notyourservant wrote:
marla191792 wrote:
I heard someone say recently that they believe that one reason depression may be so prevalent in American society is because people are culturally conditioned to expect everything to turn out well for them. They expect to be financially stable, to have a good job that they enjoy, to be healthy and to have healthy children, and generally to be happy. They do not expect bad things to happen, and so it hits them really hard when bad things DO happen.

I haven't really thought it over much to decide whether I agree with that, but I was reminded of it when I saw your post ....

There's also the binary stigma. If you're NOT happy, successful, healthy, then you're good-for-nothing. Any slight flaw and you've failed at everything. It's all-or-nothing.

In Manchester we are into MISERABLE-ISM, and the most famous miserabilist is Morrissey, (of The Smiths). Lowry may have been miserable, I don't know. His paintings aren't what you call jolly. And of course, Engels wrote about the city as a pit of vice and degradation...to which the Mancunions replied, "And?" So he skulked off and invented communism.
Education in a Manchester school, consists of the message, "you'll be %%#+ lucky to be employed in any capacity...life is nasty brutish and short....and you husband will be too"
Also, it never stops raining...
So, if you meet each day, with all that in your adult developed psyche, you are under ALOT less pressure to be happy. You do, however, happily exist within the defined boundaries of "The Miserable" and it's fine. I lived in London for twelve years - a city with no real ambition towards the miserable, and I found the people to be rather uptight, unhappy, and fake success was sending them all into a terrible cocaine habit around Soho. It wasn't much fun.
But sit in any pub in Manchester and listen to the terrible tales of people getting murdered in Hulme, robbed in Didsbury, DNA'd by the police and how next door's ice cream van housed a load of semtex for the latest bomb, and honestly, people will be laughing insanely over this cornucopia of mis-haps past, present and future. I am sure that American's could really get into this mind-set if they try. We've had terrorists blowing us to smithereens for that last four decades, so maybe nine eleven was a start????

So to answer Marla's point - bring kids up to expect that they will go nowhere, do nothing, fail in all capacities and they get their dreams crushed. That way, if they come true, then they are really surprised and happy. Me telling my teacher that I was going to be an actress, got public ridicule and more! My mother turned around and slapped me so hard I fell over. People do end up getting resilient inside sometimes and that leads to humility and eventually contentment and happiness.

Not your sevant - I TOTALLY agree that this "all or nothing" is within American society and I noticed it with relations in America - how kids in a family would get "tagged" as a winner or a loser and how it would be so hard for the loser to kid to be a winner at anything else.

Last Edited By: charliedog Jun 19 09 8:17 AM. Edited 1 times.