@ Rob-
Mr.Rob said:
@Chase
Being this is a seduction forum and were mostly following non-conventional lives with regards to "family, community, and faith" how exactly do you go about fulfilling this "sense of community and family" without having a true community or family (i.e. single playboy seducer who has a career as a digital nomad or fill in the blank accordingly).
Could you explain what you mean by "family, community, and faith"?
(i.e. If most of your family is deceased and you live away from the rest of your family is having a girlfriend and a string of mistresses enough to fulfill the family aspect?)
Sure. Humans are tribal, and tend historically to live amongst groups of known individuals, many of whom are family. In both hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies it is this way.
However, when societies urbanize, their populations become mobile, and individuals migrate into large urban seas of anonymous faces. Drinking buddies, coworkers, and friends with benefits don't offer the same kind of social support close family and lifelong friends do. So you get a bunch of people with frayed social ties who are much more prone to mental illness.
Urbanization has the same effect on religiosity, stripping individuals of religious/supernatural faith. Religious faith provides a hedge against existential angst; life has purpose, meaning, and direction. Without it, people become subject to fads, trends, and lose themselves in the mob.
Men have it better than women do. You'll note the mental illness rates in women in urbanized societies are significantly higher. But men have adapted to go out into the wilderness and be on their own and seek out new fortunes and opportunities. So pretty much all men - especially younger men - are better adapted to periods of time as bachelors, removed from community support. But most guys will see their minds fray a bit if they are too removed from people who know them and care about them too.
I've found forums a big help with not losing the community aspect as you travel around. The people you meet in real life are anonymous, but you go online to a forum you're a part of and there are your friends, same as always, as they have been for years. The best are small, private forums with guys who all know each other well and are at similar points in their lives (with travel, women, business, etc.). But if you have a large forum like the GC Boards that still works for you, that can help a lot too.
Girlfriends can help with some sense of community. Although I recommend against relying on them for this. If you get all your sense of family/community from girlfriends/mistresses, you are at their whims. If your community comes from a group of tight-knit male friends (in an online forum, or on a Facebook group, or wherever you build it) you retain your mental independence. Women will often rely on YOU for their sense of family/community (especially the kinds of girls you're more likely to pick up with cold approach... who more often tend to be loners / independent folks themselves), which can make the power dynamic a little uneven (she gets her sense of community from you, while you get your sense of community from your buddies).
@ Cacc-
Just a few studies off the top of my head that came out this year:
Marijuana use associated with increased risk of stroke, heart failure
Marijuana use tied to poorer school performance
Long-term marijuana use changes brain's reward circuit
Marijuana associated with three-fold risk of death from hypertension
So interestingly, this year alone, we've found marijuana causes blood flow problems (leading to heart attack / stroke), reduces performance in school (anyone who's had a pothead classmate could tell you this though... lol), rewires the brain, and die more from hypertension. Marijuana has a greater risk to cardiovascular health that nicotine cigarettes do.
There's plenty of older research on marijuana's bad sides as well. It increases the risks of schizophrenia, psychosis, etc. Obviously not as extreme as in the infamous 1936 "Reefer Madness" movie though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhQlcMHhF3w
There's a whole laundry list of adverse effects of marijuana on the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_(drug)#Adverse_effects
Cacc said:
What would be your recommendation to someone who feels depressed?
Follow the steps in my article on it:
How to Overcome Depression
And once you've beaten depression for good, get purpose:
The Purpose of Life from a Practical Point of View
Cacc said:
And what key aspects of society do you think will continue to worsen?
Well, we'll continue to see more and more population mixing, at least for now. As dissimilar populations mix (different races, religions, national origins, etc.), the social fabric erodes, trust goes down, and mental health issues increase. More and more people too will continue to move to anonymous cities, as the countryside continues to bleed jobs. So from the continued rise in close-proximity diversity and the continued rise in urbanization, I would expect community to continue to fray in the immediate future.
Families in the West are also in quite bad shape. Lots of people come from broken homes, lots of people who marry and have children now later divorce. Many people are now waiting until they're much older to have children, if they have them at all. Various social forces are at work to delegitimize the idea of family: rebel against your parents. The single life is best. Childfree life is best. So we can expect that individuals susceptible to these messages will stay away from family and experience concomitant increased mental health morbidity. Most urbanites are susceptible to anti-family messaging, so I see things worsening there, too. But even among the rural poor, family seems to have broken down to some extent, perhaps largely due to economics (no jobs; people have to migrate to different areas; people go on drugs to escape their problems; etc.).
And religion for now is totally buggered. Christianity, except for a few fundamentalist sects, has been hollowed out. Most of Christianity stands for nothing now, and as such inspires no one. Islam is resurgent, but is not exactly good for mental health, either; because it is an anti-monogamy religion, it creates polygamous societies with hordes of sexually disenfranchised men who become soldiers of Allah as an outlet. Very good for population expansion and growing the religion (let the top men breed with multiple partners; let the bottom men kill your enemies), but not so good for mental health or social stability.
All these issues point to a crisis, which we may already be in the midst of. Or may still be on the horizon somewhat, if you're in Europe (it's getting worse in Europe, but "crisis" hasn't entered the zeitgeist there yet the way it has in America. It will - the temperature of the pot is going up - but it hasn't reached a broil yet).
Crises can go a variety of ways: civilization collapse, invasion, revolution, dictatorship/authoritarianism, or, in rare cases, successful reform. I couldn't tell you which will be more likely. In America, we have the plutocrats, the anarchocapitalists, and the Marxists allied against the religious, the civic nationalists, and the ethnonationalists. Both alliances are tenuous, and whichever side wins is going to then have infighting among the victorious factions. However, at this point, I view social cohesion in the West as bad enough that whichever side offers improved social cohesion to be the more likely to win. Right now that seems to be the right. (that said, the right is missing some tremendous low-hanging fruit that is right up the left's alley - but I think the American left will need a few years in the woods before it reorients itself in the direction I think it will ultimately need to go in before it is equipped to win elections again)
Anyway, my prediction: social fabric / mental health will continue to deteriorate for the near-term (10 to 30 years?). After which, we should see it begin to improve (especially once Generation Z is a bigger part of the picture). But hard to say what that means for other aspects of society, like government, technology, economy, etc. Gonna be a bumpy ride till then, though.
Chase
