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mental health appreciation days always feel insincere to me and sometimes infuriating in the backdrop of a social system built around the constant use of (often internalized) negative feedback and fear of punishment to motivate people
it's the nice band-aid that gets applied after the sucking chest wound that is social comparison dynamics in the "real" world.
of course there's never been a golden age in which this *wasn't* somehow operative. it's how everything from small villages to large atomized societies work.
I just wish there was some honesty that motivating people via shame, negative self-comparisons, constant negative reinforcement, and sometimes outright threats is a habit that begins in the family and is extended throughout many other formative institutions (such as schooling)
and unsurprisingly it can sometimes fuck up people for for the rest of their lives in some shape or form. and then there's a nice little statement "check up on your friends" and "if you feel down, call for help."
this is, unsurprisingly, personal for me because i've seen the toll it can take on people i care about.
i can't make them whole again, i can only hope they'll get better and give them support. but on days like this i get a particularly bitter taste in my mouth.
addendum: i think the OP is too optimistic about anon culture but I do agree that anons are useful thought experiment for exposing how much negative sanctions tend to be over-used for generating compliance behavior https://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-masked
you can read this in your sociology textbook all day ("The Birth of the Prison" or whatever) but it becomes very very very tangible when someone can no longer use direct or indirect threats to get desired behavior and you see their reactions
