Where are we now?
Have you ever walked around wondering how and why the world is the way it is? Do you ever feel scared and hopeless? Do you wonder if others feel the same way? Do you work for the weekend dreading Mondays or whichever day you go back to work after a day or two off? Do you use alcohol, drugs, eat lots of food, watch too much TV, sit on your phone for hours a day, play video games for hours a day, spend money or find other ways to escape your reality? Why is it that we live this way, constantly looking for the quickest exit?
It seems like people are constantly trying to escape, but is that true? The average person spends approximately 7 hours a day looking at screens with the most amount of time spent watching TV, playing video games, or on their phones. That’s 1/3 of their lives staring at screens passively escaping. Alcohol is another way most Americans escape. In 2018, we spent 253 billion dollars on alcohol. That is a lot of drinking. Alcohol is not our only chemically induced escape. We spend roughly 158 billion dollars a year on illicit drugs. Food also increases dopamine, which is a pleasure chemical in the brain. As a result, 42% of Americans are overweight or obese. Food has become their escape. Is anyone truly happy in our society? There are endless wars, persistent poverty, rising mental health issues, discrimination, rising crime rates, pollution, climate change, and a multitude of other issues facing humanity. This begs the questions as to why things are this way and is there anything we can do about it. Is anyone truly happy with the systems we have created?
The reason for our constant escapes is that most people are not happy with almost every aspect of their lives. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 19% of Americans are satisfied with how things are going. According to a 2023 report by Mental Health America, 21% of adults, or over 50 million Americans, suffer from some form of mental disorder and 15% suffer from addiction. According to the Pew Institute, only 51% of Americans are highly satisfied with their jobs or careers. Childhood anxiety and depression are rising. According to the CDC, between 2018-2019 37% of children between the ages of 12-17 reported having persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness, and 19% of children between the ages of 2-8 have been diagnosed with a mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. You better believe that these numbers are even higher after COVID. According to the American Psychological Association in 2022, 20.5% of youth worldwide are suffering from anxiety and depression. So, this is not just an American problem. It is worldwide.
Why are people suffering from anxiety, depression, and addiction? People need things to survive, such as food, water, shelter, and health care. How do we get access to them? Well, we need money. That is how our world is set up. According to the Census Bureau in 2022, the percentage of people in the United States living below the poverty line sits at 11.5%, or 37.9 million people. When we consider what this number represents, you will see that there are more people in poverty than this number would lead you to believe. The poverty threshold is calculated by taking the number of people who reside in a household and comparing it to how much money the family would need to afford a healthy or somewhat healthy diet. It does not include the ability to afford anything else like housing, transportation, or healthcare. For instance, in 2022, the nationwide poverty threshold was $35,801 for a family of 5. This figure does not take into account geographical location. It is used nationwide.
I do not know how a family of 5 could ever survive on $35,000 a year and I am right. According to research by MIT in 2022, In Oregon, the annual salary a family of 5 would need to earn is roughly $135,576 to be self-sufficient and afford life’s necessities, like having access to basic human needs. In America, we consider this to be a middle-class income. How is it that a family of 5 being able to afford all the necessities of life is considered to be middle class? You would think this is the threshold of poverty. It’s also the result of people surviving on credit, or what I like to call indentured servitude. National credit card debt in the U.S. now exceeds 1 trillion dollars or $8000 per household. We can’t escape our jobs even though we aren’t satisfied because we have too much debt.
As every year passes, the amount of real earnings people make is decreasing. While at the same the accumulation of wealth of the top earners is increasing. So the majority of people’s ability to access resources is dwindling. As you can see the gap between the very rich and the poor is widening at an exponential rate.
As people’s ability to access resources in America is drying up, more are finding themselves in jails and prisons. As the graph from The Sentencing Project shows, since 1972, there has been a 533% increase in the number of people placed in jails each year. Roughly 1% of the U.S. population is currently behind bars. That may not sound like a lot, but it equates to roughly 5.5 million people who are currently residing in jails as of 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. So, not only can most people not access the resources they need, suffer from anxiety and depression, and are dissatisfied with life, they are also being jailed at alarming numbers.
How did we get here?
What is causing our society to feel this way? It is the idea that punishment will cause people to behave in the ways we want them to. This core value is the result of our distant past and our present circumstances. It is programed into our DNA. For instance, the fear of pain by a bear attack caused us to run instead of process the threat of the bear. This had the effect of allowing us to survive and reproduce. We are all the product of our ancestors’ ability to avoid pain. If they did not, then most of us would not be here. Since fear allowed us to survive our distant past, we use it to survive our present by thinking pain or the fear of pain will alter the way people behave in positive ways that benefit society.
However, all we have known is pain. We show love by punishing someone when they have done something dangerous to themselves or others. We punish each other when we are hurt. It is a never-ending cycle of punishment. This is played out in every relationship big and small. From parent to child. From friend to friend. From teacher to student. From country to country. From government to citizens. It has happened so much to us that we have created so many weapons of mass destruction that we could take out the whole world many times over because we all live in a habitual state of fear.
Think about all the ways we punish each other. The world creates enough food for everyone to eat, yet people are starving. Grocery stores throw away exorbitant amounts of food and then safeguard the throwaways because people who don’t have money to purchase the food shouldn’t be able to eat because then they won’t learn to make money on their own. Even the food stamp program requires a person to hold a job, but how do they hold a job if they can’t eat? We punish them hoping they will learn to make money and contribute to society by getting a job. However, food is a basic human need. So, they probably can’t even focus enough to think about a job without food. So they turn to crime to get that food. And, because their life is nothing but fear and shame, they turn to drugs and alcohol to escape with no hope of actually recovering because our system is not set up that way. We believe only punishment will show them the light.
Everything is telling us to be afraid. Those screens we watch for about 1/3 of our lives only contribute to this fear too. Advertisements play on the primitive nature of fear to get us to buy things. Social media finds ways to keep us engaged through fear tactics. 24 hour news cycles need to keep us engaged, so they resort to showing us how crazy the world is by using fear. This is all to make money so that they may feel safe. Money is what allows us to feel safe in our society because it is how we get our essential needs met.
We justify our actions by saying the ends justify the means. It’s the old utilitarian homage. Roughly 63% of adults in the United States believe in Christianity where what you do in this world has the potential to damn you for all eternity where you will be punished forever nonstop. So if God believes the fear of eternal punishment is the answer to making people act the way he wants them to, then we of course will follow suit. The thinking would be, that if I give them pain in this world, then it will cause them to be a better person and avoid the pain of eternal fire. The ends justify the means. Even if you don’t subscribe to this religion, you are handcuffed by the cultural presence of it. You act in accord because it is all you have known.
People do not respond to pain and punishment in the way we think. 70 years of psychological research tells us this, but we make no room for it, because fear of pain has allowed us to survive for so long. The problem is that pain causes trauma which in turn causes a person to reside in their hindbrain making them unable to process their environment in ways that allow them to make good choices. Instead, they stay in fight, flight, or freeze mode, fearing everything around them. So, we have to create ways to escape, to feel safe. In many cases, this involves drugs, alcohol, food, video games, sex, or anything else that will give us fleeting pleasure. As I have shown, this is exactly what we have done.
The majority of people don’t know how to be truly happy because we have all been punished in one way or another by each other. So, we have to be constantly planning how we are going to avoid pain today. We do this by setting up all the safeguards we can. We buy insurance in case something bad happens. We accumulate as much money as we can so we never have to worry about getting essential resources. We hide in our houses. We hide in our phones. We create alternate personas in any given situation. We prepare for all catastrophes, real or imagined. We buy guns. We create jails. We create extraneous rules and laws. We buy locks and then bigger locks. We put up fences around everything we own, even our true selves. Everything is locked up for safekeeping.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because we don’t care. It’s because we do. If they hit rock bottom then they will surely start to make the right choices. If we keep pushing them down, then they will learn to get up by themselves, right? Except this never happens, or very rarely does. This is one of the major reasons mental illness exists. We have to create fantasies to deal with the pain and suffering we are going through because this world doesn’t make any sense. Everywhere we look there is pain, suffering, and fear. Why can so few have so much, yet so many have so little as to not even be able to eat, which should be a basic human right along with access to good healthcare, shelter, and water? Without these people surely can’t survive and thrive, they will be in a constant state of pain and suffering looking for the quickest exit whether real or imaginary.
So, the question becomes, what do we do about it? The best way to contribute to growing out of the mindset that pain will ultimately lead people to salvation is to hold a new core belief or value, which is, that all people do the best they can given their circumstances. Every time you get angry with someone, remember this, and instead of retribution, offer a hand. Or, if the pain they caused you is too much to offer help, then leave the situation. Causing them pain will only further their pain and cause the cycle to continue. We must stop the cycle at some point. If we approach people in this way, and we can give them love, forgiveness, and acceptance, then they can start to live in a world where they feel safe and can heal, which is what we all need. As a society we must begin to accept this as the only path forward, or lest we be doomed to blow each other up leaving the world a cold and desolate place.