Fishhead

Fishhead documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gg7fyYH0e8
   
I still freak out whenever I hear the statistics on antidepressant use, for the countless millions on them they can't all nearly be lifesaving. The problems around us are far more endemic and coercive than we can fathom. It's hard to argue against what makes people happy, especially in this time, but I think we're largely missing a reality here in that our very conception of and importance attributed to things like happiness or identity or lifestyles could be a lot different, and that this truly is what's isolating us and destroying the planet. Personally, dogmatic or material systems are far more empty and nihilistic to me than living without the kinds of needs or assumptions those systems bring, not to mention all the egoism (and destroying the damn planet). I'm more present now with people and everything is a wonderful mystery for me all the time and that feeling just grows on me the more I read and experience. It's really trippy stuff to say the least and I feel more ignorant to it now than ever, yet empowered beyond anything I could have imagined in high school.
 
Real talk now:
I would never have attempted health care work unless I had expanded my mind, and now I've seen first-hand how desperately lacking we are in not just professionals, but compassionate ones who can connect with patients and make projects out of improving their quality of life. I look up to my mom a lot in that way. Mental health is the most ignored by far, and I watch friends go untreated while their good habits rot and their personalities disappear, unable to open up for fear of their destructive side or of upsetting some unspoken status-quo, or for want for isolation (which can be a good thing sometimes) or worse, because there is no help. 

I had a very dear elderly friend who couldn't get the care he needed in a nursing home because it was both understaffed and under-serving their patients. His wife swallowed her neuropathy and bad back to get him in and out of bed and around the house so he could have some quality of life. While I visited them in Vermont last fall I helped their neighbor who fell out of his chair and he and his wife told me a similar story. Apparently there's multiple days a week where he just has to lay there until neighbors get off work because there's no outside help. Imagine how lonely that is for them and you will understand a very important aspect of everyone's problems, not just in health, but in their total experience of life. 

This doc winds itself up very well: "Networks tend to magnify themselves with whatever they are seeded with." Simple but not trivial stuff, and this rabbit hole is so very dark for so many of us, but a lot of us also have a choice to do something about it. Love you all, now go do some kindness. And don't be a patronizing bastard either, we're all people. And don't destroy the damn planet, I need it... to take over the world.

9/29/2016 update: My elderly friend passed away late August. I got to see him once about a year ago, and he was in terrible shape but still the jolly fellow who taught me a lot about gardening and board games as a kid.