Mental Health is at an All Time Low - Here's Why
And How to Fix it
This may actually be the most important truth I've learned about physical/mental health in my entire life, and it took me decades, overwhelming failure, and countless hours to figure out.
If I had known this back when I first began working on my terrible physical and mental health over 20 years ago, I could have saved myself YEARS of excess suffering.
Absorb this information, and you'll find nearly all of your problems can be understood and addressed under the same umbrella.
Modernity: The quality or state of being modern; something characteristic of modern times.
Our current "version" of modernity has, without question, produced a virtual hell on Earth for an actual majority of the population.
Obesity rates >40%
Mental illness rates >30% (likely much higher)
Prescription medication rates > 60%
The truth is, every human being can tolerate different amounts of "modernity" before their minds and bodies break.
Examples of our current modernity:
Unnatural, synthetic, and heavily processed food
Screen time (social media, gaming, porn, etc.)
Media/news consumption
Broken and confused social roles and education
Ideological insanity (see Wokeness)
Social isolation
Etc.
Obviously, this list is FAR from complete. Modernity, it turns out, can provide poison of every flavor.
There are, however, things we can all do to strengthen ourselves against modernity:
Whole food, protein-dense nutrition
Exercise
Go for walks
Meditate
Time with friends and family
You've seen these lists before, I’m sure, and for good reason. It doesn't take a genius to notice that the people who regularly engage in these things have effectively defended themselves from the worst of modernity's effects. The percentage of people who regularly engage in these things?
<5%
You might also notice that, before modernity, these things were all commonplace and natural experiences of life; they weren't things you had to TRY to do - they were simply things almost everyone did, by default. Interestingly, the negative impacts of modernity actually encourage an INCREASE in the amount of time we spend drowning in it.
Medication
Addiction
Joining a political/religious cult (see Wokeness)
Seeking endless attention and external validation on social media
We are, effectively, in an abusive relationship with the default way of living, and we have neither the mental nor physical strength to leave the relationship.
Okay so, what's the solution?
First thing's first, we need to simplify this whole thing to make it easier to understand and deal with. Ultimately, EVERY. SINGLE. THING. in this post comes down to one of 3 states of being:
Helplessness - the feeling of having no control
Agency - the feeling of having control
Acceptance - accepting an inability to gain control
Modernity produces helplessness, and helplessness produces a broken mind and body.
Helplessness is what you feel while:
Watching the news
Seeking for validation/affirmation/attention on social media
Reaching for that 5th piece of pizza
Lying awake at night wishing you could fall asleep
It is a highly stressful state that demands immediate action from us (agency) but is, instead, typically dealt with through coping. Especially when impacting a mind already drowning in helplessness...
Agency overcomes, and is the opposite of helplessness.
Agency is what you feel when your expectations and desires for yourself and others are met; when you:
Successfully get your crush to agree to a date
Learn a new song on guitar
Finish that marathon
Break your sugar addiction
Acceptance is what we must embrace when agency proves inaccessible.
Acceptance is:
Choosing to not purchase something you can't afford
Letting your kid drive the car on their own for the first time without wrapping them in body armor
Failing to finish that marathon without beating yourself up over it
Acceptance is how we achieve piece of mind without the power to change reality. Instead, we change our perception and experience of it.
Alright, time to wrap it up!
Your mental and physical wellbeing will, without exception, be a function of your ratio of helplessness to agency/acceptance. If your life is filled with feelings of helplessness, then the solution to your suffering will be to remove as much of it as possible, and to replace it with agency or acceptance. If it wasn't obvious, this will look drastically different for every person, but there will be one MAJOR thing in common... Can you guess what it is?
Less modernity And a return to states of being that more closely resemble the environments we actually evolved to thrive in; states that eliminate excess helplessness, and replace it with agency and acceptance. Achieve this, and watch your body and mind transform into the person you were meant to be; the BEST version of yourself.