How Much Doom and Gloom Should We Spread?
Our Children Need a Little Hope, too.
Depression, anger, anxiety, and a general sense of impending doom are common in our modern world. So is the spread of nonstop bad news, predictions, prophesies, and debilitating world views.
That’s life!
Although middle age has the highest number of suicides, it’s disturbing to note that over the last decade there has been a significant rise in suicide attempts among youth across America. We live in the most convenient time period in history with a measure of abundance that is unrivaled, yet we’re far from happy.
I grew up on gloom and doom.
I may be wired to see a darker world view than someone who grew up with parents who envisioned a brighter picture. I was told that the world would end in my lifetime. That we were living in the end times. My parents were merely biding their time until the Rapture when they’d be swept up into the heavens just in the nick of time, escaping The Great Tribulations.
We lived as though tomorrow was the end.
I figured I’d never see age 30 let alone 72. But here I am. I turn 72 in a few short weeks. Both of my parents are lying in graves, something they thought they’d be exempt from as the rapture would remove the sting of death from their plates. They were wrong.
If I live a few more years, I’ll have beat the odds and surpassed the average lifespan. Go figure!
I must admit that I’m still very surprised to still be here. And although I’ve given up religion long ago, my brain remains wired by the gloom and doom prophesies of my childhood. I see more shades of gray and black holes in the universe than perhaps my friends who grew up in normal households, doing normal things, and experiencing a level of safety that I wasn’t privy to in my formative years.
I always wondered why people had children if they see such a bleak journey ahead.
What’s the point? In fact, I resented my parents having me if all they could promise was misery. Why was I here if that was all we had to look forward to in the end?
I’ve come to see that our brains are strange environments where we process information in a very biased fashion.
Behavior patterns become deeply engrained and our world view remains rather fixed at about 26 years old when our brains are finally fully developed. So, we’re going to end up doing pretty well what we’ve seen everyone else doing from the day we drew our first breath.
Like it or not, between our DNA and our cultures, we really don’t have as much free will as we’d like to think.
People get offended when I say that free will isn’t as abundant as we like to think. We all want to believe that we’re the masters of our own fate. Of course, if we have schizophrenia or clinical depression or we’re bipolar, we have finally accepted that those conditions remove a lot of choice from our plates. We no longer think that the man down the street is demon possessed, however. Science has offered a better explanation. We call it mental illness. But we’re not ready to consider that maybe I’m successful because I was wired that way. Maybe you have trouble with commitment because you’re wired that way. Maybe it’s just easier for some of us to be good, kind, anxious, cruel, competitive, mean, or understanding because we’re wired that way.
Ugh. That would explain a lot of strange repetitive behaviors, wouldn’t it?
So, if we’re raised on doom and gloom can that influence the development of our brains? I don’t know. I just know that it impacted mine. Even though I’ve become more self-aware due to a lot of hard work, I still have the tendency to revert to a more dire outlook if I’m not careful.
I must break that natural tendency by stepping outside the head space I’m in so that I can give myself a lecture.
They say you might be able to rewire parts of your brain, but the best I’ve been able to do is practice enough vigilance that I now recognize when I’m reverting to old wiring that still exists in my brain. Then, I give myself that little pep talk and do my best to sidestep old patterns of behavior. It requires a lot of hard work and when I stop paying attention, I easily revert to my old ways of dealing with life. Those comfortable patterns feel like home to me even if they’re distressful.
So why is there a rise in the suicide rates of young people? I’m talking as young as 10- to 12-year-olds.
I believe it’s due to several things that mess with the wiring of developing brains. Nonstop news, social media, the decline of social safety networks, and the feeling that the world is going to end.
Kids need to see that parents can be happy. If all they see is stressed faces, anger, and depression, they absorb that as the only reality there is.
Of course, we already know the harmful effects of social media and nonstop news on the human brain. It stands to reason that people will absorb that negativity over time and it will influence their outlook on life in general.
Children today live in a world with little continuity.
Marriage and home life is always shifting for them. Back in the day, whether our parents got along or not, they tended to stay together. Children may have been traumatized by the continuous fighting they witnessed, but home remained a constant for them through thick and thin.
One of the biggest threats to a child is the fear of abandonment.
To have someone consistently taking care of a child is a fundamental need. To have father figures come and go and new mothers enter and leave the picture creates confusion. The sense of security that the developing brain of a child requires is under constant threat in today’s society.
I’m not advocating that grownups stay in bad marriages, but the alternative isn’t all that great for a child either.
Somehow, we must find a better way. I don’t know how but we’re definitely failing our children. The bottom line? Having children is too easy. I understand the biological reason for replacing ourselves on this planet.
Strictly speaking that urge to reproduce is as basic as it gets. I fully understand that.
Yet, until we figure out a way to give children what they deserve, it’s clear that we’re not very evolved. And maybe it’s too much to expect. After all, despite our delusions of grandeur, we’re merely part of the animal kingdom, struggling to survive. Hoping to easily find our next meal and warm burrow where we can sleep without constantly being attacked by another animal that’s just trying to survive as well.
It’s brutal out there if you haven’t noticed.
I have no desire to live forever. I’m fine with an average lifespan. But I’d love to come back to earth a century or more down the road and see if we’ve managed to figure a few things out for ourselves.
Wouldn’t that be something?
We’re not ready at this point to take the next step in the evolution of societies. We’re still cavemen with cell phones. We’re warlike, greedy, and governed by our basic instincts a good part of the time.
But maybe there’s hope down the road if we’re given enough time.
Right now, the best we can do is promise a better life to our children in the next world. We know what that world should look like, but we don’t seem able to muster the will to create it for our children in this life. So, we idealize the myth of the next life where things will be so much better. Everyone will have plenty. We’ll be safe. We’ll be happy. No more suffering, not even the self-inflicted kind. Everyone will be equal, live in nice homes and walk streets of gold. The entrance gate will be made of pearls no less. We’ll sing at the top of our lungs and feel uplifted every day. No more hunger, pain, or suffering.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we decided to have babies because we could offer them something spectacular? It doesn’t have to be loads of money. How about a world with no violence? A place where little kids could lay their heads on their pillows at night and not worry that they’ll be abandoned or hurt when they wake up? So far, the future promises little stability, however. We just keep having children even though we have little happiness to share with them and then tell them it will be better in the next life.
I’m not blaming anyone.
It is what it is, but it could be better. Not perfect. Not heaven on earth. But so much better. If I had to choose between a possible glorious afterlife and an improved here and now, I’d choose here and now without a second thought.
Sorry, kids.
All I can say is that most people are probably doing the best that they can with the hand they were dealt. That’s the truth. We want you to be happy, but we haven’t figured out how to be happy ourselves.
Maybe you can figure it out for us one day, a hundred years from now.
Teresa is an author, world traveler, and professional myth buster. You can find her books on Amazon.
