[ragequittah]

>material conditions are much, much worse than ours.

I wonder how much better (or worse) off they are with mental health. What I see in our culture is a bunch of people scrambling to sell a bunch of plastic bobbles in order to afford a bunch of other plastic bobbles. None of it seems to make us particularly happy while it completely destroys the planet we're living on. In fact a whole lot of our 'material conditions' seem to isolate us and make this time in history uniquely depressing.