Suicides Have Increased. Is This an Existential Crisis?
For one, I think people are more selfish these days. I don&#x27;t mean that as an insult, I&#x27;m selfish in the same way and I think it&#x27;s a luxury we couldn&#x27;t afford until recently. I don&#x27;t know if the world made us that way, or we made the world that way, but we&#x27;re all to blame. Because relative wealth has increased since I was a kid we generally don&#x27;t need our community the way we used to. When I was a kid, my mom knew all the neighbors really well and nearly every night somebody was borrowing dinner ingredients or something from somebody. Today, my same mom would probably just go to the store and buy what she needs. Nobody needs each other anymore, or at least they don&#x27;t think they do.<p>Secondly, there is so much more entertainment now than there used to be. When I was a kid, there was maybe one night&#x2F;week where something was on TV that I actually wanted to watch. Movies were rented once&#x2F;week max. So, the rest of the time was mostly spent playing with kids on our block... and our parents would have a beer with the other parents at the same time. It was cheap, fun, and more importantly for our context... there wasn&#x27;t anything better to do anyway. It was plain simple truthful fun. It was real.<p>Fucking too. I think people fucked more back then.<p>Our transition to the mass consumption of entertainment that we have now, including hacker news to some degree, presents an even bigger problem... lies. Plain simple truthful fun is much harder to come by now. The Joneses (or Kardashians) are on your TV all the time on every channel. Mostly unobtainable celebrity lifestyles stream to your pocket in real time. And if nothing good is on in real time then you can consume every night of your next two months streaming 7 seasons of a new show. I know my wife and I definitely have less sex because Game of Thrones and other TV shows are better than most movies. I hate to admit it because it sounds sad, but it&#x27;s also our choice, we have less sex than we would if TV wasn&#x27;t so damn good. It&#x27;s not better than sex, but it&#x27;s easier to do. You can drink wine while you&#x27;re doing it. At the end of a long day, you can wind down instead of winding up. It doesn&#x27;t take any effort, and everything else worthwhile, like talking to your neighbors, is harder than winding down. It is work. You have to think. It shouldn&#x27;t be that way, but it&#x27;s just not as relaxing as watching TV or reading hacker news.<p>Nobody leaves their house anymore. When I was a kid, there were people outside constantly. Nobody in my neighborhood even mows their grass anymore, it&#x27;s all lawn care services. Nobody does shit that they don&#x27;t have to do. Kids too. My kids are young, but if I let them start the day watching TV they never want to stop and go outside. I rarely see other kids outside playing anymore. My friends with teenagers say their kids have no desire to get their drivers license, they like being at home, watching youtube, playing video games and texting with friends. Even the number of teens having sex is way down. Even horny teenagers aren&#x27;t fucking as much anymore!<p>That&#x27;s because the entertainment itself is part of the problem. It&#x27;s good. It&#x27;s really good. &quot;Binge watching&quot; sounds like an unhealthy disorder because it is an unhealthy disorder. Even &quot;reality tv&quot; isn&#x27;t real. What? The things they market as real aren&#x27;t real! Then the lie takes a break to pay the bills through advertising and it&#x27;s even more lies. Now, don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;ve worked in Advertising and there&#x27;s no grand conspiracy to try and control people, everyone in that industry is just working their ass off to do the best job they can like everyone else in every other industry. If you go to the gym, the girl with the nice boobs -- they might be fake, or that guy with the muscles you want -- he might be doped up. Everything is out of control.<p>So, it&#x27;s no wonder people can&#x27;t find purpose and are killing themselves -- they can&#x27;t make sense of this world and that is one of the few things they can do that they know is real. They feel out of control and taking their own life is one thing they can do, it&#x27;s the final and ultimate way to beat this world and prove that they really do have some control.<p>I used a lot of hyperbole and generalizations but I think this one is true: we need to spend less time with our screens and more time outside with our friends and family. Good luck convincing them.