This is the video I am referencing:
Seems like it happened about a month ago in Lancaster, California. A man entered what appears to be a supermarket wielding a machete — after attacking one employee with said machete — and gradually kinda leads the cops on a chase throughout the store, ultimately charging them with his machete near the hair care aisle. They shoot at him, as would be logical when someone with a machete is charging at you, and he later died from his injuries at a local hospital.
When they attempt to make initial contact with this man, outside of the store, they ask him (also logically) what seems to be wrong in his life. He says he’s disgruntled and tired of others taking advantage of him, etc.
Now comes the bigger picture.
Right before the YouTube algorithm fed me this video, I had read an article about how the U.S. declined again in the “World Happiness Index.”
You can argue with what the “World Happiness Index” even is, and how easy it really is to measure happiness and contentment in the aggregate. (It’s hard.) And Scandinavian countries always win these things, but they’re both (a) very cold and (b) socialist in nature, so a lot of Americans would instantly recoil at that constituting “happiness.”
But then again, does dying in the hair care aisle of a supermarket while wielding a machete constitute happiness? I would probably lean “no” on that one.
This machete situation reminded me of this, too:
I generally worry that there is some kind of decline of meaning and purpose in American life. Not for everyone, of course — I don’t think 330 million people suddenly woke up this morning without meaning. But between our generally-shitty employers and our generally-shitty politics and the fact that neighbors don’t seem to know each other too well and childcare is more expensive than a speedboat, it does sometimes feel like there’s a writ large decline in purpose.
If people had more purpose from their relationships, family, friends, community, and even employer — and yes, I’d agree it’s not the responsibility of an employer to provide purpose to people, as employers are usually just trying to make money — maybe they wouldn’t bring machetes into supermarkets and charge at cops next to the Pantene Pro.
I could be mistaken here, and it’s easy to write this off as simply a mental health issue. But it feels like a canary in a USA coal mine.
Yes/no?