Weird World

This is just a tangent of my thoughts about some stuff I recently read; it’s not a formal argument, not a concise scientific treatise on the topic, nor is it meant as authoritative in any way. I’m just a weird guy and I have weird thoughts, so here’s a bit of them for your reading pleasure or displeasure. I apologize if I give you migraines.

The world is a really weird place sometimes.

So, after a long stint of casual reading, I came across some articles on the rapid explosion of mental illness in Micronesia. Of course, it’s mostly conjecture – I don’t think there’s a lot of motivation for people in developed countries to explore issues like this – but there seems to be a general understanding that there’s been a rapid increase in the occurrence of mental illness in Micronesia over the last fifteen years.

There have been a few institutional studies done to understand what’s happening. For the folks involved, a lot of the questions about why this is happening seem to resolve by pointing to the disintegration of traditional communities, the fragmentation of the fabric of social life, the widespread adoption of consumerism as a growing norm, and rampant drug and alcohol use among the public at large.

Those conclusions at once seem like universals that I can even see in my daily life (I don’t live in Micronesia, but in the American midwest), and as if they fall short of answering the question of what contributes to the varieties of mental malaise. The answers are platitudes about numeric values inked onto paper and called statistical surveys of demographic information; they sum up to the idea that people begin to objectify one another, grow isolated, resort to self-medication in order to fill the vacuum that once contained a rich social interconnectedness, and a very real alienation from an individual’s immediate environment. The tools used to measure the data objectifies the population into data points in a statistical survey, isolates the reader from the reality those data points represent, and yet they’re step number one taken by civilized people everywhere to solve such riddles. To think about it this way puts modern life in an unflattering light; these things surrounding us are very strange. We have drywall, pressboard, manufactured furniture, polymers made by forming repetitive chemical structures and linking them with covalent bonds. We need technicians for everything, and total strangers to make things for us that we most likely do not understand, do not care about, and which get thrown away once we’re done using them.

So how does a complex problem like that get solved? I really don’t know; I’m not an expert, just some guy thinking too much about things that are happening halfway around the world, and probably not enough about the life surrounding me.

Such a strange world…

I posted this before.

I’m sure I will post it again.