Nearly 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety, a greater proportion of the population than anywhere else in the world. The next most anxious nation is Colombia, and they have something to really worry about. In 2004 Americans spent $2.1 billion on anti-anxiety drugs, and if my experience is anything to go by, the cure is worse than the disease. At the bottom of all this is the emphasis on success and money. Everyone expects to be successful, and the reality is that the US is socially immobile in comparison with other countries, and its rich people are sucking the cash out of the pockets of the middle classes. Something tells me this cannot last.
Yes, I agree with your conclusion: “At the bottom of all this is the emphasis on success and money,” the insidious driver that made your father’s life less happy than it might have been had he defined “success” differently.
To live in a civilization that now insists we always compete with each other for god-knows-what and which defines success in a way that degrades our days– for sure, I agree: “[T]his cannot last.” Why should it?
Epicurus was radical in challenging the superstitions that passed for religion in his day; we have to be radical in a different way. We have to name other aspects of the human experience which redefine food, clothing, shelter, and money as “necessary” but love, belonging, friendship, intellectual curiosity, understanding, love of nature as “important.”
The “necessary” things can’t be made ends-in-themselves without warping us. We all know people who made money, power, social status ends-in-themselves and the destructive consequences plague society. We have to have a certain amount of the necessities, obviously, but they’re only means to get to the “important” aspects of human experience, which that are ALWAYS ends-in themselves –the love, curiosity, friendship, nature mentioned above.