The questions, then, are: Why? How can this be the case? What are we not taking in to consideration in order to properly treat, or at least understand the condition(s)?
Maybe having all those things actually isn't what leads people to feel grateful for being alive.
A lot of people would say that making 75k and healthy is a "good life".
Yet we know that most of us are in dead end jobs and in a constant rat race.
A lot of people,including researchers, have such low standards and they look at other people with those standards and think "but they have a good life!"
Sure they have a good life when they try to enumerate the qualities of a good life, what they forget is that some "needs" may be unknown to them, though if they listen the needs aren't usually very quite.
Or they have bi-polar disorder and are on a downswing. That alone will do it.
Some forms of depression are medical, people need to be aware of this. Thinking that everyone can be cured by running off and finding one's true self is incredibly dangerous. For some people, that is the solution, but for others, running away from their support network is the exact wrong thing to do.
All that said, soul crushing jobs are soul crushing. The modern world's insistence that we all have true purpose in life has not helped things any. A lot of people used to just be happy getting married, having kids, and seeing their kids do well. Now, we all want some sort of higher purpose (I'm guilty of this as well), which makes obtaining happiness really hard.
For the longest time, success was "at least a few of your kids survived". Since then, standards have been raised to a point that only a fraction of the population can meet the current bar.
I think a very large percent of people would be happy with your old time antidote, but it's more an issue of security in realizing that. I would personally change your word meaningful, to my word, sustainable.
P.S. Who said anything about running away from support networks? Listening to your needs I suspect might look like asking someone for help, or something along those lines. But that's just it, everyone's needs aren't the same.
> P.S. Who said anything about running away from support networks?
The article, and popular mythos.
Leaving one's job, running off to explore one's true self. Society is full of stories of people fed up with everything so they leave behind all they know.
Heck sometimes it even works. But I'm countering the article's main thesis, which seems to be "depression is from having a crappy job" with the point that there are other causes as well.
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