Emotional/mental "health" is not the default like physical health - it has to be built through intentional culture or else we'll all be horrible to ourselves and each other, but this is not the same as saying we are bad at the core

We talk about emotional/mental health as analogous to physical health, assuming that emotional health is the default unless there is a genetic predisposition to illness.

So if we are not mentally ill in a fixed, genetic way (how we used to conceptualize "biological depression" or how we still conceptualize bipolar disorder or schizophrenia) then we should be "healthy" unless we experienced or are experiencing trauma that harms our default emotional health.

I propose that our default is to be prone to maladaptive coping mechanisms *unless* we have explicit cultural modeling and age appropriate training to elevate our behavior to the level it would take to qualify as "emotionally healthy" as we think of it today.

Of course some cultural training wires IN maladaptive coping mechanisms, but that is not what we are experiencing in 2026 in the United States. What we are experiencing here is actually the chickens coming home to roost in terms of cultural dissolution, the absence of culture and as opposed to problematic culture.

I don't actually think it started with the smart phone in 2008 like people have been saying. It started before that, like with all complex things there are many variables, but the TLDR is that people as a whole culturally in the United States (and perhaps elsewhere) have become so "individualistic" after WW2 that we have forgotten what we owe other people, what "accountability" even means. I believe we took for granted something in our culture that made being "decent" to each other an uncompromising principle and assumed we'd all keep being "good" people (what we'd think of as emotionally healthy today).

In 2008, a huge batch of people raised by the baby boomers (Millennials) became adults. There are remarkable and inspiring baby boomers, but as a whole, the baby boomers were raised during a time where the "I" in individualism was in flashing neon. JKF had to get on TV and admonish the nation "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" just 20 years after the "silent" generation came back from WW2 having sacrificed greatly.