It's an interesting one. I was reading recently about how the happiest people in the world are, in fact, people in some developing countries, especially in South America.
I've wondered about that for a long time. I've seen all these documentaries in these poor places in the world, yet everyone smiles and talks to one another, and even strangers, with total ease. In most of the developed world, smiles are much more rare, people are colder, more nervous, and do everything they can to block out their awareness of the people around them.
When I was taking classes about psychology, we learned that there are some developing countries or tribes that actually have a much better success rate than the West when it comes to helping schizophrenics, despite that they often have limited access to therapy and medication. They do it through community. And things like depression are actually quite rare.
Clearly we have easier lives in many respects. I have a fridge full of food, no concerns about still having my roof next month or even next year, I have an education, and health care. I'm not going to downplay their struggles for a moment.
Those people often don't have any of those things. Yet they're probably happier than I am. And I'm not an unhappy person by the standards of the society in which I live. But the fact is, now headed steadily towards 30, I no longer know *anyone* who hasn't had a problem with depression and/or anxiety at some point in their lives. I certainly don't know anyone who hasn't felt alone, despite living in these vast inter-connected webs of people.
Is that normal?
Is it normal for depression and anxiety to be such an expected part of life that it's pretty likely everyone you know has been through it by the time they're exiting their youth? What should be the happiest, healthiest, most energetic period of their lives?
I wonder sometimes what the constant beeps and the endless rapid-fire information does to our minds.
For all their poverty and strife, is there something about being able to see the stars at night, sit in silence even with others, or have the ebb of their life uninterrupted by bombastic headlines full of tragedy that makes them more able to just... be happy? Be human?
I wonder sometimes if we're really so much better at living than they are. And whether, as creatures of the mind, it's really "better" to be of sound bank account than of sound mind.