UN member states commit to preventing autism!

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How do you get sick from affluence?

Also, are the quarter of the world's population who live far more richly than the starving millions also the same quarter who claim to be impoverished by the 1%?

The revised Millennium Goals are largely symbolic--however, I do think this was a mistake.

The Standard American Diet (too many calories for activity level, excessively protein-heavy even for a body-builder with a laboring job, rife with added sugar and processed carbohydrates) is a pretty good example. That's BEFORE I get into all the fat, preservatives, and outright crap in fast food.

As much as I enjoy pressing a lever and having my poop disappear, pressing another lever and having potable water magically appear, and having my food magically materialize in the supermarket on tidy little Styrofoam trays, the sheer lack of activity involved in sustaining our lives is another example. Bad for the heart, bad for the mind.

Which brings up the mental health standpoint. That could be a book in and of itself.



A lot of the time?? Yes. Not always, but often enough. I think the term is "relative poverty." With some exceptions, we have materially good lives here. But it's easy to turn on the TV and see how other people appear to be living (or how advertising tells you you ought to be living), or get caught up in playing Keeping Up With the Joneses, and FEEL poor and deprived even though all your needs are met (and a healthy chunk of your wants, too).

That's very interesting. What I have been trying to work out is how can it be that people have much better lives than they did 50 or 100 or 1000 years ago and yet it seems like there is far more depression now than there used to be. How can so many be depressed when people in the middle ages weren't depressed? Surely we have better lives now than people did in the middle ages, right?But it's easy to turn on the TV and see how other people appear to be living (or how advertising tells you you ought to be living), or get caught up in playing Keeping Up With the Joneses, and FEEL poor and deprived even though all your needs are met (and a healthy chunk of your wants, too).[/quote]Yes I know about keeping up with the Joneses but it's not always about the image of what possessions our culture says you should have but sometimes about the achievements.

Recruiting ads for uni say everyone must have a degree. It used to be that only rich people or really smart people would get one but now it seems like most of the population gets one and the rest are made to feel subnormal when it used to be normal to not have one.

What we have now is a martyr culture. People say they're overworked with studies and/or their job and other people listening, instead of feeling sorry for them they think "if only I was suffering as much it would prove that I'm a strong person like they are".

Because our culture is filled with people making martyrs of themselves and boasting about how much they're suffering it causes other people to envy their strength and so they make themselves suffer in imitation. This is one explanation for why people overwork themselves.

And nowadays people are expected to be thin. In the middle ages no one told you you have to lose weight. So now we have overworked sleep deprived people and to make matters worse, they also have to go hungry, even as they work and/or study because society says they have to be thin.

And what you said about people not getting exercise, very true. They don't have enough time for it. It used to be that our work was exercise but now that we work in the office, exercise has to a separate thing. Maybe people get home late too mentally exhausted and tense, even if they're not physically exhausted. If you have a few precious hours between getting home and going to bed, if you're exhausted than those hours will not be productive hours.

I think much depression comes from people comparing themselves to other people in terms of possessions, achievements, work-ethic, thinness, etc.