America Depressed

I read an article today about how the youth of developing nations are happier than people who live in developed nations, such as the United States. Reading this made me sad, not about my life but sad that other people are not satisfied with theirs. The survey that determined this information was conducted by MTV Networks International. The survey was taken by more than 5,400 people ages between 16 and 34 in 14 countries. In my opinion that’s not a large enough sample of people to make such a claim because it’s estimated that there are one billion people between the ages of 15 – 24, which leads me to believe that there are probably about two billion between 16 - 34. That means that about 0.00027% of the world’s population between those ages was polled. Statistics aside, it makes me wonder why people in America, most European nations, and Japan would be so sad.

People said that the pressure to succeed and concern over their job. I have a very stressful job and sometimes I feel pressure to succeed or the anxiety of “am I living up to the company’s standard?”, “am I doing this right?”, “will I meet the deadline?”. But at the end of the day I take a moment collect myself and say to myself, it could be worse. I have a good job and live comfortably and I’m thankful for that. At the end of the day when I’m relaxing I’m really happy that I have a good job and can afford the lifestyle in which I have become accustomed to. I’m happy that I live in a nation where I can speak my voice freely and act freely (for the most part), and not in a poverty stricken nation, or a dictatorship, or a communist or socialist nation, or a nation where there’s not freedom of religion.

Another reason people stated they were sad because of the scare of terrorism and cancer. I thought about this for a while, because these are not things that I’m scared of. Maybe I’m just optimistic. I think that one reason that so many people are terrified of this is because of the media. It seems that a lot of the time when I’m watching the news it has something to do with terrorism. There is also a lot of media exposure to terminal illness like A.I.D.S. or cancer, like the T.R.U.T.H. ads that are run on television. Some examples are the ads that were run on T.V. about if you buy marijuana you are contributing to terrorist. Every time a big day in our nation rolls around there’s always the terrorist alert that’s orange, green, red, taupe, magenta, or whatever color means that people want to kill us. People are scared to fly now because of terrorist. The media seems to use fear to captivate us. Like this year’s hurricane season. Global warming and all these things were supposed to contribute to the “worst hurricane season on record”. The only hurricane to make landfall in the eastern U.S. was Ernesto, which did minimal damage, but the coverage leading up to it was so built up that you would think that the whole Eastern Seaboard was going to be wiped out. I think that so many people are not happy and are scared because of the way information is presented to us. If we live in fear then we can’t live full lives. I just try not to worry about it and go about my life and if I get killed by a terrorist or a natural disaster, well I guess it was just my time to go.

How do y’all feel about your lives? Are you happy or sad overall? Do you live in fear because of what’s going on in our world today? What do you think can be done to help raise moral in our nation? I just have trouble understanding why people in India are so much happier than people who live in the U.S. Maybe because it’s the vision of growth. They see their country developing and say to themselves that next year our nation is going to be greater and stronger and we’ll all have a better quality of living. Maybe here in the U.S. and in other developed countries we think we’ve reached our peak and are looking down the slope.

If you’d like to check out the article it can be found at:

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-11-20T000837Z_01_L19430195_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-GLOBAL-SURVEY.xml&src=rss&rpc=22