I’m surprised more Americans are not wandering around babbling and shaking their fists at the clouds because it sure is fucking hard to maintain ones sanity in our crazy world.

Stress, anxiety and depression are on the rise, and they have been for years. Studies have found that increases in cost of living have a lot to do with this deterioration in mental health, while others have linked it to widespread social media use, and the financial and social catastrophes ensuing from government Covid restrictions certainly haven’t helped. Then there’s the fact that highly unequal societies have lower life expectancy, even for high income cohorts, compared to the top wealthy in more equal countries.

What nobody seems to be doing any research at all into investigating is the possibility that all these mental health problems have something to do with the fact that we are ruled by sociopaths who are making the workplace untenable while plotting to deploy AI in a massive wave of layoffs, making millions of jobs unnecessary. That shitty Mac-job that you loathe could be a thing of the past, except now you’re out in the street joining the flotsam and jetsam.

With capitalism based on the surplus value of labor, there’s a sinister purpose behind homeless people wandering around. They are an object lesson for the rest of us–keep your nose to the grindstone and don’t make any trouble or this could be you. When you boil it all down homelessness and starvation are necessary sacrifices that must be made for the freedoms and conveniences the sociopaths who rule us want to have for themselves.

Some people wonder why mental health conditions are so bad, while I’m amazed that they’re not much worse. It’s pretty fucking unbelievable that anyone’s functioning at all in a civilization that’s ruled by exploiters and abusers who dominate using mass-scale psychological manipulation. It’s a testament to human resilience that anyone is sane. When everyone’s mind is always being pummeled with messaging that you’re deficient if you can’t thrive under our oppressive systems, that you’re flawed if you don’t look, think and act a certain way, that poverty is normal and endless war is acceptable, it’s a wonder we don’t all snap.

In a totalitarian dystopia that’s held together by mass-scale psychological abuse, it’s entirely reasonable that people are finding themselves overwhelmed with despair, alienation, depression and anxiety.

However, it’s important for your mental health to understand that it’s not you, it’s the system that we labor under that’s causing these feelings.

I never tire of Terence McKenna’s musings–“the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

Update: Your boss wants AI to replace you. The writers’ strike shows how to fight back” [Los Angeles Times]. “One of those workers put it to me bluntly on the picket line, where screenwriters were protesting, among other things, the entertainment industry’s openness to using artificial intelligence to churn out scripts: ‘F— ChatGPT.’