What's With People?
10 years ago
I'm a little concerned...I've been noticing an increasing pattern in my friends, both past and present: It seem like people are just simply either giving up on life and are living just to survive, or are chronically depressed or bipolar. What's with everyone? Seriously, I see more people like that on here than on any other site (DA I hear is starting to get to be just as bad).
FA+

I wouln't say bipolar or depressed alone;
The way I see it, more and more people might in fact become increasingly neurotic. The regular influx of bad news in this twisted, depressive era ( in particular in Europe where we feel like politics are ignoring us more than anywhere else ) might be causing a raise in neurotic behavior.
While it's generally described as an insult or just generally pejorative term, in a nutshell, neurotism is when your brain becomes not addicted, but optimized for this kind of bad stuff. More electrochemical power is used to fuel negative emotions, and not enough anymore to positive ones. It's a wide open gate to depression, that's for sure. The best thing to do is to stop oneself from thinking anytthing bad; it requires focus on a constant basis to analyze one's own train of thought, andd intercept whatever we think about right now. Reason? "enough of this."
In a way, a good solution is to disobey your own brain, disobey your body. If the brain rewired itself so that negative emotions flow easier and faster, then we shouldn't be thinking this in the first place. It's a disbalance, it's not what we're supposed to think like.
For people living to survive and just ggiving up or whatever, it's a different matter. While it likely stems from the above problem, I usually tend to blame this more on people's inability to make a difference between Realism, and Pescimism. People start to assume that the half-empty glass is the natural state of things. IT IS NOT.
I hope it helped you a little @.@ As you can see, I've had my share of these questions, and had time to think about an answer, many, many times.