So I was watching TV moments ago and happened to catch an advertisement for an anti-depressant with a laundry list of side affects including "sudden death." This got me thinking about these drugs and for what reason they exist.
I'm thinking what it's really all about is life, which is to say a person that is not happy with their life is labeled depressed, but is it really life that they're not happy with? We spend the vast majority of our lives at work and having been in that place before I feel I understand just where this unhappiness is coming from. Just yesterday, Sunday, I saw my mother get up out of a chair and then all of a sudden she slumped down and gave out a seriously audible groan. "Ooooooh I don't want to go to work tomorrow" she exclaimed.
I remember that feeling, the feeling that I was doomed to be miserable every day for the rest of my life. The feeling that I was going to hate getting out of bed everyday for the rest of my life. The feeling that I hated my life. A person who says "I hate my job" is given anti-depressants and so they say "I hate my job, but I don't care." Society seems to be under the impression that when a person hates their job there's something wrong with the person, but I surmise there is nothing wrong with the person and that the problem is the job.
Why though? Why do we put ourselves through such hell every day? We have plenty of food to go around and we have plenty of gadgets to play with so why do we force ourselves to work harder and harder? Why do we force ourselves to work longer hours with shorter and shorter breaks?
WAR! From territory to bragging rights as a race we're always fighting over something. As individual nations and corporations competing to survive in a dog eat dog world you've got to put all your effort into outdoing the next guy. You've got to produce more than the competition, you've got to drive yourself harder and faster than the competition. If you're going to survive this world at war you can never stop pushing yourself well beyond your limits.
In our efforts to achieve world domination. In our efforts to take their land and keep them from taking ours the only thing we've succeeded in doing is destroying all reason for living on that land in the first place. Did you get what you wanted? Do we have the land and the resources we so desired? And at what cost? What good is global hegemony if its price tag is our happiness and desire to live?