Yup. I have lived in California for decades and blame my own political group, the Left, for this newfound incessant antagonism toward Americans, the West, and for fomenting a new culture of complaint/eternal glumness.
I have been living in Europe for a year, and find a few things notable: people socialize so much more / nobody cares that much about political issues, though they vote. They just drink, smoke and chat / they are not focused on wealth or work like us Americans / every last person has said our California attitudes to mental health, gender, the police and parenting are, wait for it, NUTS.
I would add, expectations are too high now. Anybody born before 1980 basically felt happy if they weren't being hit or yelled at, and had some food. Now, most people think its the end of the world because the Internet is too slow or they might have sensed a microaggression 60 yards away on a dark rainy night.
The US needs a Peace Corps. Pay teenagers to live across the country and meet others. It needs to stop medicating humans who dropped their pencil or lost a friend. It needs to emulate Europe, as it once did, to great effect.
Junger is actually somewhat incorrect when he says there were no examples of PTSD in Native American society. The difference is most tribes had specific rituals and cleansing ceremonies warriors went through after they returned from battle. Most other tribal societies had similar rituals and cultural processes, since they recognized battle had an impact on the survivors and they needed ways to deal with that trauma. As for more modern conflicts, it's been noted that the long ocean voyages returning units from combat zones common prior to Vietnam allowed people to in essence decompress and process what they'd been through in a group with similar experiences. Vietnam ushered in the phenomenon of someone being in combat and then perhaps 48 hours later being dropped back into civilian life without any real chance to process what they'd been through.
We're also in an age that tends to celebrate victimhood (real and imagined), which might make the problems highlighted in the article worse.
I felt this way on Easter this year. It was just my small family. My husband, myself, and our two grown children. Remembering the big family gatherings or even church Egg hunts when I was young or even 15 years ago, I felt lonely. We are all so spread out now, by necessity for jobs and my husband and I are in a weird space where our parents and grandparents are gone and our kids have no interest in kids yet. It's a strange world we've created.
"But we can choose to not fall into these divides to instead recognize another core component of our biology, which is that we are all one human species and that our differences are dwarfed by our similarities. If we do that, we might all feel a little bit less lonely." Great summary of your presentation. Finding ways, large and small, to do things together, with family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances--really is a blessing, especially if we are slow to anger and of great kindness, which that interaction encourages. Thank you.
I'm not ready to buy that Native Americans didn't have constant stress and anxiety or that they never suffered PTSD. They simply may never have thought to mention it because it had been the way of humanity for longer than anyone could remember. Knowing what I do about how violent Native groups are everywhere, and the particularly insidious tortures they inflicted on each other before they ever saw a European, I can't imagine they lived placid lives knowing at any moment they could be attacked by their enemies - raiding and destroying entire villages was quite a common occurrence pre-Contact. In fact, our caveman brains are still reacting to constant threat even though the real ones we have to live with aren't the same as our cave-dwelling ancestors - knowing a painful, horrible death could happen to you every single day, if you were attacked by a wild animal, or a violent distant tribesman, or that you could get critically hurt - like falling off a cliff. And where is your next meal coming from? How would you get through the next winter?
I'm also not going to blow off PTSD for soldiers. They dealt with the very real horrors of war before the very modern age. My mother's first husband fought in a very tough division in WWII and she described actions of his that sounded very much like PTSD (or 'shell shock' as they called it back then). What the article says about how soldiers may not be handling the return home as well because we're more isolated than we were in days of yore - okay, I can see that, but I'm not going to downplay their suffering because it happened after the first Gulf War rather than World War II or even Vietnam. If you're as old as I am you remember when veterans periodically went a little nuts and hurt people, or took hostages or something. The last one I remember happened in the small town I was living in in Connecticut and it was the '90s. I remember thinking, "A Vietnam vet? Really? Tha hasn't happened in awhile. Aren't they getting a little old for this?"
Other than these quibbles, though, I thought it was an excellent article and I'm hanging on to it.
The bit about being occupied with our hands but idle with our mind, which allows it to process, really resonates with me.
I write a thesis on how interactions with the visual arts increases mindfulness, which to me, is exactly what this is talking about. If you engage in something that is physically involved but let's your mind roam for hours, you get a lot of time to background process. You also get better and just existing in the current moment (aka, being mindful).
Yup. I have lived in California for decades and blame my own political group, the Left, for this newfound incessant antagonism toward Americans, the West, and for fomenting a new culture of complaint/eternal glumness.
I have been living in Europe for a year, and find a few things notable: people socialize so much more / nobody cares that much about political issues, though they vote. They just drink, smoke and chat / they are not focused on wealth or work like us Americans / every last person has said our California attitudes to mental health, gender, the police and parenting are, wait for it, NUTS.
I would add, expectations are too high now. Anybody born before 1980 basically felt happy if they weren't being hit or yelled at, and had some food. Now, most people think its the end of the world because the Internet is too slow or they might have sensed a microaggression 60 yards away on a dark rainy night.
The US needs a Peace Corps. Pay teenagers to live across the country and meet others. It needs to stop medicating humans who dropped their pencil or lost a friend. It needs to emulate Europe, as it once did, to great effect.
Junger is actually somewhat incorrect when he says there were no examples of PTSD in Native American society. The difference is most tribes had specific rituals and cleansing ceremonies warriors went through after they returned from battle. Most other tribal societies had similar rituals and cultural processes, since they recognized battle had an impact on the survivors and they needed ways to deal with that trauma. As for more modern conflicts, it's been noted that the long ocean voyages returning units from combat zones common prior to Vietnam allowed people to in essence decompress and process what they'd been through in a group with similar experiences. Vietnam ushered in the phenomenon of someone being in combat and then perhaps 48 hours later being dropped back into civilian life without any real chance to process what they'd been through.
We're also in an age that tends to celebrate victimhood (real and imagined), which might make the problems highlighted in the article worse.
I felt this way on Easter this year. It was just my small family. My husband, myself, and our two grown children. Remembering the big family gatherings or even church Egg hunts when I was young or even 15 years ago, I felt lonely. We are all so spread out now, by necessity for jobs and my husband and I are in a weird space where our parents and grandparents are gone and our kids have no interest in kids yet. It's a strange world we've created.
"But we can choose to not fall into these divides to instead recognize another core component of our biology, which is that we are all one human species and that our differences are dwarfed by our similarities. If we do that, we might all feel a little bit less lonely." Great summary of your presentation. Finding ways, large and small, to do things together, with family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances--really is a blessing, especially if we are slow to anger and of great kindness, which that interaction encourages. Thank you.
Being online tends to chip away at internal locus of control. People need to treat social media like junk food: consume sparingly.
I'm not ready to buy that Native Americans didn't have constant stress and anxiety or that they never suffered PTSD. They simply may never have thought to mention it because it had been the way of humanity for longer than anyone could remember. Knowing what I do about how violent Native groups are everywhere, and the particularly insidious tortures they inflicted on each other before they ever saw a European, I can't imagine they lived placid lives knowing at any moment they could be attacked by their enemies - raiding and destroying entire villages was quite a common occurrence pre-Contact. In fact, our caveman brains are still reacting to constant threat even though the real ones we have to live with aren't the same as our cave-dwelling ancestors - knowing a painful, horrible death could happen to you every single day, if you were attacked by a wild animal, or a violent distant tribesman, or that you could get critically hurt - like falling off a cliff. And where is your next meal coming from? How would you get through the next winter?
I'm also not going to blow off PTSD for soldiers. They dealt with the very real horrors of war before the very modern age. My mother's first husband fought in a very tough division in WWII and she described actions of his that sounded very much like PTSD (or 'shell shock' as they called it back then). What the article says about how soldiers may not be handling the return home as well because we're more isolated than we were in days of yore - okay, I can see that, but I'm not going to downplay their suffering because it happened after the first Gulf War rather than World War II or even Vietnam. If you're as old as I am you remember when veterans periodically went a little nuts and hurt people, or took hostages or something. The last one I remember happened in the small town I was living in in Connecticut and it was the '90s. I remember thinking, "A Vietnam vet? Really? Tha hasn't happened in awhile. Aren't they getting a little old for this?"
Other than these quibbles, though, I thought it was an excellent article and I'm hanging on to it.
Love to see other Dr. K fans in the wild lol
The bit about being occupied with our hands but idle with our mind, which allows it to process, really resonates with me.
I write a thesis on how interactions with the visual arts increases mindfulness, which to me, is exactly what this is talking about. If you engage in something that is physically involved but let's your mind roam for hours, you get a lot of time to background process. You also get better and just existing in the current moment (aka, being mindful).