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[ 11 minute read ]
Some of this might be historically true
Mental Health issues
People once had money........
Long ago, when humans were sane and had control over their own lives, they were happy. They had agency over their lives. They were a people who made decisions for themselves. ‘Ah ha!’, you cry, ‘Children had decisions made by their parents for them!’. You’re right; until they grew up, moved out, and experimented with the world under their own terms and then discovered that they were actually really rubbish at being responsible. That is when they made friends with their parents, instead of resenting them for interfering in (and ruining) their lives. Once these clueless teens realised that they needed help, they looked around for it and found it in their parents. They then respected their parents. They didn’t realise it, but they respected them. Advice was given to them, along with options that were available to them, and then they navigated the problems and nasty bits of life and got on with their lives. Mum and Dad didn’t fix it for them and so they gained respect for themselves. Because they respected themselves, they looked after themselves and then died; usually naturally, in old age, with money.
Then the world was given home computers, but not before Atari gave some of the adventurous people, ‘Pong’, an on-screen tennis game. ‘Pong’ was fine, it wasn’t addictive; it was only played when they were bored. Boredom meant they had not done enough to entertain themselves. Boredom was a punishment for not leaving their homes and socialising through exercise.
Granted, for some in the halcyon days of long ago, exercise was only given to the right arm that went from waist to chin height, waist to chin height, waist to chin height; with single repetitions of, perhaps, twelve to fifteen per hour, for four hours; and during, and between, this arm-exercise plenty of fluids were taken on-board, while a great deal of socialising took place. Scattered among these mostly male fitness-freaks were a few women. For most, that exercise was restricted to Friday and Saturday nights only; unless a religious holiday, or the last day of the year fell during the week. The reason the weekday restriction was in place was for two reasons only; it was expensive exercise; and this kind of exercise, conversely, impaired work capability. People were greatly respected for this self-imposed responsibility. Arriving at work on a Monday was much celebrated among work-colleagues.
However, for many people, lifting an ever-decreasing weight, twelve to twenty-four times per hour for four to five hours per night was so enjoyable that they did not restrict it to only two days each week, and were so keen to feel the burn the next day that they took no nights off. These people had lots of money! Their work was well paid, and there were whole packs of them with well-fed spouses and children in their warm homes. The only drawback for these people was that too much of this kind of exercise impaired their judgement and they made decisions that they regretted the next day. However, this recognition of making a mistake meant that they were continuing to learn and they were pleasing themselves in making resolutions to improve; in effect, much like their recently ‘left-home’ offspring. Everyone was happy.
Sensible people in the same industries, however, stayed at home during the weeknights. They had other harmless ideas that would never lead to harm. Many of us, today, fondly remember the grandparents of the presently afflicted. Bless them, they could never have known what they had harboured in their safe homes, while their raucous peers eshewed the three channels on the TV, in the UK.
The digital two-player Atari ‘Pong’ game, played through a television set with a home-owned console, was as harmless as tilting a little glass-covered square to manouver a ball-bearing through a maze. Yet, the analogue ball-bearing in maze game was better; Oh, far better! There was a building sense of anticipation that had rising waves and falling troughs of achievement, that if the maze was completed, resulted in such satisfaction and attendant cascading dopamine, that it took many seconds to recover from it; and a sibilant ‘Yes' was commonly heard, at this time. The point is, that people mostly had agency over their lives. They could put the gadgets down.
Then, after a fascinating period of new gadgets; which came about through the invention of the magic transistor; a digital switch (current on – current off) and other arcane digital discoveries and manifestations; a small fraction of the world’s population were told that they could have their own little spooky box that would not only replace their home typewriter, but allow them to make endless copies of their carefully scripted letters to their Councils and Bank-Managers, AND they had real-time editing of those letters. Many homes were cleared from rubbish, both on the floor and in the air; scrunched up balls of paper frustratingly hurled at a bin that didn’t respect their aim, and ‘Dammit!’ vanished. Not only was the typewrite gone but with one of these new digital typing machines that strangely also allowed home accounts to be digitally kept, the bin became nervous from lack of use, and miserably and quietly kept to heel. The kids liked this replacement box and keyboard too, because for a vast amount of treasure (that realistically materialised only two times a year - one being a religious holiday) the games that were played in the amusements arcades, the ones that had bred from the fecundity of new supplicants to the digital games, and moved from the periphery of small nations surrounded by sand and salty water, into the medium sized conurbations, were now available a the flick of a switch. Nobody, however, could afford ALL the games in the palaces of flickering lights and digitally created ‘clangs and dings’, for their home use. The electronic section of a sea-side transported to a town stayed for a while longer next to cinema, without the sea gulls and fish and chips.
Initially though, it was only the serious adults who wanted to appear ‘mentally contained’ to their bosses, and bank managers who bought this home office. They wondered what else to do with it, and separated themselves from their, by now, dreary spouses, to instead push around some digital letters. The strongest mental exercisers found that they could produce digital images and psuedo-presentations. It was, at least, better than the telly, and since they almost never exercised only one arm and never the other arm, found that they could get some separation from their mindlessly raving peers, and a smidgeon of relaxation, not least through silence, unless you discount the music, (with rubbish sound reproduction) they keep on them. Their kids were a bit disappointed as well, because the anticipation of winning a reward of tiny financial wealth by inserting a two pence piece into a glass covered electric machine with a reciprocating wall that may serendipitously push their money into a pool of hundreds of other coins to make them move towards a edge of a precipice that had an access hole to the outside for players to collect their reward, still remained quite firmly at the edges of small countries and in large conurbations, next to the cinema. So, anticipation of a positive reward, lasting for only a few fleeting seconds, was still absent in their homes. Things, however, were about to change.
A bit before 1996, there was a tribe of Japanese technocrats who realised that kids wanted to keep digital pets in their pockets. Finally, anticipation of a dead pet hooked a generation. They gave us ‘The Tamagochi’. The End was Nigh. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Atari’s Pong just could not cut the mustard; they were ‘Marmite’, while Tamagochi was crack cocaine.
Today, everyone is an avatar extra in ‘Stepford Wives’ with a perfect life, despite living on a run-down UK Council Estate; or a blur of a person, more excitingly present in both the past and the present, simultaneously in multiple places, but not, consciously, at the breakfast table.
Just so you know, in early 1990s Britain, no-one was surprised to have to wait ninety days for a parcel to arrive; To even think of Just-in-Time supply chains was quite simply madness. Inventory costs, or keeping things in warehouses makes up about 25 per cent of the cost of supplying an item, so if someone ordered something, before Just-in-Time logistics, it had to be ordered from China, or Taiwan, or some other far-off manufacturing country. Unless, it was manufactured in one’s own country or the one next door.
‘We had joy, we had fun. We had seasons in the sun. But, the joy couldn’t last because the season’s went too fast.’ Lyrics in ‘Season’s in The Sun’ sung by Terry Jacks.
..........and then technology arrived.