And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 219.

It's titled Happiness in a Depressing World.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hello, you. How are you doing?

Things feel quite hard for people at the minute, and I hope things aren't affecting you too much.

But listening to clients talk over the last 12 months or so, if not longer actually, but particularly recently, many people are telling me that they're quite dismayed with the world at the minute and are kind of losing faith in humanity to look after the world we live on and the

people we share it with and it is hard to disagree. Often, my job as a therapist is to help people

challenge their view of the world, usually because their view is negatively skewed and it's

making them feel depressed. By helping them to change the way that they think,

they can change the way that they feel,

and change the things that they do and so on,

and the old CBT thing, you know, which feeds itself.

And we all live happily ever after.

But what if they're right?

What if actually the world is kind of broken? What if there are so many

people that are either ignorant to reality through defence mechanisms or they're just plain old

selfish and greedy that oceans are going to just fill with plastics as Australia eventually just

becomes 100% fire.

And Europe descends into fascism and everybody kills each other off in World War III

and the rest of the world watches from some state-controlled dictatorship that's full of slavery and corruption.

...