Parenting & Family Quote by James Hillman

A psychologist calling culture “depressed” is a deliberate provocation: it drags a private diagnosis into public life, insisting that our collective mood isn’t just politics or economics but a psychic weather system. Hillman’s intent is less to pathologize individuals than to name an atmosphere of low-grade dread that has started to feel normal: stalled mobility, anxious status maintenance, a future that looks smaller than the past.

The quote works by stacking worries that slide from respectable to shameful. It opens with the socially acceptable middle-class checklist (kids’ prospects, homeownership, a car payment), then pivots to the ugly thought we’re trained to deny: “Are immigrants taking away my white world?” That last line isn’t an accidental spike; it’s the point. Hillman exposes how economic precarity can be recruited into a racialized story of loss, how “competitiveness” becomes a moral alibi for fear, and how nostalgia hardens into grievance.

Context matters: late-20th-century and early-21st-century America, where deindustrialization, wage stagnation, and asset inflation made the old promises feel fraudulent. Hillman, an archetypal psychologist who treated culture as a mirror of the soul, is diagnosing not only anxiety but the fantasy that someone else must be stealing what was “ours.” The subtext is brutal: depression doesn’t always look like sadness; sometimes it looks like suspicion, scapegoating, and a politics of restoration. By naming “my white world” out loud, he refuses to let that subterranean entitlement hide behind polite euphemisms.