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- Hacker News
- As someone living with a lifelong serious melted illness, I say this guy can F off.
Strictly blaming depression on sociological factors is demeaning to those people with mood disorders. What about diet? What about nutrition? What about EMF’s? What about Covid infections?
This blow hard with his three points, always three points by the way, is minimizing depression, and all people with mental illness.
by Noaidi - Melted illness, that sounds very serious. He sure loves his brain hemisphere lateralization, wasn't that stuff seriously questioned? Like found to be divided the opposite way around, or not at all. He's also a bore, which according to the trendy theory of the day means he is doing a public service by making us bored.by card_zero
- Over 90% of your body's serotonin is manufactured in your gut, meaning severe anxiety and depression often start in your digestive system, not your brain.by VaderAi
- It’s the lack of community. In prior eras, we had more community to help us deal with ourselves. Now, without community, we just ruminate. Or fall into toxic, one subject, online community.by John23832
- I think the new generation will be alright. From what I've seen, they seem to believe that maximizing their looks is the answer.
- Calhoun's mouse utopia experiment is looking more and more real by the day.
> The "Beautiful Ones": Younger mice withdrew entirely from social interaction, spending all day grooming and eating alone without mating or fighting.
> Hyper-Aggression and Apathy: Dominant males attacked others randomly, females neglected or killed their young, and reproduction completely flatlined.
Remind you of anything?
by antisthenes - That is a thing people do when they feel a lack of control over other aspects of their life. It's a coping mechanism. Frequently comorbid with depression.
Also it's quite rude of you to dismiss an entire generation with this belittling rhetoric. Mental health is a really, really big deal.
by LoganDark - Is this like how everyone warned us about an ADHD epidemic and it turned out it was an epidemic of getting extra time on exams? There were lots of explanations from the mental health brigade. These kinds of extra strong effects are like the blue zones situation - there's always something else that creates a formal effect that is nothing like an actual change.by arjie
- Turns out houses are getting smaller for most people,and less interest in gardening and outdoor activities, sitting around and playing on there phones all the time will create boredom. And without having goals in there life to keep them motivated is one of the key things to prevent depression. John kirwin also stated this in his book. Apart from people with chemical inbalanceby VaderAi
- Living space per person has tripled since the 1950s for Americans. House sizes have gone up and family sizes down.
I do notice that new houses seem to be built to maximize house size and leave little for the garden. I assume most people want that. Personally I've got a large garden, although it's a lot of work.
by jemmyw - We are inundated with more choices and decisions than ever before, causing stress that becomes overwhelming.
Up until the last generation, you didn’t even worry about what you were going to have for dinner. Your option was whatever was available. You spent the day making that thing. You ate. Now you have to make decisions on every little thing in life because there are options and choices for everything in life. We have not yet evolved quickly enough to handle this many choices and decisions, as lame and unimportant as they may seem.
by Aboutplants - This is absolute nonsense, for most of history most people were at the edge of starvation, balancing on the knifes edge between "not enough people to work on a farm to provide enough food" and "too many people for the food we grew".
Of course, most of history didn't even have concept of depression or a sizeable count of medical professionals to diagnose it.
by izacus - From Moby-Dick, about spending three years at sea (Chapter 35):
"""There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner- for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."""
by armedgorilla - So I did a chronological search for "what's for dinner", here it is in a poem from 1794: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_pindarian...
Their choices are rat, mouse, or nothing, but they do have choices, and I think non-fictional characters would typically have more palatable choices about what to have for dinner, when using this age-old common phrase, 230 years ago.
Edit: 1794 was in the middle of the French Revolution, and in the decades leading up, the peasantry famously had the choice of no bread or no cake. This bewildering choice is why they were misérable.
by card_zero - To put it more succinctly: the world is changing too quickly for our biology to adapt.by ks2048
- This has seemed like a compelling idea to me for a while. It’s an interesting thought.by talon8635
- This is what adaptation looks like actually, some organisms not surviving to reproduce.by hackernud3s
- If privileged people use words like depression (without also accounting for change in diagnosis) to basically say phones should be taken away from their children so they can control their feelings more, it always reminds me of https://heatherburns.tech/2026/07/08/the-kids-with-phones-ar...:
> the upper classes have always objectified their children into possessions. These are groups who, culturally, do not want their children to have agency over their own lives, nevermind devices, nor do they want their young adults to develop essential skills to live their lives as independent adults. They never have. And they never did themselves, which is why the notion of blanket bans come so easily to them.
by janpeuker - I don't know. I think it's too convenient to blame this solely on devices and internet and such.
I'm certain that they are a symptom, but I am unconvinced that they are a sole cause for this
Edit: Obviously not a psychologist, but just from what I observe: People have had way higher expectations from life than ever before in the past, and life has not really been meeting those expectations.
A lot of people I know simply aren't going to enjoy the same luxury that they grew up expecting, being told they would have, that they were "promised".
- But what about "the medium is the message"? I haven't read the book, but I'm remembering a quote mentioning how the technological mediums become extensions of our nervous systems, through this optic, internet and devices maybe really do have this kind of potency...by brbrodude
- Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.by EA-3167
- Is it because the world is more depressing?
Inequality, injustice, war, climate change, lack of opportunity, loneliness, destruction of social systems by technology, decay of community values and the promise of a worse not better future. Is it that this generation is less well off than its parents, that housing is no longer affordable, that the world is polluted, that nuclear war has returned as a possibility, that careers once valuable are commoditized by technology? Is that why or is it something else?
by wewewedxfgdf - Go read some books about the past lol, my godby talon8635
- Turns out when people can't afford kids, healthcare, housing they are unhappy.by Avicebron
- 60 years ago you might have ended up in a psychiatric hospital without getting effective treatment, mental health issues were stigmatized and the incentive to seek out help was low. People used to just live a miserable life with their issues.
Nowadays knowledge about mental health issues is widespread in the population, somewhat normalized and leading to people seeking help.
I consider it realistic that depression did not actually increase, its just more people showing up in the statistics.
by blueflow - Exactly. See also statistics for "how many people are left-handed". The incidence of left-handedness didn't go up; acceptance of it went up, and people stopped trying to force other people to hide/mask it.
It is also possible that depression itself is more widespread. But it seems exceedingly likely that acceptance, willingness to talk about it, and general understanding that the correct answer to "chemical imbalance in the brain" is not "cheer up!", have improved substantially.
by JoshTriplett - Depression is related to biological health of the brain. People are exercising less leading to worse biological health of the brain. So you’d expect depression to be increasing.by unparagoned
- One anecdote. I had a friend who went from healthy to almost unable to walk through a post viral 'chronic fatigue' type thing. She couldn't really work but chronic fatigue wasn't a recognised condition for benefits so had to claim depression to get state assistance. (Ireland)by tim333
- I 100% believe there is such an effect, and that it’s confounding the measurement of population level changes. But I want to point out that the existence of such an effect is not really evidence _against_ the changes, it’s just another confounder. Your wording is very accurate — you “consider it realistic that depression did not increase”, ie it is possible that depression didn’t increase. But whether depression actually did increase or actually didn’t, is not possible to determine from these numbers directly. Without controlling for confounders and doing some fun statistics, we largely just have opinions