Western mindset and mental illness
Today I'm wondering how much mental illness is directly caused by culture and the mindsets our cultures teach us. Particularly, I'm interested in American (United States) culture and mindsets and foundational assumptions that I've learned.
I'm most interested in ideals of what a person is supposed to do in their life, how people should spend their time.
And the pervasive idea seems to be that we should be working - that we, as individuals, should make our own way & support ourselves.
This idea of working - so that we earn our own money and food and shelter - seems completely disconnected from what the work actually accomplishes.
Some work is extremely important - growing, transporting, and selling food; counseling sexual assault survivors; caring for children.
Even as I write "caring for children", there's a battle in my mind between stay-at-home parents and day-care workers. You can't survive if you're a stay-at-home parent without some kind of external material support (such as a partner working or welfare). But if you work in a day care, then you do get to survive on your own.
But a lot of work is so fucking stupid and unnecessary and shouldn't be tied-in to survival needs being met.
I think entertainment is important, and creating culture is important. But also ... if every video game developer quit working today, the amount of food and shelter available would be completely unchanged. Those developers would lose those homes because of how our economic system works, but the homes would not disappear.
And then medication. There's an Aleve commercial that talks about being in pain and how you can't take a day off work and so take an Aleve.
And like, that's kinda fucked up. Your body is damaged, you need healing, but instead you need to take medicine so that you can work.
This isn't Aleve's fault. They're marketing about a real problem - if you don't work, you don't eat & you have no bed in which to sleep.
Maybe our cultural baseline for living should shift from "work to make money" into ... idk ... building healthy bodies and lives and communities.
There is some aspect of work I value - serving others. You go to the doctor. They went to school for years and they work really hard to take care of people. They work hard to serve my medical/health needs.
Those medical professionals, who are serving me, deserve to be served too. They likely would enjoy being able to eat out, or go watch a play, or have somebody mow their yard for them. (Mowing is stupid but also necessary under our current social contracts)
But how much work is actually there to serve other people? And what needs should we be servicing anyway?
Does your kid need their 40th stuffed animal? I love my stuffies, and I'm not judging, but I don't need most of them. Do they need another Happy Meal toy from McDonalds? Do you need a new smartphone every year?
I think our society is so busy serving so many consumerist desires that we're not serving more important needs - a need for healthy food, good relationships, community, activity, and good rest.
And I think fixing this requires that we move away from the fundamental belief that people need to work, that work in and of itself is important.
Some work is necessary - we need to grow food and build homes and cook. But it's necessary in pursuit of these other goals I've listed, and I feel like our society has totally lost sight of that.
Idk. I'm too mentally ill to work, and I sell blood plasma to meet a few of my needs. This culture around work affects me, both in my own self-image and in how I can get support from society.
I want to say more, but I've hit a mental wall.
P.S. Related: underlying belief that all progress is good. Do we really need faster computers at this point? Is it actually good to put so much human labor and earth's resources into producing faster computers? Do you have any idea how fast computers already are? And did you know people survived before computers were invented?