Maybe people are depressed because of the ideas that:
- happiness comes from outside yourself
- the world is fucked (people who think this tend to blame the economy, the environment, the threat of nuclear war)
- humans are weak and ineffectual, so we can't change the environment or ourselves
Why do these ideas exist? Because people trying to sell us on voting this way or that (illegal immigrants are ruining the country! big bad corporates are ruining the environment!) or spending our money a certain way first have to convince us that the status quo is unacceptable and that they alone can effect change.
Get rid of these ideas and watch your well-being skyrocket.
And while happiness needs the "inside yourself", it also needs the outside. Especially the outside that affects the inside, like reduce socialization and spaces to meet causing loneliness, social media and "personal highlight reels" posts from thousands that one sees causing feeling of inadequacy and missing out, an economic climate that brings precarity and uncertainty, etc.
Of course if you e.g. make $200+ plus stock bonuses and such a year in a cushy IT job you might dispute the latter is a thing, and if you're an introverted "hacker" type, you might dispute the former is a thing as well. It's like billionaires saying "everybody can succeed, just look at my and my unicorn 1 in 1000000 company".
And while we can be happy even with bad external conditions (e.g. third world poverty) it's very possible that we cannot be happy with all kinds of bad external conditions, e.g. a damaged social fabric, widespread atomization of society, meaningless work, status and income uncertainty in a consumerist (not a third world, where everybody is poor anyway) society, and so on.
- happiness comes from outside yourself
- the world is fucked (people who think this tend to blame the economy, the environment, the threat of nuclear war)
- humans are weak and ineffectual, so we can't change the environment or ourselves
Why do these ideas exist? Because people trying to sell us on voting this way or that (illegal immigrants are ruining the country! big bad corporates are ruining the environment!) or spending our money a certain way first have to convince us that the status quo is unacceptable and that they alone can effect change.
Get rid of these ideas and watch your well-being skyrocket.