Anxiety is not identical to depression, but consider: "The Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression: Where Is It Going?" https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/02/chemical-imbalance-theo... "The spurious chemical imbalance theory of depression is arguably the most destructive thing that psychiatry has ever done. ..."

The placebo effect can be very real...

And self-fulfilling predictions by authority figures can also be powerful...

Lack of neurotransmitters being produced in the gut due to microbiome issues is maybe the closest to a real "imbalance" -- like with the original article. Example: "How Your Gut Health Affects Your Brain: The Mind-Altering Power of Your Microbiome" https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/how-your-gut-health-affects... "Your gut microbes can produce neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and acetylcholine—all of which are crucial for brain function. In fact, more than 90% of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, not the brain. This has profound implications for mood and emotional health."

Lots more health and wellness ideas collected by me here: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

Good luck finding things that work for you -- assuming you are not happy just the way you are. "I like you just the way you are" - Mr. Rodgers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPDTpqtmzPQ

Indeed; good point! And how will all that play out? Better communications or more schlock to wade through on the internet? Or both?

As a historical analogy, a lot of telephone switchboard operators lost their jobs with the beginning of direct dialing with better telephone switching -- and direct dialing presumably is preferred by most people than having to talk with a person before their calls go through. Although something was also lost in that telephone operators also had a broader informal social role in a community (including as a gossip) and also informally coordinated some emergency services (judging from old-time movies).

Related: https://www.bbntimes.com/society/telephone-operators-the-eli... "As late as 1950, there were about 350,000 women working as switchboard operators working for phone company, and maybe another million working as switchboard operators at offices, factories, hotels, and apartments. Roughly one of every 13 working women was a switchboard operator. Of course, now the number of switchboard operators is nearly zero. The example is often given to point out that in a dynamic economy, even when hundreds of thousands of jobs are “lost,” workers do manage to transition to new jobs. But that basic story lacks detail. James Feigenbaum and Daniel P. Gross have been digging into two aspects: 1) What happened to the women who were displaced from switchboard operator jobs; and 2) for AT&T, what determined the speed and timing of investing in automation to replace switchboard operators? ... The effect of this shock on incumbent operators was to dispossess many of their jobs and careers: telephone operators in cities with cutovers were less likely to be in the same job the next decade we observe them, less likely to be working at all, and conditional on working were more likely to be in lower-paying occupations. In contrast, however, automation did not reduce employment rates in subsequent cohorts of young women, who found work in other sectors—including jobs with similar demographics and wages (such as typists and secretaries), and some with lower wages (such as food service workers)."

So, it sounds like the next generation who pursued different careers did OK even if the displaced generation did worse?

One difference though is that switchboard operator was a relatively recently introduced job in the past century given telephones are a recent invention. People have been writing/thinking, speaking/acting, and painting/drawing/art-ing essentially since there were people (essentially the jobs in the article being replaced).

What I put together circa 2010 is becoming more and more relevant: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

"a friendly and kind guy mostly contented with his life" reminds me somewhat of another Irish author, James P. Hogan (who I was lucky enough to meet in person once through Princeton University's Infinity Limited science fiction society and corresponded a bit with many years later).

https://web.archive.org/web/20160221054919/http://www.jamesp...

https://tangentonline.com/interviews-columnsmenu-166/intervi...

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/articles/ho... "Hogan's humane outlook and faith in intelligent problem-solving permeate his books."