…is that there are many millions of people across this planet who feel that the way they lead their present lives is void of any fulfillment. There’s a lot of other “big” things one can worry about (climate, COVID, etc.), but if you think about it, a lot of these other issues are not even on the radar of many since they’re not in a healthy state of mind themselves.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the “Great Resignation”. I became aware and concerned about all this when I recently watched these interviews…
As I listened to these discussions, my initial reaction was how lucky I feel to lead a life that does not require me to deal with a lack of work-life balance, demands on me to work harder than I already do or to obsess on existential thoughts of what my life-purpose is. But many are struggling with these things day in, day out. Many are just quitting their present job so they can rectify these important issues. But many who live on a subsistence level are not able to quit and thus are under extreme mental health stresses. In short, everyone is burned out!
It has become so cliché for politicians to scream that they can get people jobs and keep our taxes low. But have you ever heard a politician promise that they will help their constituents get a better work-life balance and demand that corporations not make people work so hard? Politicians always promise more funding for health care, but what about mental health care? In a social democratic state like Canada, every person can have a family doctor (although even this is difficult for some), which is great to take care of physical issues but, what if we lived in a world where every person can have access to a mental health professional free of charge? I think we live in a frenetic world where we literally want to put a band-aid on everything without getting to the root of what the deeper issues are. The pandemic has made many of these issues bubble over and now the “Great Resignation” is one of the symptoms of this, which I guess is a good thing. But my life experience has taught me that making important life decisions is more challenging when there are external stresses at play.
Forget about security, climate, human rights, if the governments of the world rallied together to promise that all citizens will have access to proper mental health services at no cost, many of these other big issues will simply solve themselves.