Then you'd have to live in Utah, Idaho, or Michigan. There are good reasons those houses are cheap.

I dealt with a little bit of what the article describes, the burden of too much leisure. I ended up getting a masters part time and another certification that ate up much of my 20s. But after that I still felt anxiety growing older. It was all just so meaningless. And every year I was less likely to ever have my career really take off so what the hell was the point? I'll be working until my 60s or moving to some random cheap country I have no connection to to live out the rest of my days.

This all changed once I had children. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention children at all. But I was in a kind of prolonged adolescence. You see this among many people without children. Just obsession about "addictive, sensationalist, forgettable entertainment and media", Disney World for adults, collectibles, anime, video games, all distractions.

Obviously children are not for everyone and I can only speak from personal experience. But having kids just cured that anxiety almost immediately. Not that I was not bored, but I kind of flipped things where time was on my side. Prior to kids, I felt anxiety growing older because I was just that much less likely to have some big breakthrough. And every year we get a little slower and less interested in things. Now every year my kids grow a bit and I know they got their best years ahead of them. And I get to experience all of that, win back some hard earned free time for personal interests, and overall have more interesting dinner conversations. But probably most importantly, you get to see what kind of people they're going to grow up to be.

This is just me of course. Some people might have the opposite experience, where they feel children are a prison. And plenty of people blow their lives up and abandon their families. But for me I couldn't imagine where I'd be without them.

What an insane article. It's almost like he hasn't read Eric Hoffer.

Mass movements arise when populations, that had had large increases in living standards, find their living standards are no longer rising. Hoffer cites something like 30% of the country is now 'middle class' and then depressions etc. set in.

Take the quote, "A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives."

The reality is the opposite. When work doesn't pay (i.e. when hard work can't lead to buying a condo/house and starting a family) the original premise of "work hard to get ahead" breaks. And here we are.

Any civilization where two 30 year old elementry school teachers can't buy a 1,200 sq-ft 3bdr/2bath condo for less than 30% of their income - is morally bankrupt. Aka 99% of the bay area, or DC, NYC. So people tern to idleness without the ability for work to result in personal progress.

The solutions are simple: make it easy to build housing. If you're bored, deadlift. Spend time outside. And, most of all, change our national household economics to allow ownership and family formation.

And build toxic, explosive factories and petrochem facilities in residential areas also in flood zones. cough Houston cough

Residentially, Texas has crap tons of HOAs that forbid even minor changes, so permits don't matter. Texas is also pretty boring, spread out, and requires a lot of driving to do anything. Business-wise, tiny industrial-centric cities would be happy to permit an asbestos factory and an oil refinery beside a nursery school and farmland, and all in a known flood zone. Ask me how I know.

Congratulations on being lucky enough to not be afflicted by a bad enough mental health disorder! All you have to do is to "get out there and do stuff" to achieve fulfillment.

Maybe you'll consider not projecting your experience onto the many others who are literally unable, even though they are equipped with the same number of functioning hands and feet as you do, and don't seem disabled by mere appearance.

> They fill up their time with worthless empty "calories" of media consumption, ethanol, and doom scrolling.

You might consider extending this empathy by also not blaming the otherwise healthy people falling into these dopamine traps that are designed by professionals to entrap, designed carefully over many thousands of man-years to maximize ad revenue.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you for the most part. Yet I'm struck by the complete omission of the robber from the story, and the focus on the robbed houseowner's weakly built front door, when it was already made of steel. And of course, the non-negligible fraction of the population whose front doors are made of weaker material through no fault of their own.

> Almost all of them are unhappy.

Then surely they would climb out of their dopamine gravity-wells in the first chance and pursue happier, more real lives, right, if they could?

I kindly ask you to reconsider your beliefs regarding "willpower".

I think a better way of putting it is the collapse of western style free and democratic societies. This is the post-truth era where reality doesn't matter and you can consume any version of "reality" you feel like on Internet.

China is not impacted because it has a tight grip on what its citizens can consume. Society will not collapse all over the world it will just become an authoritarian dystopia.

Civilization does not collapse from the edges, but rot from the center — in our case when middle management silences vision, and shareholders trade legacy for dividends.

Blame the government. They have strangled the hell out of productive Americans. Try to get a building permit to build something, anything.

Insane amounts of taxes, being wasted.

Failure to raise the minimum wage.

I was concerned because I was mostly shore diving. I hadn’t considered LEDs being used for dive lights and appreciate the link.