Thoughts that Keep Me Up at Night

I started this blog in a fit of inspiration after seeing significant improvement in my sleep. Part of improving my sleep involved recording and understanding the anxious or depressing thoughts which were preventing me from sleeping and try to come up with coping techniques for these thoughts. Most of my anxious thoughts have been typical have been easy to deal with while others have been difficult to overcome. The purpose of this post will be to discuss these more difficult to deal with anxious thoughts. This post won’t be very structured or organized since organizing anxious and depressing thoughts is generally difficult.

Context

In order for what I talk about to make sense I should provide some context as to why it is significant to me.

What I want to do with my Life

I have grown up with one of my parents having a minor disability. Due to this they have had to quit their original career and start a new one at home in order to continue to be supportive of the family. So throughout my life I have seen how disability affects both individual affected by the disability and people around. Seeing this has motivated me towards pursuing a career in medical device development. Currently I working toward a degree in biomedical engineering in order to pursue this goal. My hope is to be part of team who develops something that makes a big difference in the healthcare world and improves the lives of many people.

Modern Society

At first glance modern society seems to be progressing well. Many new technologies have allowed to do things that someone 100 years ago could not even comprehend. The most disruptive of these technologies is probably the internet. With it we can communicate to anyone almost anywhere and the way people live their lives has changed dramatically. With the internet nearly everyone has access to an immense amount of information about anything. From this pool of information they can gain knowledge about the world, what skills are in demand, and how to improve themselves. There are also many advances in healthcare and disease prevention. By all means people’s lives should be improving.

Anxious Thoughts

The previous section probably sounded somewhat hopeful. So much so that you might have forgotten that this post was about anxious thoughts I was having. However the previous section only takes one glance at how things are and only shows the surface of what is happening in both my life and society.

Social Decline

You would think with all this technology people would be making better decisions, be healthier, and be happier. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the last few decades obesity rates, depression rates, and a lot of other negative things have increased. This is in spite of all the technology we have today. Think about that for a second. With access to more information and more utilities, people today are doing worse than people who had less access to information and less utility. This makes as much sense as a someone with a calculator doing worse at math than someone without a calculator. In order for that to happen the person with the calculator would have to have immensely less ability than the other person. Applying that same concept to society at large shows that people today are less able than people in the past and increasingly so as time goes on. Not only is society becoming weaker, it is becoming weaker at a rate greater than the rate of technological growth.

Hopelessness

This idea of society declining faster than the progress of technology relates back to what I want to do with my life. Ideally I would work with a team and design a medical device that would improve many lives. However even if I am able to do this the amount of good I do could not possibly outweigh the natural state of decline that is already prevalent. What really scares me about this is that I feel everyone around me is oblivious to this concept. I might talk to someone about how std prevalence is higher in a time where we have access to condoms than it was in  a time before condoms even existed and people will just kind of laugh it off without really seeing why that is scary. Overall I am still going to try my best to improve myself and the world around me. Though I still have not really come to terms with the fact that I am almost certainly not going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.