Agreed for sure. As someone who's lived or spent time in a number of other cultures I do think there's something excessively (if not uniquely) toxic about American life, which if I had to summarize (and agree with Sebastian Junger), would be: lack of community.

It's more than just the absence of community. The real sorrow comes from a culture that actively encourages us to abandon community in favor of striving for personal gain.

Community is there and possible. We just don't know how to reach it.

I can't help thinking organised religion was /the/ way to create a local community. Unless the state steps in and "forces" locals to gather regularly (in the way fear of god "forces" worshippers together) there's little reason for family X on road A and family Y on road B to meet, let alone shared experience for them to bond over.

Well, part of the issue is being able to find time+energy to be part of a community. With a "work/life" balance actually being a "work/children" balance in many cases, thanks to the nuclear family, it's very difficult to find time to do anything since the expectation is that you're keeping a hawk eye on your kids at all times.

Young people (or, at least, young people who don't feel the need to work 80-hour work weeks) do actually have a significant sense of community since they still have time to be active in communities. Personally, knowing that I have people I could arrange to be around on short notice who actually care about me is an incredible boost to my mental health.

I think one of the biggest missteps of modern industrial society was to disregard religion as outmoded without making any attempt to fill the psychological void it leaves. Seen in this light, atheism is clearly not interchangeable with religion. There are no weekly gatherings of atheists who praise the beauty and glory of creation. Religion is a reminder to take a step back and think about the big picture. Atheists can do that as well, of course; they just don't have much reason to do it, because atheism is not something you practice. It's not a way of life. It's just a void. And like you said, that void threatens the integrity of a community.

We need a new religion. Nothing out there right now is cutting it.

Another problem lies in the extreme pursuit of youthfulness, and the lack of respect for the elderly, the latter of which is opposite to what you find in "happy" cultures.

It creates a rather sad outlook on life.

I agree, having also lived in a multitude of cultures for some decades (~5), mostly Western(-ized) and so on, and in the case of America, had the opportunity to observe the culture, at scale. i.e. from top to bottom and back again, and so forth.

For me, the summary would be: America loves itself too much. Most "mental ill" Americans I met were, simply put, just too full of themselves. Its a tragic thing to have to explain, but the mirror seems to be one of the most dangerous weapons of all, and .. Americans sure do love that mirror.

So perhaps the (super-)self awareness of your average USA-branded citizen is one factor. I note that in other nationalistic/adornment identity- cultures, there are also 'mental illness' lunatic fringes (literally, pun!) which - in my opinion, are meta-physically transferrable - infections at a mental level - and therefore the best remedy is indeed an active and positive attitude about mental conditions.

For the most part, in lieu of pscyho-pharma-industrial dependence, I just travel. It totally works.

Agreed 100%. "Pill culture" is real in America, and in the West. But taking a pill just alleviates symptoms, it never cures anything.

I would say that for minor mental conditions (anxiety, depression, grief), psychiatric drugs exist solely because talk therapy is still primitive and ineffective.

It's much easier, logistically, to give a statin to a group of obese people, than it is to help each individual increase their self-esteem, start taking care of themselves, and teaching them the mindset skills they need to to make sustained changes.

Pills never fix the root problem. Some (more indigenous) cultures are very pro-grief, so when somebody loses a loved one, other villagers and even strangers try to support them, emotionally, so they can get through it. This is simply not the case in America, where people never receive the support they need and take pills to stop feeling so bad. The problem is an emotionally repressed culture, which can't be fixed with pills. Yet nobody actually tells it like it is.

> It's much easier, logistically, to give a statin to a group of obese people, than it is to help each individual increase their self-esteem, start taking care of themselves, and teaching them the mindset skills they need to to make sustained changes.

Your advice to people sounds like "just stop being fat", but what specifically should they do to take care of themselves and what are those changes? The people prescribing the drugs might not know or might've told them something that doesn't work and lost credibility.

I agree about the lack of community. There is also something about "artificiality" - it troubles me when walking around a city to know that all this was constructed by other people; and getting to grips with the 'documentation' for all this can be daunting.

Do you know of any other authors/philosophers who explore this idea more fully?

Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" is the most recent book I've read that touches on the overwhelming nature of modern life. In a nutshell, his idea of a solution to this problem is to not think about it. People who don't dig into the symbolic/artificial nature of society tend to function better.

Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault among others. [0][1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterotopia_(space)

Having lived in placed in America where people "have community", I'm generally happier without it. I despise being socially forced to be like the people who happen to be in my immediate geographic proximity.

Maybe those communities were just dysfunctional, not nurturing, or the people making them up weren't good to be around anyway (in the sense of "you are the average of the 5 people you hang out with most").

That doesn't indict communities and their social and emotional importance.

If anything, it proves GP's point. The coexistence of dysfunctional communities and no-community within a culture actually seems pretty congruent. It just points to both of these being caused by dysfunction in the culture.

Communities are of course important. A great many people find their communities critical to their social, emotional, and sometimes economic well-being.

Nearly every community is healthy and wonderful if they're like you in the ways you care about and you have membership. Nearly every community is dysfunctional if it's different in the ways you care about and you lack membership.

Most people I know seem to define "community" based purely on geography and some localist shared identity. I, personally, am not a fan of this. I find it too arbitrary and and far too likely to attempt to co-opt me into supporting things directly against understanding of my interests. I fully understand why some other people value such things.

And yes, it's possible that I'm just an asshole that nobody ever wants in their community.

It's also entirely possible that parent is just an asshole and those communities are better off without him.

What places are you referring to?

Large swaths of the American Midwest "have community", in the common sense of people in an area sharing and identity and caring about one another. People know each other. Look out for one another. Spend time together socially and culturally.

Of course, all of this only applies if you're sufficiently like them to be judged worthy of membership.

>Of course, all of this only applies if you're sufficiently like them to be judged worthy of membership.

Well, of course. A group who accepts anyone and everyone loses its identity. The real problem is that people don't have freedom of movement: that is, the ability to seek out and join a group that they truly fit in with.

Arguably, part of the problem is that people do. The ones who do come into conflict with the people who have no desire to use their freedom of movement.