"Financial independence can lead to isolation, and isolation can put people at a greatly increased risk of depression and suicide." p. 21
Conventional success (high billable hours, making partner) in the legal profession has zero correlation with happiness, and public defenders who have much lower status than corporate lawyers lead happier lives (according to a 2105 survey in the George Washington Law Review).
"The findings are in keeping with self-determination theory which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money, and status." p.21-22
"The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment ... that maximizes consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences." Journal of Affective Disorders study, 2012. p. 23
...In bitter safety I awake, unfriended
And while the dawn begins with slashing rain
I think of the Battalion in the mud.
- from Seigfried Sassoon, wounded in WWI, poem Sick Leave
Rape survivors exhibit extreme psychological trauma immediately afterward, but nearly half of these experience a significant decline in their symptoms within weeks or months of the assault.
"That is a far faster recovery rate than soldiers have exhibited in the recent wars America has fought. One of the reasons, paradoxically is that because the trauma of combat is interwoven with other, positive experiences (bonding with other combatants) that become difficult to separate from the harm." p. 80
Because our society has created this structure for veterans struggling with PTSD that puts them in the status of victim, they get sympathy and resources, but not a social context that will help them feel meaningful and aid true transition. "Soldiers are never allowed to see themselves during deployment as victims because that passivity can get them killed." If they have problems returning, our formal programs and social status bestowed on them makes them viewed so sympathetically that they are "...Often excused from having to fully function in society. Some of them truly can't function, and those people should be taken care of immediately; but imagine how confusing it must be to the rest of them." p. 101
"Two of the behaviors that set early humans apart were the systematic sharing of food and altruistic group defense. Other primates did very little of either but, increasingly, hominids did, and those behaviors helped set them on an evolutionary path that produced the modern world. The earliest and most basic definition of community -- of tribe -- would be the group of people that you would both help feed and help defend. As society that doesn't offer its members the chance to act selflessly in these ways isn't a society in any tribal sense of the sore; it's just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own. Soldiers experience this tribal way of thinking at war, but when they come home they realize that the tribe they were actually fighting for wasn't their country, it was their unit. It makes absolutely nos sense to make the sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn't willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in in for the past decade and a half. p. 109
