The Top 10 Reasons Why the Modern World Is Ruining Everyone’s Mental Health
Information overload, outdated instincts, the need for society replacing the need of individuals, the sedentary lifestyle, and much more
In the developed world, on average 1 in 4 people a year experience a mental health problem of some sort, and this number is rising every year. However, it never used to be this way and in tribal cultures, mental health problems are extraordinarily rare, suicides are even rarer to the point they pretty much never happen.
Here are 10 reasons why the modern world is screwing up everyone’s mental health.
Information overload
500 years ago, a highly educated person could expect to intake as much as 74 gigabytes of information through books and stories across their entire lifetime. Today, some people take in that much information in a single day, and on average people take in 34 gigabytes of information a day.
This unprecedented level of information intake leads our minds to become so overwhelmed and focused on processing information, the majority of which is superficial, that we lose the ability to think and feel because we don’t have enough processing power left available to do so.
So, our minds are so focused on processing superficial information, that we don’t have enough spare energy to allow us to actually exist and think and feel. Because of this, we lose the ability to connect to the real world and the people in it.
The paradox of wealth
The world health Association reports that people in wealthy countries suffer depression at a rate as much as eight times higher than they do in poor countries.
It is also well known that those in developed countries who live in a form of poverty suffer far fewer mental health problems than those who do not. Many believe that this is because we have evolved to function in a world of heavy individual reliance — so we instinctually like to have people heavily reliant on us and like to feel heavily reliant on others.
Sebastian Junger, in his book Tribe, proposes that this is why mental health problems are so rare in tribes. In tribal cultures, everyone is heavily reliant on each other, and so feels like they are needed and indispensable and that everyone else is needed and indispensable. This creates deep and profound connections between people, which protects people from mental health issues.
However, in a modern society, the only entity that you become heavily reliant upon is society — you work for society and that work provides you with the money to sustain yourself. The more money you earn, paradoxically, the less you need other people — at least on an individual level.
This means wealth accumulation robs a person of the ability to ever truly need people on an individual level. Many people struggle with this, and as such, when they have wealth start to lose the ability to connect with people on a deeper level.
The “I want you” versus the “I need you” paradox
It sounds like such a great line to say, “I don’t need you; I want you.” But it’s not a great line, it is one of the most destructive lines humanity has ever coined. People want nice cars, but they don’t need them.
That means nice cars are expendable, so if you just want something and don’t need it, what you are saying is that something is expendable. Highly expendable. Who wants to be highly expendable?
No one is the answer, the problem is we live in a world where everyone is basically being told they should aspire to make everyone expendable. For example, if you look at the world of memes, quotes, dating advice, life advice, everything, it is full of people saying how women don’t need men or men don’t need women or how none of us needs anyone.
Basically, the world is full of everyone telling everyone how they should aspire to be independent and not need anyone, then we all wonder why everyone has such severe mental health problems.
Society pushes us to live a sedentary lifestyle
It is well-known and documented that exercise and getting out and about boosts mental health. The problem is, the modern world is not built to give people a lot of reasons to exercise and get out and about. In fact, it is built to do the opposite.
Even the working-from-home trend, which is now set in stone, despite its benefits, serves only to give people yet more reason to be sedentary.
If you add this to the fact that most jobs don’t require large amounts of human interaction, and even the ones that do, only require superficial interactions. If you add this to the fact that all the technology that inspires us to be sedentary, both in the workplace and at home, keeps us awake at night, disrupting our sleep. What you get is a recipe for mental health problems.
The reason, exercise, a good night’s sleep, and social connections are known to be key factors for a healthy body and mind. This is why the sedentary lifestyle that we all are now pushed to live is one of the main reasons so many suffer mental health problems, it robs us of all of those things.
Society makes our lives far less important on an individual level than they used to be
One of the most difficult factors that all of us in modern society must cope with is the fact that, compared with history, we are all on an individual level extraordinarily expendable.
To explain, when we used to live in tribes, small rural communities, or even small self-contained urban communities, everybody had a great need for each other, and so everybody felt greatly needed.
For example, when living in a rural community of let’s say thirty people, every person’s role in that community would be integral to the survival of that community — it’s even more important in a tribe. That means the loss of even a single life could have devastating effects.
Every person in the community would know that. This means every person in the community would know just how immensely important it was for them to stay alive, and for everyone else in the community to stay alive. This creates an intoxicating feeling of importance and self-worth. We have evolved to long for that intoxicating feeling.
Modern society takes it away from us. If we die, our family and friends will be upset — if we have any. However, society as a whole won’t bat an eyelid. Everything will go on exactly as normal, we will be replaced easily in all areas except our family life — but we may even be replaced there i.e. many widows move on with new people. Only blood family members in the modern world are completely irreplaceable to us.
That’s an extremely scary reality when historically we were all a lot more irreplaceable to a lot more people, and as such, it is a reality that messes up many people’s mental health by making them feel expendable.
We are all much more knowledgeable
We all get an education — something which we never used to — and the education we get gives us all the tools to question everything. That’s great and must be enshrined as a human right for all time.
However, just because something is great does not mean that it does not have downsides. The ability to question everything means that sometimes those questions we ask will give us answers that ruin our mental health.
The most popular questions that we now ask are why am I alive, what is my worth, am I being treated fairly, is there any point to anything, am I normal, do people like me. Inevitably, asking these questions and trying to answer them yourself — if the answers you come up with are negative — can have detrimental effects on your mental health.
Because so many of us now ask these questions so repeatedly, inevitably, there will be times when the answers we come up with are negative — which is another reason why so many people suffer mental health problems.
Trauma now leads to alienation
It’s well known that when it comes to handling trauma of any kind, big or small, if we are part of a community with a strong level of social cohesion, we are far less likely to suffer long-lasting effects.
Social cohesion means a world where we don’t just have friends and family around us, but a strong community, and all of us are united like one big family.
When we exist in such a world and we suffer a traumatic event, because those in it won’t treat us any differently to how they treated us before the event, and we wouldn’t expect them to, we get over the event pretty quickly. This is why many believe people in tribes see such low levels of long-lasting PTSD whereas in the developed world long-lasting PTSD is common. Tribal cultures have really high levels of social cohesion.
The trouble is, we don’t exist in such a world; we exist in a world where there is very little social cohesion and where those who suffer trauma are typically treated differently, and as such we don’t just teach that trauma is life-changing, we make it life-changing.
This inevitably alienates people who suffer traumas of any size and makes it very difficult for them to reintegrate into society in the manner that they were part of it before, let alone feel a part of it. This inevitably leads to ever-larger numbers of people being alienated which leads to ever-larger mental health problems across society.
The paradox of the desire to be different from others but also not to be
In a world of eight billion and counting people, it is very hard to stand out, yet many of us want to feel like we are individuals and not clones of everyone else. At the same time, we also want to find people who are like us and to who we relate.
This creates a paradox where many of us are both desperately trying to make ourselves stand out from the crowd by proving that we are different from others, while at the same time desperately trying to find people who are not different from us by proving we are like them.
When you have these two competing forces, it can create endless mental health problems, mainly because it can be very difficult to find the right balance between these two opposing forces.
Our languages are built for a small world, not a big one
Modern languages are not suited for a world of mass communication, this is why it is so easy to offend. Everyone sees and interprets words in different ways, say something to one person it could be complementary, say it to another it could be an insult.
So, we all have our own language schemes, which would work great if we only lived in a community of say, thirty people, and that community was all going to get to know our and everyone else’s language schemes.
The problem is, we now live in a world of eight billion and counting, and every person’s language schemes are now out in the open and clashing with every other person’s, causing absolute chaos to the point where people are afraid to say anything or do anything for fear of insulting a person with a different language scheme.
Inevitably, this is extremely destructive to people’s mental health because it creates a world where everyone feels like they are under attack from everyone else, and everyone is afraid of saying something that could be perceived as an attack on someone else.
Constant cultural evolution
It takes 25,000 years for our instincts to catch up to our environment. That means our instincts haven’t even adapted to a world of agriculture and will take another 15,000 years at least to do so. Evolution is slow.
Technological advancement on the other hand is rapid. This has created a profound problem for all of us, least of all because once we hit our thirties it’s been shown that we become less open to anything new. This was likely beneficial at one point i.e. it likely helped create stability. Now it’s not, and it is why once people hit their thirties, many struggle to keep up with the rapidly changing world.
But it is not just those in their thirties and beyond, the world is changing so rapidly that the culture of an 18-year-old could be completely different from the culture of a person just a year younger than them. That’s how rapidly our constant technological advancement is changing our culture, every year it is different than the year it was before — sometimes profoundly.
That means we live in an era of permanent cultural instability i.e. our culture is constantly changing, which means it is never stable, hence, the culture wars. To make matters worse, the reality is we teach people to become certain of their viewpoints. Except many of the viewpoints that we teach them to be certain of keep changing on a yearly basis.
These issues combine to create lots of mental health problems for people as it makes it hard for people to keep up with society and work out what is the right thing to believe. Even more damaging than that, it makes it really hard to find any form of cultural stability. And when it comes down to it, all of us long for stability. The fact it is so much more difficult to find stability in the modern world is leading many people to suffer from mental health problems.
Final words
Thanks to an unprecedentedly rapid population boom along with an even more unprecedentedly rapid technological boom, the last year two hundred years have seen us create a world that is unlike any from our past, which is why our instincts are so out of tune with it. In a way, we are like fish on dry land, we have all these great tools that are built to help us survive in the ocean, but on dry land, those tools are detrimental to us.
But it’s not all bad, out of the chaos of all our problems, we are creating a new world, a better world. By learning why we are having mental health problems, and learning new tools to identify them and deal with them, we are learning to evolve and become greater and more importantly stronger than we have ever been.
So, the saying holds true, change is never easy and is often painful, but the reward is always worth it. That means if you are suffering any mental health problems, remember, if you keep fighting your victory in overcoming them will play a part in helping to create a better world, not just for yourself, but for everyone. If that’s not an incentive to keep fighting, I don’t know what is.
That’s all from me, thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy the following:
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