This doesn't get said nearly enough. Social media is also to blame. I know one person who got upset about his credit score (low 700s) from watching videos about it and then kept consuming information until he was seriously depressed about his (good) finances.

When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I never worried about any of this at all.

I couldn't imagine worrying about it, but maybe it's because I think I'm doing fine. Credit score is such a strange game to me.

Closed a loan? That costs me points, somehow.

Dad got a new cell phone and they ran the wrong person's credit? That cost me points too, because clearly their screw up was my fault. Hope he was still approved.

I rent and the cars are old. Sometimes I feel like I play on hard mode by having a $3000 VISA as my only debt.

If I make a $2000 purchase, they report it Tuesday, I pay that back to them Thursday, and I check my score? Woah, dropped 80 points! What a delinquent!

That might have become more of a rant than I intended. I should probably just apply for more credit stop the large points changes like this.

Not to downplay the current world problems, but you could make similar arguments at any point in history about any number of big problems humanity has faced. Yet, people still find hope and keep solving problems.

in the past we had religion, which gives some people hope. we have yet to find the replacement for religion.

Religion gives you a set of things to believe in, a community, and maybe some transcendent experiences. You can still choose to believe whatever you want though even without religion, and there are many other sources of community and transcendent experiences out there.

Religion wraps it all up in a nice package, and plenty of folks do still choose religion and reap plenty of benefits from it, but there are other options out there.

Without wanting to underscore the seriousness of those problems, a day or two in the woods without access to email or a constant stream of news (Discord and SMS seems fine for me in that situation) really dampens a lot of mental health issues I have, even after going back to civilization.

Hope comes from negative situations, you hope things will get better. There wouldn't be any reason for hope if everything was going well.

Of course, hoping for change and actually changing yourself are two very different things.

I don’t think those sorts of problems cause depression necessarily.

The term "Late-stage capitalism" was invented over 100 years ago, and I don't think there is any rational reason to be more depressed than a feudalist peasant.