The Altman Technocracy

Thanks for your reply!

I live quite close to a place for mentally ill people, and will have to walk around some of them on their long hallways, for otherwise they will just walk straight into you. There are no visibility problems, they just don't register that other people might exist on their path to whatever destination. This is how the staff treat their suffering, by medicating them into a lower state of consciousness.
Speaking of which, anti-psychotic medicine is mood-stabilizing, which is precisely my point. It's all about restricting the range of emotion. It's the same for stoicism, by the way.

The zombie effect is what I've personally experienced, it's because I also have anxiety, which stimulants make worse. The body then either numbs you as a defensive mechanism (like the state of shock) or simply depletes the resources required for keeping you in a high-alert state.

Until I started ADHD medicine, I was used to feeling the entire range of emotions: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fc0v1cv9crcc51.jpg
On this scale, I'd swing between 1 and 10. Now all I experience is 5-7. Most professionals would consider this a win, but I feel like the full human experience has been robbed from me, it's like going from a wild rollercoaster ride to a kiddy-version.
My opinions are not simply born from this, though. I take full responsibility for everything I've done to my own body.

According to a quick Google search, emotional blunting happens to 50% of users of anti-depressants: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-explain-emotional-blunting-caused-by-common-antidepressants

This article, which I randomly clicked, by the way, even makes the same observation as me: "Emotional blunting is a common side effect of SSRI antidepressants. In a way, this may be in part how they work – they take away some of the emotional pain that people who experience depression feel, but, unfortunately, it seems that they also take away some of the enjoyment"
Amphetamine-like stimulants affect the amygdala. I found that non-stimulants had the same blunting effect for me though, and if you search on Reddit, many other people have experienced similar things.
I found this study result for atomoxetine: "Atomoxetine led to a small (effect size 0.19) but significant (P=0.013) treatment effect for emotional control". It wouldn't surprise me if this "emotional effect", which is of course described positively, is just a clamping of the range of emotions.

Of course, I wish you the best, and if medicine helps you, then I don't want to discourage your use of it. I just think better approaches are possible, and that destructive tradeoffs are described more positively than they ought to be.
A common piece of advice I see online is "Nothing matters" and "Nobody cares about you, they're too busy thinking about themselves". This is freeing to hear for some, but it's ultimately a nihilistic kind of thinking, mere detachment.

> Do you have a source for that number?

No, it's an estimate for the portion of people living good lives (psychologically healthy lives, not just socities impression of a good life) but finding themselves unexpectedly depressed despite that. And I think it's quite telling that the rate of depression is almost negatively correlated with standards of living. Africa has some of the lowest rates! Our "improvements" are making us enjoy life less, not more, we are very poor judges of what is good for us.

I don't think depression is an error at all, I think it's an adaption to an environment (and that agency and control are fundemental needs). There's a Wiki page called "Evolutionary approaches to depression" but it seems this view is still controversial and that it's not receiving a lot of attention.

> I could not pin down any good reason why I would feel so numb and empty

This is just a guess, but did you perhaps think logically? "Logically", a zoo animal should be happy because they have all the food and water they could ever want, as well as absolutely safety. But zoo animals are known to have high rates of depression and anxiety just like the general population in modern socities. Logic doesn't help with psychological well-being, even Nikola Tesla died poor and alone. I'm 90% sure he'd have lived a better life if only he had socialized more (and met better people), but intelligent people do not introspect with the consideration that they're animals with animal needs, they consider themselves above such things

many things that are detrimental to collective human health

You mean "immoral" actions? This definition includes many healthy things, which are deemed bad by a large number of people who are too weak to undertake said healthy things.

To give you an example in which this effect is visible, bad students might mock their nerdy friends for getting good grades in school, discouraging them from competing and getting ahead.

A less obvious example is banning competitions in schools, or the general consensus that competition is evil/cruel. Some people are discouraged by competition, while others almost need it to reach their potential. Depending on which type you are yourself, your preference is likely to change to suit the one which would help people like yourself thrive. So when society has a majority of people who aren't confident in their own abilities, it develops a general consensus that competition is evil.

Envy is one of the ugliest and most anti-social motivations, and the hardest one to defend. But does most of the modern society not think similiarly to Thag? Don't they think that the losers are good while the winners are bad? That all rich people are evil and that all privilege is a result of exploitation of the harmless (and thus innocent and good) average person? If the average person was to think like this, who would stop them from forming a consensus using the power of numbers?