This is a thoughtful and well-written essay, but I have my issues with it:
Aria is not unique. As a psychiatry resident, I am all too familiar with the fact that all too many human beings are broken, and the extent of dysfunction might not to be obvious to those who do not spend a lot of time around impoverished communities:
Let me tell you about a patient, or at least a synthesis of several patients. We’ll call her Maria.
Maria is the same age as Aria. Like Aria, she has problems with substance use. Like Aria, she has a complicated relationship with her mother. That is where the similarities end.
Maria’s mother isn’t flying in with designer drugs; she’s working a second shift cleaning offices and a third shift at a diner (optimistically, in the UK, she’s just as likely to not work at all and subsist off unemployment or disability allowances), and Maria hasn’t seen her awake in three days. Maria isn’t acting out to see if the boundaries will hold; she’s acting out because there are no boundaries. There is no one home to make any. The “friction” in her life is not a carefully calibrated challenge to build character. It is the constant, grinding abrasion of poverty, neglect, and trauma. She doesn’t have an emotional support animal; she has a barely legal descendant of an American bully chained up in the yard that her step-dad threatens to kill when he’s drunk.
When Maria skips class, it’s not to escape to a more exciting party; it’s because a boy from her neighborhood who thinks he owns her is waiting outside. When she uses drugs, it’s not a rebellious search for meaning in a meaningless world; it’s a desperate attempt to numb the relentless pain of a too-meaningful one, a world where every choice is freighted with the potential for immediate, catastrophic consequences.
And consequences? Maria craves a world without them. Her tragedy isn’t that an urn she pushes off the mantel fails to shatter. Her tragedy is that when her stepfather pushed her down the stairs, the bone shattered exactly as physics would predict, and the primary consequence was her mother telling her not to make a fuss.
Maria does drugs, just like her wealthier counterpart. She probably has access to coke and ket (the supply is cleaner in the UK, and probably cheaper), but in its absence, she’s drinking alcohol. A lot of alcohol.
Maria’s school lacks the cushy amenties Aria takes for granted. No personal therapist for her. Social workers who might be well-meaning, but are utterly burnt-out and unable to do very much about her issues. When I go visit the pubs around here and disclose that I’m a psychiatry trainee, it’s 50:50 if someone won’t immediately tell me about the problems they’re facing, kids going without a diagnosis of ADHD or autism for years or even decades from when it was flagged.
Someone like Maria, or even Aria, might eventually receive a diagnosis. You may take your pick of any of the following:
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): This is a strong possibility. BPD is characterized by a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and emotions, alongside marked impulsivity.
Conduct Disorder (CD): This diagnosis is given to individuals under 18 who exhibit a persistent pattern of violating the rights of others and major societal norms. Aria displays some of these behaviors, such as theft (stealing ketamine) and serious rule violations (substance use on campus).
Substance Use Disorder (SUD): This diagnosis is almost a certainty. She uses multiple substances (cocaine, alcohol, ketamine, Adderall) in a way that is clearly causing significant impairment in her life, leading to her eventual expulsion. Her mother’s role in supplying drugs indicates a severe and established pattern of use. For many adolescents, substance use is a way to cope with other underlying disorders like anxiety or depression.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): ODD involves a persistent pattern of angry/irritable mood and defiant behavior toward authority figures. Aria’s constant arguments with her parents and teachers, defiance of school rules, and deliberately annoying others fit this pattern. ODD can be a precursor to Conduct Disorder.
Now, outside of the obvious, I would wager that she might well have depression or ADHD. The pattern fits.
A rose by another name smells just as sweet, and has just as many thorns. Should Maria ever end up in front of a child or adolescent psychiatrist, a formal diagnosis is unlikely to do her any good.
She doesn’t have the luxury of having parents capable of shifting her to a different, more elite or more strict boarding school. She might drop out, her parents and social workers will likely be powerless to stop her. Her parents didn’t have the means to put her in a relatively safe environment, or at least one without boys/men ready and willing to take advantage of her. She’s probably going to be knocked up sooner or later. Later down the line, she might commit a crime, be it petty, drug-related or more serious, and begin a spiral that may or may end in a lengthy prison sentence.
It isn’t the presence or absence of money and luxury that usually causes such problems. Some people are simply broken, dealt a bad hand by genetics or environmental factors.
The prevalence of such conditions, however, does depend on socio-economic background. In their respective cohorts, there are far more Marias than there are Arias, and that’s adjusting for population size. There might be one Aria in her class. It is possible to have an entire class of Marias.
Wealth is a decent proxy for IQ, and IQ a decent proxy for mental health and well-being. The universe doesn’t care about human notions of fairness, the halo effect isn’t entirely unjustified: the rich are likely to be happier, healthier, smarter and better adjusted.
The kind of person who wins big at the lottery, isn’t the kind of person who might have earned the same amount of sum by labor or investment. Little surprise that they squander it. Similarly, it far less of a negative signal to be poor in a society where everyone is poor than it is to be in one where far more opportunities for socio-economic mobility exist.
(I would probably have to look up better citations, but I strongly expect that the Native American communities that make large amounts of money do better than those without that good fortune. They’re both still heavily dysfunctional. The money or not having to work for a living isn’t what’s causing it. I do not expect this trend to hold.)
I don’t expect a wealthier society to, by itself, change this. But the same factors that produce “abundance” hinge on technological advancement. Giving everyone UBI won’t solve Maria or Aria, but better medication, genetic or social engineering, those might.
I have had lifelong struggles with depression or ADHD, I found a workable solution to both, albeit with drawbacks. In a less enlightened time, I’d have just been screwed.
In the future, we will have the tools to solve ennui and such failures of the ancestral psyche, which hasn’t adjusted to motor vehicles or the absence of famine, let alone Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism (with optional homosexuality). Will we apply those tools? I hope so.
The worst part of depression is often the anhedonia. You cease to care, you lose the ability to enjoy things you once enjoyed. I am (mostly) an optimist about the future, which is an intellectual position hard to hold while feeling that life sucks and has sucked for ages. But I have given thought to what I’d do in a better future. Is it possible that humans will exhaust our entertainment options, that we won’t be able to expand Infinite Fun Space faster than we can plumb it? I think that’s very unlikely.
Yet, if we somehow manage to end up with nothing to do, and can’t make the universe more exciting, we can change ourselves. I see this as a last resort, but if I find myself as a mind in a Matrioshka Brain that finds the space of experience to be unavoidably ergodic, unable to find a new and exciting hobby to indulge, then I am willing to tamper with reward circuitry, to make myself with content merely with the space of what’s possible or already experienced.
UBI will be necessary, to ensure that biological humans survive in a future where their cognitive and physical labor don’t fetch a rate sufficient to justify a living wage. But I don’t think more money actually means more problems, and it is a solvable problem.
Aria is strictly better off than Maria. She has parents who care, and where they can’t, the resources to seek better. Just having the money for better treatment makes a difference, and hopefully we’ll have the technology to match soon! At the very least, I don’t see any fundamental barriers in the way.
This is a thoughtful and well-written essay, but I have my issues with it:
Aria is not unique. As a psychiatry resident, I am all too familiar with the fact that all too many human beings are broken, and the extent of dysfunction might not to be obvious to those who do not spend a lot of time around impoverished communities:
Let me tell you about a patient, or at least a synthesis of several patients. We’ll call her Maria.
Maria is the same age as Aria. Like Aria, she has problems with substance use. Like Aria, she has a complicated relationship with her mother. That is where the similarities end.
Maria’s mother isn’t flying in with designer drugs; she’s working a second shift cleaning offices and a third shift at a diner (optimistically, in the UK, she’s just as likely to not work at all and subsist off unemployment or disability allowances), and Maria hasn’t seen her awake in three days. Maria isn’t acting out to see if the boundaries will hold; she’s acting out because there are no boundaries. There is no one home to make any. The “friction” in her life is not a carefully calibrated challenge to build character. It is the constant, grinding abrasion of poverty, neglect, and trauma. She doesn’t have an emotional support animal; she has a barely legal descendant of an American bully chained up in the yard that her step-dad threatens to kill when he’s drunk.
When Maria skips class, it’s not to escape to a more exciting party; it’s because a boy from her neighborhood who thinks he owns her is waiting outside. When she uses drugs, it’s not a rebellious search for meaning in a meaningless world; it’s a desperate attempt to numb the relentless pain of a too-meaningful one, a world where every choice is freighted with the potential for immediate, catastrophic consequences.
And consequences? Maria craves a world without them. Her tragedy isn’t that an urn she pushes off the mantel fails to shatter. Her tragedy is that when her stepfather pushed her down the stairs, the bone shattered exactly as physics would predict, and the primary consequence was her mother telling her not to make a fuss.
Maria does drugs, just like her wealthier counterpart. She probably has access to coke and ket (the supply is cleaner in the UK, and probably cheaper), but in its absence, she’s drinking alcohol. A lot of alcohol.
Maria’s school lacks the cushy amenties Aria takes for granted. No personal therapist for her. Social workers who might be well-meaning, but are utterly burnt-out and unable to do very much about her issues. When I go visit the pubs around here and disclose that I’m a psychiatry trainee, it’s 50:50 if someone won’t immediately tell me about the problems they’re facing, kids going without a diagnosis of ADHD or autism for years or even decades from when it was flagged.
Someone like Maria, or even Aria, might eventually receive a diagnosis. You may take your pick of any of the following:
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD): This is a strong possibility. BPD is characterized by a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and emotions, alongside marked impulsivity.
Conduct Disorder (CD): This diagnosis is given to individuals under 18 who exhibit a persistent pattern of violating the rights of others and major societal norms. Aria displays some of these behaviors, such as theft (stealing ketamine) and serious rule violations (substance use on campus).
Substance Use Disorder (SUD): This diagnosis is almost a certainty. She uses multiple substances (cocaine, alcohol, ketamine, Adderall) in a way that is clearly causing significant impairment in her life, leading to her eventual expulsion. Her mother’s role in supplying drugs indicates a severe and established pattern of use. For many adolescents, substance use is a way to cope with other underlying disorders like anxiety or depression.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): ODD involves a persistent pattern of angry/irritable mood and defiant behavior toward authority figures. Aria’s constant arguments with her parents and teachers, defiance of school rules, and deliberately annoying others fit this pattern. ODD can be a precursor to Conduct Disorder.
Now, outside of the obvious, I would wager that she might well have depression or ADHD. The pattern fits.
A rose by another name smells just as sweet, and has just as many thorns. Should Maria ever end up in front of a child or adolescent psychiatrist, a formal diagnosis is unlikely to do her any good.
She doesn’t have the luxury of having parents capable of shifting her to a different, more elite or more strict boarding school. She might drop out, her parents and social workers will likely be powerless to stop her. Her parents didn’t have the means to put her in a relatively safe environment, or at least one without boys/men ready and willing to take advantage of her. She’s probably going to be knocked up sooner or later. Later down the line, she might commit a crime, be it petty, drug-related or more serious, and begin a spiral that may or may end in a lengthy prison sentence.
It isn’t the presence or absence of money and luxury that usually causes such problems. Some people are simply broken, dealt a bad hand by genetics or environmental factors.
The prevalence of such conditions, however, does depend on socio-economic background. In their respective cohorts, there are far more Marias than there are Arias, and that’s adjusting for population size. There might be one Aria in her class. It is possible to have an entire class of Marias.
Wealth is a decent proxy for IQ, and IQ a decent proxy for mental health and well-being. The universe doesn’t care about human notions of fairness, the halo effect isn’t entirely unjustified: the rich are likely to be happier, healthier, smarter and better adjusted.
The kind of person who wins big at the lottery, isn’t the kind of person who might have earned the same amount of sum by labor or investment. Little surprise that they squander it. Similarly, it far less of a negative signal to be poor in a society where everyone is poor than it is to be in one where far more opportunities for socio-economic mobility exist.
(I would probably have to look up better citations, but I strongly expect that the Native American communities that make large amounts of money do better than those without that good fortune. They’re both still heavily dysfunctional. The money or not having to work for a living isn’t what’s causing it. I do not expect this trend to hold.)
I don’t expect a wealthier society to, by itself, change this. But the same factors that produce “abundance” hinge on technological advancement. Giving everyone UBI won’t solve Maria or Aria, but better medication, genetic or social engineering, those might.
I have had lifelong struggles with depression or ADHD, I found a workable solution to both, albeit with drawbacks. In a less enlightened time, I’d have just been screwed.
In the future, we will have the tools to solve ennui and such failures of the ancestral psyche, which hasn’t adjusted to motor vehicles or the absence of famine, let alone Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism (with optional homosexuality). Will we apply those tools? I hope so.
The worst part of depression is often the anhedonia. You cease to care, you lose the ability to enjoy things you once enjoyed. I am (mostly) an optimist about the future, which is an intellectual position hard to hold while feeling that life sucks and has sucked for ages. But I have given thought to what I’d do in a better future. Is it possible that humans will exhaust our entertainment options, that we won’t be able to expand Infinite Fun Space faster than we can plumb it? I think that’s very unlikely.
Yet, if we somehow manage to end up with nothing to do, and can’t make the universe more exciting, we can change ourselves. I see this as a last resort, but if I find myself as a mind in a Matrioshka Brain that finds the space of experience to be unavoidably ergodic, unable to find a new and exciting hobby to indulge, then I am willing to tamper with reward circuitry, to make myself with content merely with the space of what’s possible or already experienced.
UBI will be necessary, to ensure that biological humans survive in a future where their cognitive and physical labor don’t fetch a rate sufficient to justify a living wage. But I don’t think more money actually means more problems, and it is a solvable problem.
Wow, those are really sad and unfortunate circumstances. I hope we can improve them.
Aria is strictly better off than Maria. She has parents who care, and where they can’t, the resources to seek better. Just having the money for better treatment makes a difference, and hopefully we’ll have the technology to match soon! At the very least, I don’t see any fundamental barriers in the way.