[rexpop]

> childhood trauma, broken families, pathogens, and metabolic disorders

These are all downstream from the points mentioned.

> Personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution. (Carol Hanisch, 1970)

[manmal]

That would imply a unidirectional flow of influence from society to communities to families to the individual. But those ecosystems really communicate with feedback loops, and not strictly downstream. Improve one, you‘ll likely improve the others.

If you think strictly unidirectional, you‘ll end up at the Big Bang as the root of all suffering, and what would that achieve?

[zerbinxx]

Well, then you’d become a Buddhist and hopefully that’d help. To be less oblique, the act of abstracting your own personal suffering from “the way things are” can be a good step in isolating exactly what has got you down. I personally know that accepting a mantra like “life is suffering” can help to improve my resilience and get out of the delusion that everything is “happening to me” vs. “happening around me” and that it’s my choice of how to reckon with that and live life to the best I can in spite of it.

[manmal]

I think to accept that life means suffering might take away potential to improve perspective on whether it’s actually suffering I need to accept, or pain I can mitigate. The distinction is crucial and getting it wrong is - IMO - a big contributor to anxiety & depression (they usually coincide from a clinical perspective). It has been shown in rats that they will reproducibly get anxious and depressed when they feel trapped and isolated, and this resolves when their situation improves. So if someone is not being held prison at the moment, it would IMO be beneficial to find out whether there’s a „prison in the head“.

That’s besides the other factors I mentioned - if you look at studies of what substances pathogens in the stomach and microbiome produce, it turns out they can really cause anxiety. My take is that anxiety can be a multifactorial issue and a local minimum that one needs to climb out of actively. Accepting life as suffering might not give the impulse to get the necessary help.

[rexpop]

Yes of course there are feedback loops involved—which is why I really disagree with the comment that we should look back to the big bang, over which we have no influence (AFAIK, but which I'm not interested in debating)—and if I thought there weren't, why would I bother problematizing the political economy?