Cold Turkey Nation

20% of the Us population is on some sort of psychiatric drug.

Now add in all the other other people who need street drugs or alcohol to get through their day.

While we are at it, put in all the screen addicted people who only survive by zoning out in front of a TV or computer screen.

Does this sound like a healthy society to you?

Some of us are reasonably happy and functional without mind altering substances. Perhaps they are like the person with an abusive spouse who’s found successful coping mechanisms to reduce the abuse. Others may be like that abusive spouse, fine with the abuse because they are the one dishing it out.

Now imagine that everyone stops taking meds and the screens are turned off. What would happen then? There would be a lot of pain. Cold turkey withdrawal is hard. Then a lot of people would go into depression.

A little bit of depression isn’t a bad thing. It’s around because it has some evolutionary benefits. People withdraw from the world and reflect inward. From melancholy periods comes insight. It’s a time to find out what’s not working in one’s life and maybe make a change. Now I’m not talking about deep clinical totally dysfunctional depression. Frankly, I’m glad there’s treatment for that. However, in it’s milder form it could be just what a person needs to restart their life.

When someone says they have a hard time fitting into society, I think that might be healthy. There’s not a lot of joy in the way things are currently set up. My guess is that we are doing things that go against basic human nature. Why would someone want to fit into a system if it takes mind altering coping strategies to survive it?

We don’t choose the world we are born into. Throughout history there have been many different types of societies. Some have worked better than others. When the colonists came to the New World, they bumped into cultures different than those in Europe. A persistent problem for leaders of the new settlements was that their settlers kept running away to live with the Indians. They often voted with their feet to join a culture that was a lot more satisfying than their own.

Too bad disease decimated the native population. It allowed the Puritan ideas to win by default. It’s a shame too, as the Puritans didn’t believe in having any fun. It was all work and no play with those guys.

We are not responsible for the world we are born into, but as grown ups, we can choose a different way to live. Go cold turkey on your culture. Break the addiction. Maybe then it’s possible to live like a human being -a mentally healthy human being.

-Sixbears