In this day and age when most people have everything they could possibly need and then some, the world is sadder and angrier than ever before. The standard of living around the globe has never been higher, but neither has the discontentment.
According to a major analysis of global well-being, the world really is getting more miserable. Human beings worldwide are sadder, angrier and more fearful than they have ever been before.
Something just isn’t right on Earth. In Gallup’s annual Global State of Emotions report, all three emotions (sadness, anger, and fear) rose to record levels in 2018, for the second consecutive year.
Chad took the undesirable honor of being the world’s most negative country. Wrought with war, political crisis, and human rights violations, the country is the world’s worst in terms of emotional health, according to CNN.
Futurism reported that the researchers who conducted this study found that the number of people who said they’d experienced anger increased by two percentage points over the previous year, while both worry and sadness increased by one percentage point which is setting new record highs for all three negative emotions.
Research has noted the impact negative feelings can have on a person’s physical health — studies have linked angerto an elevated risk of heart attack and stroke, while chronic worry and sadness can be signs of anxiety disorders and depression, which carry an increased risk of heart disease.If people continue to experience these negative emotions in greater numbers, we could be headed toward a future in which the global population is increasingly unhealthy — a situation that carries its own troubling side effects. –Futurism
Research has indicated that stress and other negative emotions can wear on the body and even manifest in the form of health problems. According to the people living on the Earth, the world is just not that happy of a place. But there are ways to improve our happiness.
Alcoholism and other addictive behaviors and suicides are also on the rise in the United States. Feelings of hopelessness and despair are overwhelming far too many in the U.S. So much so, that people are turning to alcohol, drugs, and suicide to numb the pain of their lives. Government enslavement and the stranglehold on the economy are making life even more difficult on those already struggling to get by. And this is seen in new “death” numbers released.
Volume One of Fernand Braudel's oft-recommended (by me) trilogy Civilization & Capitalism, 15th to 18th Century is titled The Structures of Everyday Life. The book describes how life slowly became better and freer as the roots of modern capitalism and liberty spread in western Europe, slowly destabilizing and obsoleting the sclerotic tyrannies of feudalism.
Today I want to discuss the erosion of everyday life as a manifestation of the endgame of the current version of state capitalism, more precisely neofeudal state-cartel financialization, which combines financial predation of the home (core) economy and global exploitation of the Periphery (a.k.a. neocolonialism.)
Unlike the era Braudel describes, our era is characterized by the decline of liberty and the distortion of capitalism to serve the few at the expense of the many.
The over-used analogy of the boiled frog remains apt in understanding the erosion of everyday life: everyday life has become increasingly more difficult, more stressful, less rewarding financially, more deranging and less free for the past two generations. This erosion has gathered momentum in the 21st century as the status quo has ramped up its dysfunctional dynamics to keep the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, power and liberty in place.
Traffic congestion
Workloads
Loss of purchasing power, a.k.a. inflation
Loss of political agency
Financial insecurity
Nonsensical narratives
I could go on, but you get the picture: everyday life is eroding, getting harder and less free for the bottom 95%.
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