There are always brighter moments in the past, it's pointless to even make the rebuttal about living in the past, as if we could.
Your work depends on pulling dark information on genomes into yet another database for a client. I doubt I'm going to sway you on the damage of recent progress. GATTACA is closer than I'd (we'd?) like and you probably won't be around to see it. The worst part is that it's likely to be secret, no blood tests at the gate required. Just sort a database row and you have your secret candidates for the next task.
A two thousand year semi-respite from the naturally severe realities of life is ending and nobody seems to having anything to say about the shining beauty of a mankind that valued truth, a good handshake and gentlemanly behaviour. Is violence such a bad price to pay for freedom? I guess you can buy people off with iphones and widgets while they get slowly locked up by a system seeking absolute control over their lives.
Any prior golden age you might care to look at was unevenly distributed. That was the case before the internet took hold in the 90's, during the rapid economic growth of the 50's, in the Renaissance, the heights of the Roman Empire...
Yes, that does not mean we shouldn't look back on the things in the past that were good & now are not. But if a wholesale reversion to a past time was possible, we would still find the golden parts of that earlier age to be apportioned to some, but not others.
Another consideration is that while I don't like life inside a panopticon, its absence in the 90's meant those of us fortunate to be "golden" simply had less awareness of those who weren't, hence the false impression that perhaps there was a lot more gold everywhere.
I'm not selling a golden age of wealth for all. I'm selling the right to direct your own life, commit to the good on your own terms and live a life of privacy. You know, freedom. There's more to life than money, we used to kill for these outcomes. The violence stopped not because we improved but because there was no more freedom to be had. Now we just end lives over economic contrivances. I'm a dinosaur, I see the meteor hitting in 2140 and so does bitcoin and many others. The only answer is ghe unknown and darkness. I don't sell out for power.
I'm not selling a golden age of wealth for all. I'm selling the right to direct your own life, commit to the good on your own terms and live a life of privacy.
That sounds good to me. To me, and it may have been my own misconception, the tone of your original post seemed to convey a belief it would be great to return to a prior time. If you're actually saying you'd like to choose just certain aspects of those times to bring forward instead of a wholesale return to those times, then I can wholeheartedly agree.
There was no golden age of the past and the future is what we make it. We can sit around thinking everything is going to shit, or we can get on with making things better. I prefer the later.
"All of us have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others". Francois de La Rochefoucauld
I see you're On Fire further down in the thread, helpfully whatabouting malaria or something to explain away our current crisis. I don't think most people wake up and immediately start praising their lucky stars that they aren't living during the Black Death or in some war-torn country in Africa. Life still isn't that easy or safe for a lot of people all around the world, and perhaps those of us who aren't psychopathic jackasses can find that depressing even if personally they're doing pretty well.
It is amazing you manage to read this all into my post. Of course life is hard for many people in the world, but things are getting better every year for the average person. This seems to not include the average HN poster who seems to be caught in a depressed funk.
It's almost as if people's emotional states come from things other than making entirely rational big picture judgements about the state of the "average person" on the whole planet.
I'm curious if you have, at some point in your life, met another human being? All evidence would point to "yes", and yet here you are, all over this thread, debunking other peoples' subjective mental states with your superior facts and logic. As people do.
It is tempting to picture you striding confidently through a mental health ward, heels clicking authoritatively. As you approach each patient, you lean down and gently impart a optimistic fact from Nature or The Economist ("did you know that rates of cholera have declined by 60% in 2018 alone"). In your wake, sparks of life return to the previously dead seeming eyes of troubled teenagers and despairing middle-aged men.
You offer up statements about population aggregates as a supposed explanation for the self-reported mental states of a collection of individuals, so you don't really get to reasonably complain about this.
Exactly my thoughts. I thought this place had become more negative, but I'm still shocked at the results. Perhaps it's time to move on and find more positive technology communities. You don't happen to know any?
I have pretty much moved on from HN. It used to be the place to learn first hand from people doing amazing things in tech, these days it seems to be a nest of negative nut jobs whining about how hard their life is while holding 6 figure desk jobs.
Yes I know you are not supposed to mourn for the old HN, but I do. I feel like HN should purge the last 5 years of posts and start again.
