Hello, Today.
Lately, I've been thinking about a few aspects of our society I think would benefit from some updating.
These aspects are mainly mental health and basic economy.
Mental Health
Nowadays, there is still a lot of competition and other factors that lead people to act defensively and treat mental health significantly differently from physical health.
This happens on both patient and doctor side. The patient is inserted into a culture that doesn't recognize mental health issues as well as physical health. And also, mental illness is seen as much worse than physical, not understood and a door to exclusion for the patients.
One example would be depression, although recognized, the symptoms and peer reaction is often negative, perhaps because it's the total opposite of what one most commonly seeks in life: happiness, fulfillment, stability.
From the doctor side, the tendency is to treat this example as a simple disease, to be cured with medicine and perhaps a few sessions with a psychologist. A quick, standard solution, albeit inappropriate. Often not enough attention is paid to solving the life context that is causing this ailment.
But to me, the only issue with mental health doesn't occur only when there's a disease, injuries occur often, and in my opinion, they are often not recognized or treated properly. They eventually grow up to an illness such as the previously mentioned depression.
My worry is that these injuries, of more often occurrence, negatively impact relationships, both personal and work.
They stop people from feeling fulfillment, happiness they so much seek. Think how many times you retained yourself from talking the truth because you were afraid of injuring a peer, knowing they'd never developed resistance to that injury, wouldn't know how to deal with the situation and act in a defensive manner, injuring both you and that person.
This generates a lack of trust, honesty, which ultimately hinders us from improving ourselves , from cooperating and achieving higher goals.
You see this all the time, wether if it is when you didn't tell the neighbor you disagree that her cats have priority over the local fauna, or you stopped yourself from telling the right person you disagree with the recent actions of the company and instead chose to abandon the group for a new, unknown where you think those issues aren't present, opposed to being honest and face the reaction.
Basic Economy
My other worry is economy. As we know it, the economy is incredibly ancient and inappropriate to the days of now.
I am hinting of ideas popularized by the zeitgeist movement, Star Trek or The Venus Project.
Our economy, the values it sits upon, haven't been kept up to date with our achievements. Achievements in science, both technological improvements to resource generation and understanding of the human nature - what drives us, how we work and the realization that we are not on the top of the universe and live in a minuscule rock lost in the pocket of an immense giant.
My point is: you don't need to live in the 24th century to see how much needs to be improved, how much we need to change. Stop being driven by our animal instincts, we are much more than that, we are aware of those instincts, we are the only known animal capable seeing what we are made of and sculpt it.
You really don't need to be from the future to know this, the fact is that people like me know it, but this knowledge is also abused and used to control behaviors on a daily basis.
The most blatant nefarious use of this information is done by advertisers, they abuse known biases such as the fact we don't have granular validation rules for an entity, that is to say that if Aston Martin as a company were to use Office360 we are likely blind to see that AM is a car manufacturer, not an expert in what's good for your business infrastructure.
Wrap Up
It is an incredibly complex subject, especially the economics.
This is just me letting off steam and hopefully connect to more people with similar concerns, hear your opinions.
If you haven't, I recommend you check out the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season, titled: "The Neutral Zone", where you get to see a very emotional culture clash between us and the future where money doesn't exist and mutual respect is a given.
