Reimagining Mental Wellbeing

Over the past few decades we’ve seen a significant increase in technological advancement and living standards across the world, yet somehow ‘happiness’ is also trending downward for many parts of society.

This is not just anecdotal or at the extremes; when we look at the data we’re starting to see it across the board with large increases in the rates of depression, loneliness, hopelessness, lack of purpose and even suicide.

What is going on here? Was it always this way? What has changed?

Theoretically we have all these incredible resources to help us with our overall mental wellbeing: both contemporary, like modern science & psychology, and the more traditional: literature, spirituality, religion, or simply wisdom that gets passed on between generations.

And there’s certainly not a lack of demand, as we’re seeing with the explosion of mindfulness apps, self help books, motivational videos, feel better podcasts and so on.

So why does it all still seem so ineffective for so many people?

We can probably fill a whole book about why we’ve ended up in this place. But the bottom line is this: the way we’re addressing mental wellbeing as a society is not working. And technology is unfortunately a major part of the problem:

• The knowledge required to live a content and meaningful life has mutated from something that should be relatively straightforward to a non-stop information overload that’s made it incredibly overwhelming and unnecessarily complicated.
• Instead of creating an environment where we are helping one another and building meaningful connections with supportive communities, we’re becoming further isolated and lonely, making what is already a challenging individual journey even harder.
• Worst of all, the fact that we’re trying to solve so many of these issues using our mobile phones, which are arguably one of the biggest contributors to these underlying problems in the first place, has become almost laughable.

Is there a better, more effective way to do this?

We believe there is.

The unintended consequences of technology might have gotten us here in the first place, but we believe that the right application of technology can also help us fix these very important and consequential issues, both at individual and societal levels.

With financial backing from our friends at LocalGlobe and Balderton, we’re assembling a small team dedicated to reimagining mental wellbeing for the next century.

Marcus & the Rokk team