mental illness and every age is going crazier. And the biggest increase is generalized anxiety disorder. Generalized anxiety disorder, which I do talk to a lot of people who have some kind of generalized anxiety disorder, usually women, but I would imagine men have it too. And I would say that the reasons for it are all pretty obvious. Here's the main reason. Others have said this, but let me just summarize some reasons.

In the old days the only problems you had were the ones that were local. In other words, all you knew about was what was happening to you because you didn't have any telecommunications or anything. So you could limit all the things you worried about to your food and your safety, which are big problems, but you knew what to do. So you just get busy trying to keep yourself safe and trying to get yourself some food. So those are simple times.

Now we have the internet that's telling you there's all these other risks that are coming to get you. That climate change is going to kill you. They say Trump is going to be a Nazi. They say we're running out, the debt is going to kill us all, Russia might nuke us. There's like a million things to worry about and there's the locusts. You name it. Now we're not really designed or evolved, if you prefer, we're not made to worry about all the problems in the world at the same time. We're made to worry about our own stuff. And so if you take your own stuff and add to it all the problems in the world, you could imagine it would give you some generalized anxiety that you can't put a finger on because it's just everything from everywhere. So that's got to be part of it.

The other part of course is social media gives us comparisons to make us feel bad and makes you concentrate on your internal who you are, and all that's bad for your mental health. And then there's the fact that maybe we don't have enough to do, that we're not in survival mode, so we just start thinking about things that are not survival-related until we worry ourselves to death. There's some of that. I think among the older people loneliness is probably, well even the young, I would say the loneliness epidemic is causing mental health problems. And we don't quite appreciate the depth of that.

Let me tell you one problem that you can never get sympathy for. Are you ready for it? I'm lonely. Do you think you can get sympathy for that? Nope, because everybody thinks you could solve it. Well just go talk to some people, right? If it were easy to solve everybody would have solved it. Apparently there's something about life that makes that hard to solve. So I think loneliness is a gigantic thing and society is not organized so that you have a natural way to meet people. And the more single people there are — and there's a huge increase in single people and childless couples and stuff — there's going to be way more loneliness.

But here's the variable that tells you maybe all of the statistics are fake. All right, I'm going now. I told you that all the numbers are up, right? That there's way more mental health problems that have been diagnosed or people seeking help for mental health. Here's something I didn't tell you and it's in the article. Maybe it's because people have more access to telehealth and there's less stigma. Let me tell you what I wouldn't have said to anybody when I was a teenager: I have a mental health problem. I never would have said that even if I did. You know, maybe I did. I wouldn't have said it in my 20s. Nope, wouldn't have said it. But today it's almost like a badge of honor, right? It's like a thing you want to say on social media. You actually want to post in public, oh I have this or that condition and I'm on the spectrum and I've got ADHD and I've got generalized anxiety and I've got depression. And now it's no longer stigmatized. It's actually something that people can get attention for.

So if you make it really, really easy to seek help, which is what telehealth does — you don't have to leave the house — and you make it instead of something that makes you look weak, it's something that gives you some attention, so of course there'd be a lot more reported. But I do think there's more actual. So I don't think the fact that people are willing to talk about it is the full story. I think it's really social media and probably the entire structure of society is making us crazy. So maybe we should do something about that.

Well, you know Boeing had those two whistleblowers who died suspiciously. Suspicious suicide and a suspicious fast-growing bacterial infection or something that looked a little suspicious. Now nobody in law enforcement has said that these are not natural deaths, but they're kind of coincidental.