Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate, raising question: Why?

[caseymoz]

14. Disparities in wealth and self-worth are only part of it.

I've been under treatment for depression for years. What I tell my psychiatrist and counselor now is that prospects for the entire world depress me.

I grew up reading science fiction and had an optimism about the future. I had a negative self-worth, but I had optimism that the world itself would improve. I mean, we had put people on the moon, we had that energy crisis, but fusion energy would come along, the problems with nuclear energy had not become so explicit, at least not with me. When global warming was first hitting the news, it seemed that could be handled. Nationally. We had just had Vietnam, but seemed our nation had learned its lesson from that. There was the Cold War, but it seemed that would either be worked around or would destroy the world suddenly. Thinking about the future was a matter of the two systems learning to live harmoniously. Racial relations appeared to have nowhere to go but improve. There was certain anti-intellectualism and anti-science undercurrent in this country, but that didn't appear to have any legs. The gap between rich and poor wasn't a chasm. The military industrial complex was a problem, but it seemed to have a cause with national defense, and at least it employed a lot of people in technical positions, and it was a driver behind science.

I look at it today, and it's all worse. And I can trace back the point where it began to become worse to the day we elected Ronald Reagan. Before that, we had the canker of Richard Nixon, but all of the worst people in the Reagan administration had cut their teeth under Nixon.

The optimism, if not the actual prospects became better in the late '90s. Communism was over, and it seemed the world improve. Then the dot com and telecom crashes hit. And if that didn't disillusion my generation enough, George W. Bush was arbitrated President, consequently followed by 9/11, with all of the barbaric and oppressive measures to follow.

And wouldn't you know, they date the uptick in boomer suicides back to about the time of the dotcom crash. I bet it became much worse during Bush's first term.

Now, Global Warming is all but at hand. This culture is not going to move the population into space; in fact, physics has screwed us. Moreover, nothing has fixed the energy problem, and we have corporations running and ruining the planet. Bolshevistic communism has ended, but the military industrial complex has run amok and has turned against us. Moreover, the government spies on us wholesale, and has turned into a system that has to be called fascism in every way except subtlety. The only good thing I could name: the Internet. But that has consequences, because if the government doesn't show restraint (and ours doesn't), it becomes the best surveillance tool in history. Meanwhile, with overpopulation, depletion of resources, global warming, and general degradation of the environment, it's questionable to me that humankind will survive another millennium.

I could go on, but I'll sum up by saying when I graduated high school, this is not the world and the nation I thought I would see in my fifties. Part of it was just bad luck, but a lot of it is we just blew it. I think if I would have known when I was sixteen what I would see now, I probably would have committed suicide then.

It's depressing, even crippling. I keep going through antidepressants, escapism, focusing my attention on problems I can solve, and generally turning my attention away from the big picture when I have to.