Posted on 28/04/2007. By Pete Otaqui.
I can agree with the violent acres post on depression but I do think it misses some very obvious points. I believe that, especially in rich countries like America, one has vastly more freedom and power over one’s life than elsewhere. The fact that relatively few seem to understand this, and talk about being “pressured into living a life they would have never chosen for themselves” is, to my mind, ridiculous.
In a society like America, that pressure is entirely in one’s own mind – which suggests to me that it is in fact ‘broken’ even though the fix is unlikely to come from the kind of drugs a doctor will prescribe. Almost nowhere is one more ‘free’ to make one’s own choices – whether that is throwing out the TV or taking a pay cut to do something more fulfilling.
It seems that we as a species can very easily fall victims to our own success. Once we remove the real struggle for comfortable survival, and therefore the deep satisfaction of overcoming it, we start wanting to invent new problems for ourselves and yet become too lazy to do anything about it.
I suppose I do agree with the post’s author, but I’m just a bit more preachy.