Over the last two decades I've seen a dramatic increase in stressful academics at schools: More homework, more intense classes, ect, ect.
I went to a "college prep" high school that was harder than my college. As I became independent, I realized that intense academics stole my childhood and didn't have the value that the adults believe they have.
At the same time, when I lived in Palo Alto, I used to hear about how one of the high schools, (Gunn?) had a very high suicide rate due to the stress of academics. Someone (Caltrans?) put fences around the train tracks to try and stop suicides.
(I wish commenters wouldn't immediately blame social media.)
I went to a totally normal high school and found it to be way more time-consuming and stressful than college. 7+ hours in school and one to two hours of homework much of it due the very next day plus some longer-term stuff you really ought to be working on? It was a very rare day in college when classes, coursework, and studying combined college took up 9 entire hours, and often it was way under that. High school was pretty much always 8 hours, minimum, five days a week. College was so much easier it was kinda shocking. Especially the required 1xx level classes outside my major, which comprised so much of my first year. It was like a vacation.
My high school was horribly inefficient, in other words, which ended up being stressful. I gather this is the norm. Meanwhile adults were telling me those were the best years of my life—I mean I wasn't really bullied and had a pretty decent high school experience and now that I'm older I sorta get what they meant but god damn, if that'd actually been true I should have offed myself. The "real world", and college, are easier than high school, which was difficult mostly because it was both hyper-authoritarian and wasted phenomenal amounts of time.
I think the worst thing about it was that you could never just chill. It was friggin' relentless. Every day in high school's got a very do-or-die thing going on, for some reason, while at the same time feeling like the lowest-stakes thing possible. It was like stress for the sake of stress. Meanwhile those days are relatively rare in college and real life. Certainly not 5 days a week, every week, unless you seek out jobs like that. Granted the lower end of the job market's a lot less flexible and easy-going than, say, software development, but even that's usually not as bad as high school, which is pretty damning.
I remember being asked as early as 13 where I wanted to go to college, and what I wanted to do for a living, I'm 36, and I still cant give you the answer to that last question.
That question (what do you want to do for a living) is not that important, because most of us, for various reasons (but mostly market forces), cannot work the job we would prefer anyway.
I'd suggest based on empirical evidence most people in the tech world are more apt to flower later. So for some, their peak was at high school or college - for most of us, I suspect its early to mid thirties.
People are happiest either slightly before they have kids or slightly after their kids turn 18, depending on whether they had children late or early. Childless married people coast through marriage years.
My last two years of high school had 8 hours a day in class, one to two hours of homework a night (including the long term projects you mentioned), a 20 hour a week part time job, and three extra curricular activities that ate probably about 20 hours a week in meetings, fundraising, and practice.
So, all, told, I was working _80 hours a week, minimum_ in my high school years. I graduated top ten in my class, and my parents were astonished that I took two years off between high school and college going to a technical school eight hours a week with a 40 hour a week job. I had cut 32 hours of work a week out of my week, and I was only 19!
When I finally did go to college, the weeks during the semester were about twenty hours a week between classes, studying, projects, and tutoring and a twenty hour a week part time job. I can understand why you felt like college was a vacation because I felt the same way!
The downside to all of this is that I was very poorly socialized, compared to some of my peers, when I started college. Luckily, since I had a bunch of free time, it was easy to catch up, but the first semester was difficult for me navigating all of these unstructured, unsupervised socialization opportunities. A part of me regrets that because that stunted my ability to network from the start of college - I have no idea what opportunities I have missed out on and will miss out on in the future as a result.
Several people that graduated in that top ten with me who had the same 80 hour a week work week in high school could not handle the unstructured free time in college. Two dropped out of college but have none-the-less worked their way into lives that seem to make them happy, one got heavily into drugs and is still in jail, one committed suicide, and the rest graduated and seem to have kept on the track.
I have the same experience as you but when I talk to peers I went to highschool with and say the same thing they seem to not have the same experience. I am not quite sure why that is. Might have something to do with how you treat highschool. If you don't take it seriously and don't do your homework then I guess highschool would be a lot less stressful.
The same dynamic is at work in weedout courses during college. High school is in many places a four year weedout course (actually 3.5 years) used to decide who goes to college.
The obvious question is whether weedout regimens actually burnish skills. In my experience they did to some extent, but most of the effort expended was game-playing to get onto a path which would be easier or more lucrative in the long run. (Example: becoming a medical doctor or tenured professor is harder than it has to be because people are attracted by the prospect of a job-for-life.)
Maybe they just over-prepared you for college and that's why the first semester was so easy. Unfortunately a lot of schools make it difficult to test out of first year classes with just high school classes.
It's pretty frustrating to bust your hump in high school to get a leg up on college work and then be stuck in the same class as the mouth breathers who just coasted by in high school and completely bored.
Wasn't so much the difficulty as the sheer quantity of homework combined with lots of unbroken butt-in-seat hours, most of which weren't very useful. A start time so early I had to wake up at like 6:45 didn't help, either. Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways. Thanks for causing me to develop seasonal depression it took me more than a decade to get over, high school. Thanks a whole bunch.
But yeah, coulda CLEP'd out of at least a year of college if I'd known better. No-one told me that and I didn't figure it out until it was too late. Never even occurred to me that I could knock out all those credit hours on the cheap with some very, very light studying over a summer. I mean college is supposed to be really hard, right, otherwise what's the point? eyeroll
> Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways.
This is one of most baffling aspects about the US, that is that you can have classrooms with no windows. I didn’t personally grow up as a kid in the best social-economic regime (an Eastern-European communist country in the ‘80s) but fortunately for little kid me the regime’s architects and urban planners put great emphasis on all classrooms having lots of windows, as big as possible. I later in my life became quite interested in the history of architecture and urban planning and I was able to find this idea (i.e. big windows are good for schools) in architectural magazines published way back in the 1950s.
It's an energy thing. These schools were built in the 70s with 70s tech. Big windows meant lots of energy lost in heating and cooling. Or you got a school built in the 40s that did have big windows, but no AC that was sweltering for the first and last weeks/months of school.
Unfortunately this happens en masse to Asian American students. The discrimination adcoms use against them force them to attend schools that are far too easy for them. This has positives and negatives. They can coast to a great GPA in the most competitive majors and land top jobs as a result, but they also are left feeling unchallenged.
It's a problem throughout American education, which follows the universal, comprehensive model because of cultural and political values. Primary, secondary, and even tertiary American educational systems all underchallenge advanced students.
Same story here. I went to US public schools and British grammar schools. The latter are no joke and much more stressful. US school I could mess around and still maintain perfect grades.
Stress at schools? I hail from India and when I was a kid in 90s, I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework.
My view on social media and parents giving smartphones to kids is the primary reason. When kids start overusing phones and digital world, everything seems binary, they can feel like they can control people in real-world as if thy do a 3d character in their latest game. And can get depressed when others don't behave as they intend to. A friend becomes a removable entity in a list or circle(google+) they can add or pluck out anytime, without considering the emotional factor others feel. I can talk on this topic whole day, i believe kids don'e need smartphones etc. and I will never bring my kids near them at-least till they reach their teen years.
The stress in the US system is very different. Indian schools (basically the oldschool british system I grew up with in boarding school) are hard but not stressful. Performance metrics are clear and students know what they have to do. US schools have become strange minefields of nebulous collage prep. Grades are given, everyone gets As. So students are forced to pad their resumes is other ways. You don't see indian students picking sports based on whether they can make team captain. You don't see average Indian students participating in 4+ team sports during a given week.
I've talked to Canadian kids who, when caught using steroids, have said that their performance on the field was part of their entrance plan. They had consciously decided to take drugs not to become pro athletes, or even to win a scholarship, but simply to get into a proper university. Similarly, I haven't heard of many indian students taking "learning drugs". I heard an ivy league admissions person talk about the sports thing. She spoke of a boarderline case involving an athlete who had competed at the Olympics. He had failed to medal. THAT was part of the schools decision, whether they metaled or not actually mattered.
I rarely see others mention it but I have a pet theory that grade inflation makes school more stressful. When A's are expected, a single bad day can easily sink a semester of effort. Additionally, as you say, grades don't leave much room for students to distinguish themselves positively anymore. Student have little room to excel, but every day is a chance to screw up.
My son is a junior now in a very competitive high school, and they had to do away with valedictorian/salutatorian because the difference between that and, say, just top 5% would be a 99.6 vs a 99.4 in one class in the 10th grade. It was so stressful for these kids, like it even fucking matters long term.
For people who burn out in high school, that's usually your first experience with it. The first time is always the worst, whether it happens in high school, college, or on the job.
Once you've already burned out once in high school, twice in college (once before and once after switching your major), and hit your breaking point at a job or two (regardless of whether you switch jobs, or careers, or just take a long vacation, or just spend six months kind of just putting in time at your job before you're ready to really try again) ... well, burning out still sucks, but you kind of get used to it, you know how to deal with it, and you know that eventually you're going to pick yourself up again.
But man, that first time, you really feel like a failure, like you're never going to amount to anything, and like you'll never be able to try again.
The biggest advantage to getting into an elite school is the networking. If your kid is making friends with the children of board members of Fortune 500 companies then they have a chance at the big leagues. Otherwise they're just clawing their way up to middle management like every other schmuck.
Of course even then it's a total crapshoot, but there's very little chance of that panning out in the state school.
> The biggest advantage to getting into an elite school is the networking. If your kid is making friends with the children of board members of Fortune 500 companies then they have a chance at the big leagues.
I wonder how the math works out on that. Realistically, I would only think so many connections could be made at such high levels for any given class of students.
How much does getting into the right college matter though? I'm not sure about the US system, but in Canada it doesn't feel like it matters all that much. Some schools are a little bit better than others, but it doesn't feel like a world of difference (at least when it comes to STEM). I've especially noticed this when interviewing candidates from various schools.
It doesn't really matter outside of fields like investment banking, parents (and college prep companies) place an artificial importance on it for the most part. In a tougher economy prestigious schools can provide useful connections, but in a bullish economy a degree from a regionally-known state school is equally valid.
It's not what you know, it's who you know. Even in Canada, a Waterloo grad is going to have much better connections then someone from the University of Northern BC.
Even that is only important a little bit. Excelling at a mid-tier university is completely FINE. It's so much harder to get into an Ivy League school now than when I was applying in the 90s; I'm not pushing my child to the brink for a tiny blink of undergrad prestige.
The 'arguing grades up' I always saw students doing seemed weird to me. But I was paying for school and ultimately just paying for a job-entry ticket so maybe I wasn't in the right mindset.
Absolutely and application padding began as early as the 90s when I was applying to colleges. It definitely was a thing back then but not as bad as we have today.
>The stress in the US system is very different. Indian schools (basically the oldschool british system I grew up with in boarding school) are hard but not stressful. Performance metrics are clear and students know what they have to do. US schools have become strange minefields of nebulous collage prep. Grades are given, everyone gets As.
Can you please point out the schools giving away A’s? My high school and the colleges I attended were certainly not that way. Not even remotely. I’m going to get a masters soon and I want to go to this type of school.
Who said anything about given away As? I said that having As was a given, not that it was easy. I do know of schools where 80+% of graduates have strait-As on government exams. They earn those through constant prep. My former highschool is now like this but nobody complains because almost all of their students go to university. (There is always that one kid each year who has mandatory military service to attend in his home country.)
What on earth are you talking about? You think the average American student is participating in 4+ team sports during a given week?
There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who's parents are spending their life savings to send them to a broken down public school, and anything short of an A+ means abject poverty (I mean real poverty, not the American "I can't afford my iPhone bill poverty") for another generation of their family name. My dad is the only person in his small shanty town who made it out, and he studied 16 hours a day, 7 days a week - all to achieve a decent middle class salary and drive a Toyota Camry. I was an exceptionally gifted student thanks to him, graduated at the top of my class, and now, again, barely eek out a middle class life
Not to mention the societal aspect - in many Asian cultures anything short of an A and you're an abject societal failure and a generational disgrace. Western-raised people don't have a clue what that kind of pressure feels like.
Anyone who thinks American schools are stressful are completely delusional about how the rest of the world works. Americans have had life too easy for too long - depression is simply a symptom of an overly easy life. It's the same reason depression & mental health issues overly present in zoo animals.
Suffering and struggle are necessary for a fulfilling, happy life - the West hasn't been exposed to real suffering in over half a century.
> I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework.
That sounds more like pain, not stress. If you (or the you at the time, which is an important difference) can easily externalize your problem—i.e. blame the school for being stupidly strict, rather than blame yourself for not living up to its standard—then as much as it might be an ordeal to go through, it won’t really affect your psyche.
The concern here isn’t that school is harder; the concern is that school (and the way parents talk to children about school) is being treated with more seriousness than it deserves, and so the potential of failure at school is being seen—at least on average—as more of a personal, moral failing, an automatic source of shame.
Of course, children always treated some school environments this way—mostly high-cost private schools, intensely-competitive academic schools, and military academies. But this attitude seems to be spreading to all schools, and that’s a bit concerning.
Competition is way up now because the stakes are so high. When I was a kid, there was a spectrum of success: people who did well in school and went to college did well as adults, people who did a little well were a little successful, people who did average had average adult lives, etc. We are moving toward a bimodal winner-take-most world. Straight A’s plus good university in the right major and you’re set for life, but come up short in any way and you’re going to end up on welfare or homeless. That’s the message my fellow parents are telling their kids (I’ve heard it in person), and that pressure is the norm. The Middle Class bus only has a few seats left, and you need to do everything at 150% intensity during school to get a ticket.
Pain and fear of pain is stressful. I think people are trying too hard to dismiss the perfectly reasonable point that schooling used to be stressful in a different way, became more reasonable as we moved away from corporal punishment, but is now becoming too stressful again, just in a different way.
> Stress at schools? I hail from India and when I was a kid in 90s, I carry 10Kg bag to school and has to do homework in 7 subjects, and get beaten by stick if I fail to do any of them separately by respective teachers, and has to spend time till 10pm after school (ends at 5 pm) at tuition to finish the homework.
One person's suffering doesn't diminish or invalidate the suffering of someone else.
Anecdata. I personally know a person mid-30s that truly thinks life is exactly what you can see in the series Friends [0]. With almost all the unrealistic expectations promoted by scenes in that series. And that person sees any deviation from that as a failure in life.
And to be clear, we're talking about an educated person with a relatively successful life. But the expectation that real life follows "Hollywood" is still there. I started to doubt that everybody is able to draw a clear line between reality and fiction as long as they bask in that fiction for too long or at key moments in life.
What? I could very much see someone having that expectation at 20, maybe even at 25. At 30, we're already talking about a serious lagging in somebody's development as an adult (unless that someone was in jail/hospital the whole time and knows society only from TV etc.). At 35, I don't even know where to begin.
Your generation is teaching the current generation, so there might be an feedback/reinforcement effect, where the same ideology has worsening effects with each generation. Maybe our academic/educational culture is worse now than it was a bit earlier, because we've had more time to exercise it.
Stress is very different from physical things, like carrying heavy stuff or getting beaten. Pain, you just have to endure once and then it will slowly go away until the next time you receive pain. Stress accumulates. Forever. Getting stronger and stronger over time. If you can't deal with it it will devour you.
> Someone (Caltrans?) put fences around the train tracks to try and stop suicides.
Reducing access to means and methods is the best way prevent suicide, and that includes physical security around frequently used locations, especially if they involve trains or high places.
There's often a strong resistance to this and I don't understand why.
There's often a strong resistance to
this and I don't understand why.
The suicide prevention features added to my local railway station look like were designed by a prison architect who believed nice views were a major cause of suicide.
It’s dystopian to prevent only suicide and not the causes. It invokes a feeling of being somewhat like a farm animal: you exist to consume and work for the benefit of others, and if you’re unhappy that’s your problem. You certainly can’t decide to escape in any way, by design.
Yes it is. Reminds me of the case where NYU installed fences in the Bobst library to prevent more suicides [0]. Basically it comes down to not being concerned about the causes but find a solution to prevent the suicides on the premises of the campus. I see it as, go kill yourself someplace else, we don't want the negative image.
A significant percentage of people who come across an obstacle to their planned method of suicide will never try again. They are not intended to go elsewhere.
How would a statistic like this be calculated? We can talk to people who were going to commit suicide, encountered an obstacle, and decided not to. How can we determine how many people decided to commit suicide, encountered an obstacle, and used some other method?
We can look at natural experiments like England's switch away from coal gas, or the introduction of catalytic convertors, and the decline in rates of suicide in the years afterwards. Both these events removed popular methods.
I think that what they're getting at is that once the impulse is not met with success it ceases its grip and might lessen to some extent. Not sure I agree with it but at the same time it is possible that if the means of committing suicide were more easily available and required less upfront effort a lot wouldn't have the time to hesitate and commit to it
I disagree. Preventing suicide, even impulsive suicide, is impossible. I could enumerate all the ways I can see just looking around me but I don't want to ruin my day and yours. However, seeing that people are scared of this doesn't exactly make me think that society cares about me, it implies they're scared of how unhappy people are and have no idea what to do about it.
You are wrong. It is quite well established that blocking a specific method of suicide can prevent people from trying. What you say is true in a technical sense but is completely ignorant of the actual ways that humans behave.
Yes, it can block people from trying that specific method. I have no idea how you would measure the impact on preventing people from trying at all. Do you have a source? I'm curious about how they measured it.
>Anderson points to another example where simply making a change in people's access to instruments of suicide dramatically lowered the suicide rate. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.
I remember watching a documentary on assisted suicide where they said that many people who are approved never follow through, but knowing they have a way out provides a great deal of relief.
With that in mind, I can easily see how things like fences might make the problem worse as you said. People will feel even more trapped and helpless when what they need is the opposite.
Heightened suicide risk is often short term and situation specific.
I didn't say this (because I thought it was obvious) but installing fences is not meant to make people happier. It's meant to reduce access to means and methods. This is part, but only part, of preventing suicide.
It's a very important part, and it's the bit that we have best evidence for.
In the short term it's the bit that has most impact.
Heightened suicide risk is often both _short term_ and _situation specific_. Access to support at this time can save lives. People cannot access support if they're dead, so alongside providing immediate support you also need to reduce access to means and methods.
I've never claimed that the only thing we need to do is install fences.
Completely agree. There was a big shift in education in the early 2000s that brought business-like accountability to schools in the form of metrics. I think that change alone has led to a hollowing out of our education system that turned it from a nurturing, educational environment into a stressful, performance-focused environment.
When you introduce business-like accountability, you need a way to “stack rank” your resources. This process alone is misguided — not all public schools have the same mission, so whatever criteria you come up with removes control of that mission from the local level — and has a lot of second-order consequences.
Even in business, all this heavy measurement and reporting causes a ton of overhead — and in schools, this takes the form of standardized testing. This causes a lot of schools to abandon their primary mission — educating students — to pursue a mission of improving standardized test scores by X%. Test prep is hammered home with mountains of homework so teachers don’t get dinged for not challenging students enough.
Using business-like incentives (the best-run schools get more budget) is counterintuitive in education: the worst schools need more support, not less. Closing down a low-performing school furthers the goal of meeting the metrics, but often not the goal of educating students. A lot of attention is paid to the impact of this in low-performing schools, but when you give high-performing schools bigger budgets, they just pile more work on the kids as parents apply pressure for intense college prep.
So you end up with 2 kinds of schools: one that provides basic services focused on test metrics to keep the little funding they have, and another that has test scores covered through demographic advantages and focuses on college prep because the parents are better educated and more involved in their kids’ lives. Kids are stressed out in both schools — instability and violence in the former, massive expectations and workloads in the latter. But I think the cause is the same: by forcing our kids to operate in a business-like environment, they end up looking a lot like the stressed-out employees of big companies.
Personally, what depresses me is that at 28 and in an excellent job making a little more than my train engineer (designing & fabricating train engines) father was in the late 90's and he had 3 kids, a house, two cars, and had no other sources of income or money. I can't ever see myself owning a home except somewhere extremely rural and requires a lot of costly basic remodeling, we've had changes & commodification of dating, loneliness, a planet becoming inhabitable with nobody really doing anything to address it. I did what I was told would lead to success, I've worked in multiple places with 5-7 years of experience in my IT field now, and I'm in the same spot I grew up with my grandparents in, barely making it with like an extra $40/mo for ramen & beer with a friend or two one night for entertainment. No debt. It's such a common story among my similarly aged friends too.
More extreme weather, less water, more migration from countries where people have it worse than you, rise in political parties suggesting protectionism and anti-immigrant policies to combat the above, lower quality goods that don't last as long as people chase that margin down, less interesting and interest in art as people lack the spare time to come up with anything remotely non-mainstream, increasingly censored internet, rise in "tropical" diseases such as dengue fever & ebola in non-tropical countries due to climate change, more religion, more random civilian deaths at the hands of marginalised people and the police, people being prevented from travel/shop/work due to unchallengeable blacklisting by corporate CCTV networks with face/gait recognition resulting in homelessness.
Yep, there's a storm comin' alright.
The only solution I see to this is the richest 1% or so paying everyone else to have no children. It would sort out just about every problem in about 50 years. I don't see another solution.
"The only solution I see to this is the richest 1% or so paying everyone else to have no children. It would sort out just about every problem in about 50 years. I don't see another solution."
Except for the whole "economic collapse" thing. See Japan.
That is part of the issue though. It wasn't that long ago that that was true of most people (90s is pushing it a bit, but before?).
These days a lot of people are DINK, and you're competing with those. So not only you have to index the salary for inflation, you have to consider that you're competing with people who don't have a bunch of kids, and whom's spouse also brings in a salary.
So (not a real calculation, but just to make a point) assume the spouse would make the same amount of money and the kids are taking half of it, the DINK equivalent of income available for housing is now inflation + 4x that.
If the norm back then was:
1 income, multiple kids.
Now you have
- 1 income, 1 or more kids (essentially screwed)
- 1 income, no kids
- 2 incomes, 1 or more kids
- 2 income, no kids (so far beyond the first case that the former can't come close to competing).
Its also why if you are in the later camp and something happens (you lose your job or get sick and get a divorce), you're completely fucked.
The planet is not becoming inhabitable. We will do fine even if the planet warms up some.
You can probably own a home if you want. You can travel the world if you want. You can meet a nice girl and cook food together in a cozy apartment. You can start brewing beer as a hobby with your friends. You can hike the Appalachian trail.
> The planet is not becoming inhabitable. We will do fine even if the planet warms up some.
The problem isn't that Chicago is going to become uninhabitable. The problem is that food supply for billions of people are going to be threatened, that will make the flood of refugees from Syria seem like a trickle.
The population growth of mainly Africa and parts of Asia is a problem but just like now it would be a problem of distribution. We can grow enough food even with the changing temperatures.
It will also be a very gradual increase in temperature and we humans are very good at adapting and finding solutions.
> It will also be a very gradual increase in temperature and we humans are very good at adapting and finding solutions.
Serious question: Have you ever lived in a country that was in the middle of a famine?
People 'find solutions' to that problem. They aren't pretty. Those solutions consist of 'rob', 'starve, or 'leave'.
If you live in the first world, your problem is going to be dealing with people who are taking option #3. We're barely capable of dealing with a flow of refugees from one or two countries.
That's the story of the millennials right now. Too many people then before and nobody building houses for them. I think most non-millenials know of it and there won't be any changes until there is an offset of the generation controlling policy around home building.
As a recent home buying millennial in the Chicago-land area, this article [1] is pretty accurate.
Basically it's a mix between boomers not selling, and millennial's not wanting what they are selling (because what they are selling is shit). When we bought our home, we were looking at old (built in 1940's) starter homes in the 200k to 250k range and it was a nightmare. Anything that was great was out of our price range, and anything decent to 'ok' would be sold in the first 24 hours. Most of the stuff that wasn't selling was just straight garbage - stuff that would require a lot of work and money (50k minimum) to get moved into the 'decent' category.
There are plenty of new houses being built, but you have to go an hour or an hour and half outside the city. I have a family member and friend who went this route and they love it, but that obviously leads to long commutes and other downsides.
It never occurred to me that people expect new houses to be built for young people trying to get their first home. When I think of a young person buying their first home, I think of buying a 20+ year old home. New homes are for relatively wealthy people, usually people upgrading for the second or third time.
Many of the 20+ year old homes in the metro Toronto area have been demolished to make way for either condos or mansions. But even if they weren't, the property values are so high that these homes would still be unaffordable. So, yes, new starter homes have to be built for there to be any on the market at a "starter home" price.
I feel like there's a cycle starting here that looks something like this:
"I can't afford to do the thing I want to do most."
"Then do something else."
If jobs in Toronto aren't paying enough to live there, move. Find a job making less money in a place where you can actually afford to live. I understand you may want the lifestyle afforded by being in a big city, but you're not owed that experience.
It is not so much new homes for young people, as increasing housing stock. It does not matter if the new homes are bought by the young, or if they are bought by existing homeowners; who then sell their old house. Either way the effect is an additional house on the market.
I have such a different perspective on this. Based on the zoning policies of the people in places like San Francisco, they are sending a clear signal they don't want me there. They aren't building sufficient housing such that someone like me could afford to live there. So I just don't. If I accept a job there that doesn't cover the rent, that's my fault.
The answer is to flee these places, move on to greener pastures, these are barren.
My second home was new development precisely because it was "easy" to lock in. I hate it. I want to live in an older home. But, when I was on the market for a place in a new area the older homes were going to cash buyers who were paying over the asking price. With new development, you put down a "small" (in terms of total costs) down payment and then get your loan approved. There's no real competition to speak of.
Race to the bottom. This is what millennial are always told. "Well you just need a BEGINNER job, it'll get better". But, there are enough homes for everyone in the country and 20-30 year old homes are fine.
Do you live in a high COL area? There are plenty of places that are not "extremely rural" that you should have no problem owning a home. I'm an hour outside of Chicago living your Dad's 90's lifestyle on a solid but not spectacular IT salary that was a lot smaller when I bought my house eight years ago.
That's all well and good. I don't begrudge anyone for spending their money how they wish. Just don't choose to spend your money on those amenities and then complain and act like it's some sort of generational injustice that you can't afford a home or family in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
I'm 20 miles outside of Seattle renting from a private owner, so comparable rent for the same 1br to where I grew up in suburb upstate NY. Shop at walmart, dollar general. Went back to smaller town NY last year to visit family, absolutely no difference in costs except electricity costs are higher there.
Rents aren't cheaper than what I'm paying even in the 'flyover state' cities.
Average rent in Seattle is $1,965 (https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/wa/se...), but many neighborhoods are lower and more in tune with upstate New York (and "20 miles outside" is anywhere between Everett, Snoqualmie, or nearly to Tacoma); let's split the difference at $1,600. That leaves $1,653/month. Call it $53 for ramen and beer one night a month (that's a lot of ramen and beer) and there's $1,600 for everything else.
The poster this is in reply to said they have no debt.
> I'm in the same spot I grew up with my grandparents in, barely making it with like an extra $40/mo for ramen & beer with a friend or two one night for entertainment. No debt. It's such a common story among my similarly aged friends too.
You can crunch fake, sort-of-made-up numbers all day. The average man doesn't exist. My point is that it's certainly possible to be living paycheck-to-paycheck in a city with what was once a decent salary, even if you aren't blowing all your money on frivolous stuff.
Even within the Rust Belt, Cleveland is an outlier in that it’s decline was more recent and steep than the rest of the region. Cities like Pittsburgh and Buffalo started to decline in the 70s and bottomed out in the mid-2000s, but Cleveland sort of double-dipped in that the decline actually accelerated through the financial crisis and is only now starting to bottom out.
A lot of what I’ll call “third tier” cities (Cleveland, Boise, Reno, etc.) are facing housing shortages precisely because a lot of people were priced out of larger cities. So housing shortages are popping up in those places as well, driving up home prices dramatically. I know at least one of those cities where the average price of a 2br house jumped from $300k to $600k in 5 years.
As usual, the problems are NIMBYs and restrictive zoning with a heavy preference for single-family homes. But moving to smaller, cheaper cities is only a short-term solution. The long-term solution is to build more, denser housing.
Reno's listing price $231/ft^2 up from $151/ft^2 five years ago, but keep in mind that Reno was rather badly hit by 2008: median sales prices for 2br homes peaked at about $284,000 in 2006, bottomed at about $75,000 in 2011, and are currently back up to $271,000 (https://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Reno-Nevada/market-trends...).
Thanks for that — I was off on the exact numbers, but I think the trend still holds true because those market fluctuations happened nationwide. People in smaller cities want to preserve that “small city” way of life, which makes it harder to build affordable housing to handle the influx of “economic refugees”. There’s enough tolerance for remote work that locality of employers is not as strong of an effect on housing prices as it used to be, which makes smaller cities really attractive.
It’s a problem that will get worse before it gets better, and the cities that can figure out how to provide housing that someone working minimum wage can afford will be the winners.
Moving elsewhere would be entirely dependent on if I could secure full remote as there's just no way I can leave my current salary or I'd be making minimum wage in another city.
Why would you be making minimum wage in another city with 5-7 years IT experience? People in this thread are trying to tell you that someone with your experience can find a job and own a house in many other parts of the country.
Pretty much the only value you get from formal education is the paper you receive at the end. It's all pretend play nowadays. Teachers pretend to still teach and students pretend that school is important and since everone keeps up the charade, it's hard to notice that school has become a huge waste of time negatively impacting the lives of students.
The fences and guards have absolutely helped. When I first started the commute we had something like 12-14 deaths one year. Since those fences went up it’s dropped dramatically.
School anti-suicide (or any of their social intervention) programs mostly accomplish teaching the targeted groups to blend into the crowd and avoid attending the school's hamfisted intervention programs. But maybe that's the point.
My understanding is that there are two types of suicides: premeditated ones, and spur-of-the-moment ones.
Putting up fences next to train tracks won't do much for the former, but I suspect it will reduce the frequency of the latter (which it did, in this case).
It reduced the frequency of "suicide by train". But suicides overall went up 30% from what the article states. It's more likely that the people who could no longer use this method as a spur of the moment thing just chose something else. Transportation related suicide accounts for 0.4% (or ~170 in 2012) of suicides in the US. [0] "Fall", another spur of the moment method, accounts for 6 times as much. You can only build so many fences.
As someone with a bit of experience on the topic I can tell you that when suicidal ideation reaches the tipping point you need more than a fence to stop them.
But I'm not saying "don't put up the fence". I just found GP's remark that "The fences and guards have absolutely helped" either a bit cynical or unrealistically optimistic. The only thing we can say with certainty is that it helped keep the trains going. I'm not sure it definitively saved lives. For that we need to do a lot more than build a fence...
It sounds like "it's complicated" is a better way of thinking about suicide prevention. It's pretty hard to measure a localized "it's no longer happening," when measures for suicide prevention are put in place.
Things effective one place, are less effective in others because of "sociocultural" reasons [0], but there is some evidence to suggest denying people access to the tools to commit suicide, and reducing media coverage (social contagion/clustering) seem to help.
With that said, yes, you are right, just changing one thing doesn't do much, there needs to be a bigger picture approach that addresses many factors.
This seems intuitively obvious, but all the research I’ve read suggests the opposite: a very sizable fraction of people with suicidal ideation will not commit suicide if given even marginally fewer opportunities to do so.
> We put people on the moon and we did it without grinding 8 year olds with hours and hours of homework.
Really? Do you mean that typical NASA engineers, astronauts, and other hard-working and gifted people involved in the Great Space Race, typically were not intensely trained, but just had all childhood time full of playing?
I totally agree. Even if you have completely normal parents, the issues you cite are enough to give kids a lot of anxiety. However, if you add to that list any other external problems (tiger mom, deadbeat dad, financial hardship, bullying, etc), it really compounds things and makes it harder to have a positive outlook.
That anecdote can hardly be considered relevant, no? We're talking about national suicide rates, and you're bringing up a story about a fence that (maybe?) happened at a school in one of the wealthiest districts in the US.
At the risk of talking about suicude and increasing it's potency, the OP is talking about the cluster that occured before 2015 in the Palo Alto area [0]. The linked article is unfortunately paywalled (for me at least). Other clusters have occured since then. Though I cannot find the citation, I remember reading an article that stated that suicide is considered contagious, in that it seems to look just like any other contagious disease. That article further mentioned that suicude in the social media age is much more virulent, I think by ~2000% more contagious.
Recently, in Colorado Springs, CO, a teen suicide cluster was allowed to fester for a number of years in the evangelical community. The coroner, respecting the religious wishes of the bereaved, listed the teen suicudes not as suicides per se, and these victims were not included in official stats. The religious community believed that death was not the end and that the victims would live on in heaven. The victim would be lionized and become the 'most popular kid in school' for a while. Finally, the memorialization of the victims was wide spread via social media and the religious community, and was also very public with lots of people attending funerals. The combination of these factors allowed the suicide rate to spike 4900% there [1,2].
Though stress is undoubtably a trigger for suicide, it seems that suicide is very complicated and individual, despite the cluster nature of it. More research has been helpful in preventing this horrible 'disease' from spreading further, and awareness of the issue is being increasingly taught to our youth.
If anyone reading this is feeling suicidal, please reach out! In addition to the hotlines (1-800-273-8255), I would like to personally help you. Let me know a good email address and we can talk offline. I really, honestly, do want to help you.
I am a voluntary youth minister at a local low-to-middle class church in Mexico so I have a lot of contact with adolescents (Which is unusual because I'm married, almost 40 and have no kids of my own). And what I've seen is that it has become cool or fashonable to be depressed, anxious and to have some mild mental disorder like TOC or ADHD. Kids "brag" about it on social media and sometimes discuss who is more miserable and make fun on people who are "wholesome" or "happy" as being shallow. They constantly make jokes about being worthless and wanting to die and being secretly sad (even when they are broadcasting it on the internet).
I'm not saying that they are faking it, and I know their lives look significantly shittier than mine at their age and the future looks bleak for most, but I have a theory that when it becomes viral some people try to act depressed and end up being depressed for real. Like, when I was adolescent I knew a lot of girls with eating disorders (bulimia/anorexia) in my immediate circle (before social media) but I don't think I know anybody with those problems today, because having those issues became uncool, now you have others to pick from.
So yes, what I'm trying to say is that I had paralyzing social anxiety before it was cool.
Thanks for mentioning this. This has been the norm for at least 15-20 years. It wasn't until I was in college (early 2000s) that I realized popular and happy people weren't inherently bad. Where did I get the idea that popular people were malevolent? And where did I get the idea suffering gave me validity? Who knows. What I do know is that this misconception was a big waste of time.
> Where did I get the idea that popular people were malevolent?
They were the primary bullies growing up? That's where I got the idea, at least. And suffering seems like a more authentic emotion than happiness, as there are all sorts of heavy social incentives to constantly project happiness. There's a lot more people out there faking happiness, than there are faking suffering.
Some grunge and altrock, no doubt marketed / targeted directly at the youth of the time, pushed those sorts of tropes. The songs aren't bad, perse, in retrospect, but I'm able to view them very differently today than how I felt about them as a youth.
The general concept is much older than even Nietzsche. I would put it at least as far back as the account of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic[1], a critique of Socrates' concept of justice:
I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger
I most likely am. I had many friends/relatives in my youth with bulimia and anorexia but depression and anxiety were not even in our vocabulary. I'm no expert and I'm just saying what I see, like when talking to a group of friends, except that my group of friends is HN and likes to yell at me for being real dumb.
You're not just saying what you see. You are sharing elaborate theories that are demonstrating an inaccurate and unsympathetic perspective of teenagers with mental illness.
The fraction of teens with BMI < x is not a measure of how many teens have eating disorders. To pick the simplest possible confounding factor - teens dying of cancer would be false positives.
Establishing causation is often more difficult than it seems. You're drawing a particular arrow of causation here: kids talking about or joking about depression or EDs -> kids actually suffering from depression or EDs. How do you know the arrow of causation isn't the other way around? Or that there isn't a third factor that's causing both?
Last year I listened to an interesting program on Swedish public radio about this topic. There was a researcher there who said something similar; that Swedish youth today are more likely to answer that they are depressed even though if you looked the actual questions they were not saying that they were less happy than previous age groups that had answered similar but did not see themselves as depressed. There was an expectation that they should be depressed because there are so many stories about kids these days being depressed.
It could be a self fulfilling prophecy for some and if you add internet where a lot of people tend to make their diagnosis their whole life. My guess is that if you are feeling depressed it can be very comforting to talk with other people in the same state but I'm not sure how healthy it is in the long run if you spend a lot of time in such communities.
That said I think it is also a rougher way to grow up in many ways than it was for me. Your life might be hyper connected but I think for some that will only suck more when they are lonely outcasts and see everyone else's (appearance of) happy life on Instagram.
I understand your point but must say it's 100% unhelpful, facts on the ground is that suicide rates among young people are up. Are kids faking some sense of doom and gloom to get likes on Instagram? Sure. But I doubt these kids are willing to go far enough to actually commit suicide and influence these numbers in a substantial way.
I'm just saying some of the young people I know think it's cool and like to brag about it in social media. The actual cases of suicide I've encountered came as a surprise.
But, again, I'm a dumb happy adult that once almost jump in front of a bus because I was a dumb heart-broken twenty something. I know nothing.
> And what I've seen is that it has become cool or fashionable to be depressed, anxious and to have some mild mental disorder
I think this has always been the case. Isn't this what being emo, metal, punk, etc. was about in the early 2000s, 90s and 80s? Calling for attention is common at that age, and with so many and so intense feelings as one feels during teenage years, I have always assumed this is common.
> Kids "brag" about it on social media and sometimes discuss who is more miserable and make fun on people who are "wholesome" or "happy" as being shallow.
This sounds like punk subculture. And really a lot of other sub and counter-cultures. IMO this is also healthy. In the context of college I know people who went to schools where, they told me, the overarching social dynamic was "showing a put-together facade". They said this was very stressing. Not only would you struggle, but on top of that you'd have to hide it.
I went to a college where the overarching social dynamic was to complain and talk about how miserable we were, how much work we had, how stressed we all were, etc. It is very refreshing to not have to pretend you've got everything under control and to know that other people are struggling in the same way you are.
On that note, IMO it's worth having a look at wether it is in the other side of the coin that this problem resides— those "wholesome" kids. Especially in some areas of the US, kids are under immense amounts of pressure. Many times the people you'd less think are at risk of committing suicide are the ones who do [1].
It makes sense. If the middle-class keeps disappearing, this becomes an all-or-nothing game. Getting into a good college to study a lucrative career can sound like a ticket to a drastically better life. In the US you hear the word "success" a lot. If everyone around you is a high achiever in one monoculture, not fitting into that monoculture or not achieving the same things your community has can make you feel alone and inadequate. Here are some quotes from that article I linked [1]:
> A goofy basketball player with short brown hair and a pixie face, Cam, as he was known to friends, was the last kid anyone would have suspected of being troubled. His classmates describe him as having been happy, nonchalant, and popular, and that’s exactly how he appears in the homecoming photos posted on so many Facebook pages before his death: a handsome, grinning kid, standing smack in the center of his clique. “If you told me that someone in my friend group would commit suicide, he would be my straight-up last guess,” says Lisa Hao.
> “There’s no middle point for success. There’s no ‘I’m here and I’m happy with where I am.’ It’s always ‘I need to be up there,’” she says. The kids paint a picture of a sort of academic coliseum, where students look down their noses at peers in a lower math “lane,” guard their grade point averages like state secrets, brag about 2 a.m. cramming sessions, and consider a B a disaster.
> “Because we live in this extraordinary place that really has some singular qualities,” says Ken Dauber, a Palo Alto father and a member of the school board, “we think somehow that our kids are also singular and extraordinary. But they are just kids.”
I would go one step further and claim that if you're not in some victim group nowadays, you just don't really "fit in". Be a victim instead and you will get all the virtue signals.
It's a devil's bargain, because being at the receiving end of virtue signals is actually pretty worthless, unless maybe you get to be a diversity hire. However, if you foster a victim identity you will underachieve because you will blame everything and everyone but yourself when things go wrong.
In the past, males in particular would be told in no unclear terms that pretty much nobody cares to hear about their problems and that they need to sort themselves out as part of becoming adults.
Today, they'll be given pills and a consultation with therapists whose education is probably nonsense.
People's beliefs about their responsibility and efficacy do have real impacts on their performance.
Research has shown that whether or not someone's will power is limited is largely determined by whether or not they think it is.
Basically, if you think will power is a limited resource, people will use that as an excuse to give up.
One of my fellow graduate students failed 2 out of 3 classes last semester. He's repeated that will power is finite several times, ignoring me when I mention research suggesting otherwise. It's just too convenient of an excuse for him to say it was beyond his control, he had no choice but to play board games all day instead of studying and doing homework.
Ego depletion has been badly bruised the replication crisis: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-132383. At most the effect size is considerably weaker than first claimed and it probably doesn't actually exist at all.
On that note, it'd also be unwise to bet on the "ego depletion happens only to those who believe in it" finding from the paper I cited being replicate-able either -- it may be that the more broadly is no simple ego depletion effect effect at all.
Psychology studies tend to be marred by the "piranha problem": you can't have a bunch of large effects determining behavior, without them eating each other.[1]
We're immensely complicated, and make highly individual and nuanced decisions. There's just too much noise to try and boil things down to small patterns from simple studies.
I believe (perhaps grounded weakly in largely anecdotal evidence) that people need to be able to fit their own behavior in some sort of personal narrative, or justify it in some way. Therefore, that the belief they "can't help" but do something they want to do (whether that be procrastinate or eat unhealthy food) will make it easier to justify, and thus the behaviors more likely.
But there are as many different internal narratives, built on life experiences, as there are people. Making it hard to generalize surface level consequences between people.
This isn't about ego depletion, but about his mistakes on priming (which also failed to replicate), Kahneman writes:
"""
My position when I wrote “Thinking, Fast and Slow” was that if a large body of evidence published in reputable journals supports an initially implausible conclusion, then scientific norms require us to believe that conclusion. Implausibility is not sufficient to justify disbelief, and belief in well-supported scientific conclusions is not optional. This position still seems reasonable to me – it is why I think people should believe in climate change. But the argument only holds when all relevant results are published.
I knew, of course, that the results of priming studies were based on small samples, that the effect sizes were perhaps implausibly large, and that no single study was conclusive on its own. What impressed me was the unanimity and coherence of the results reported by many laboratories. I concluded that priming effects are easy for skilled experimenters to induce, and that they are robust. However, I now understand that my reasoning was flawed and that I should have known better. Unanimity of underpowered studies provides compelling evidence for the existence of a severe file-drawer problem (and/or p-hacking). The argument is inescapable: Studies that are underpowered for the detection of plausible effects must occasionally return non-significant results even when the research hypothesis is true – the absence of these results is evidence that something is amiss in the published record. Furthermore, the existence of a substantial file-drawer effect undermines the two main tools that psychologists use to accumulate evidence for a broad hypotheses: meta-analysis and conceptual replication. Clearly, the experimental evidence for the ideas I presented in that chapter was significantly weaker than I believed when I wrote it. This was simply an error: I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through. When questions were later raised about the robustness of priming results I hoped that the authors of this research would rally to bolster their case by stronger evidence, but this did not happen.
"""
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/02/18/pizzagate-...
So he has made mistakes (we all do!), but tries his best to learn from them (which not all victims of the replication crisis do).
> The nineteenth century French pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim borrowed the word from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau and used it in his influential book Suicide (1897), outlining the social (and not individual) causes of suicide, characterized by a rapid change of the standards or values of societies (often erroneously referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This was contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person's life and their subsequent depression.
Just look at when this took off: right after 2008, when any notion that they'd be taken care of and their futures were secure was swept away. The adolescents who came of age during that event will probably spend the rest of their lives with lingering economic insecurity and fear about the future.
That's what really did it for me. Losing any notion of security or a future. Initially I thought losing my physical health was the worst of it, but the losses of relationship and financial (and thus physical) security were an order of magnitude worse.
There have been many articles on rising suicide rates especially among kids and young adults, but they tend to not mention a very important possible factor. And that is antidepressants.
It is well known that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide for children, teenagers and young adults (i.e. people under 25). The FDA has acknowledged this and even put warnings on the drug packaging. Yet antidepressants are still routinely prescribed for children and teenagers.
This is something the media does not like to talk about considering how pharma companies spend a lot of money on advertising. But it is a very important possible factor and it should be considered.
When I was 11 or 12 I was put on anti-depressant and anti-psychotic medications (some off label). Several years later, it's discovered the company had illegally marketed one of the drugs to minors and it had developed into negative side effects in some patients, for which there was a class action lawsuit. Luckily, I never developed said side effects personally, but it did leave a level of distrust with pharma companies and to an extant the medical field
I mean big pharma creates mistrust time after time. Look up Bayer selling HIV infected blood products in Africa after removing it from the North American market.
Opiates were marketed as sleeping aid for babies.
Synthetic opiates, such as tramadol were marketed not to be addictive that turned out to be a lie.
Many medications were taken of the market due to side effects, and often the pharmaceutical company knew and downplayed the side effects.
Anti-depressants were also supposed to be safe and non addicting, but withdrawals are actually insane.
I have been nearly crippled by an antibiotic and again side effects are downplayed, and FDA is updating the label year after year adding more and more side effects and not recommending the medication as first line treatment anymore.
It's also an issue that sometimes statistically insignificant adverse side effects can be successfully used to litigate against pharma companies.
For example as a teenager, I desperately needed accutane. Other solutions weren't working and some had actually more severe side effects than accutane; one tetracycline gave me heartburn so severe I basically couldn't eat anything, whereas the most accutane did was dry out my skin.
But because of studies that found a link to increased rates of depression/suicide among people taking accutane, it took years for me to work my way up to taking it, with very bad damage to my self esteem over that time. And if you look up the studies that promote this link, they are obviously not properly controlled, because they compare accutane users to the general population, and not to a subpopulation that has acne bad enough to need accutane. Which is dumb because lots of people (like me) who were taking accutane already had depression not because of the medicine, but in part due to very low self esteem and social ostracization due to the acne that was bad enough to warrant taking that drug.
So the symptom they were trying to prevent was something I already had, and withholding the drug because of concerns about that symptom contributed to making the symptom even worse for me.
To contrast your experience, I was prescribed an oral retinoid as a teenager. As someone who was already depressed, what followed was one of the worst depressive episodes of my life.
There's definitely a fine line to walk between effective treatment and harm reduction when it comes to that class of medication.
Sorry to hear about your experience. I hope things are better now.
Do you think you got any benefit from the aforementioned medications? If you did then maybe it was luck that you did not incur the negative side effects and yes, any profit generating device is to be a a bit distrusted and treated with somewhat skepticism.
> any profit generating device is to be a a bit distrusted and treated with somewhat skepticism.
Yes, but I feel that these days, at least on the internet, speaking with skepticism about medicine and pharma companies will have people equating you with anti-vaxxers, given the arguments are often similar
Conspiracists are not skeptics. Skeptics question commonly accepted beliefs to arrive at a deeper understanding of those beliefs, while conspiracy theorists replace commonly accepted beliefs with less commonly accepted alternatives with only superficial scrutiny of either. The conspiracists takes a dogmatic stance of opposition while the skeptic sees adherence to dogma as a pitfall to be avoided.
How about, instead of putting derogatory labels on people to belittle their efforts to understand truth, we all simply strive for truth?
> The conspiracists takes a dogmatic stance
What, all of them? And who are the "conspiracists"? Those who disbelieve the 9/11 myth, who question the long-term health effects of drugging water systems, who question the safety of wireless transmitters installed in every cubic inch of the world, who see through war propaganda and manufactured history? There are a thousand more "trigger topics".
All of these people are the same, huh? Dogmatic dolts who can't do research? Dummies who don't accept official narratives simply because they're trouble-makers?
The power system maintains its stranglehold over the population because our implicit slavery has been normalized. Is there any earthly reason why we should have billionaires next to people starving to death? We accept this because it has been normalized. There has always been a war on information, but we finally have the means to take back control. But in order to do so, we have to want it.
I've found that individuals in physical or psychological pain tend to have limited capacities for criticality while also searching for solutions to their pain. 9/11 and anti-vax conspiracies can be attributed to this. Having two skyscrapers fall on your neighborhood has to be traumatizing and finding out your child is not what you expected her to be is no walk in the park.
The largest source of trauma in the country right now is school gun violence. The gun control movement being led by the traumatized victims of gun violence, regardless of it's ultimate effectiveness, is the healthiest response to trauma I've seen in the US.
It took suburban middle class children access to therapists, to start moving that conversation towards a place of sanity. If their pain never subsists, what kind of adults do you think they'll be?
An argument / possible explanation that I've heard is that the increased risk for suicide can be attributed to the beneficial effect of reducing lethargy and fatigue, effectively removing one major barrier between suicidal ideation and carrying out the act.
That is a possible explanation, but it does not explain why the effect is so pronounced in younger people and goes away with age. The truth is we just do not know how the popular antidepressants work to begin with and we sure as well don't know what makes them create suicidal thoughts. It is best to gather and publicize available evidence as best as possible and thread carefully.
The right tool for the job. Every patient is a little bit different, and a small but noticeable portion are very different.
Antidepressants worked very well for my S.O. for a stretch of their life. The long term benefit is not so clear, but they have clearly helped. With me, they made everything worse.
This all comes down to how we value/price medical labor in my opinion. More extensive conversations, bringing mental health experts with proven track records into the loop, more custom tailored medication approaches-- all of these things are needed to get a better grasp of the overall societal problem and how best to deal with it.
This is absolutely fascinating to me. Is there any hypothesis as to why this is?
I think its a damn shame where the conversation on depression is going. Depression is tested and diagnosed by a questionnaire (presumably well-designed, with redundancies to make it robust). Antidepressants are serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a drug inspired by a monoamine hypothesis now discarded. We still prescribe them because they modestly lower the score on an observer rating scale better than placebo. If you take an SSRI, it should be bioavailable instantly! Why does depression take months to recover from?
With this all said, all severely depressed people should get medical treatment; moderately depressed people should consider trying it. I also don't want to strawman medicine, science or psychiatry, and claim that they think we are serotonin vessels. They acknowledge all the stuff I said above. I just don't know if its communicated to the layman or the media, especially when we see horrendous, exponentially growing rates like this.
Speaking from experience at the very lowest you can "shut down" lacking motivation to do anything.
The thing is mood and motivation are shockingly separate and antidepressants are a "try and see what fits". So if it combos to improved motivation while still feeling suicidal that is a bad combination.
As for the why biochemically it not certain but it involves longer cycles.
Ketamine is one faster acting hope but it isn't widely used from other concerns.
Administration of antidepressants initiates with up-regulation of target receptor sites along with many, many non-target receptor sites. Over time, those target receptors down-regulate and that is what is theorized to contribute to the antidepressant effect.
The period of initial antidepressant use and its associated up-regulation of receptors can increase activation, anxiety and akathisia, a feeling of intense physical discomfort and restlessness, with many people finding the anxiety and akathisia to be inescapable. One receptor associated with this is the 5HT2C subtype, which is not a targeted receptor, but still is activated as a side-effect of SSRI therapy.
It's hypothesized that people might harm themselves in order to decrease or escape the discomfort they feel while beginning antidepressants. Another hypothesis is that the anxiety and activation might drive someone who is struggling with suicidal thoughts to act upon them before the antidepressant's therapeutic effects kick in.
One of the reasons Prozac is approved for minors is 1) it has an extremely long half-life such that a missed dosed isn't the end of the world and 2) it antagonizes the 5HT2C receptor site, theoretically minimizing activation, anxiety and akathisia associated with starting an antidepressant regimen.
Double worse because being diagnosed for a lot of these issues is just a matter of telling your doctor you're feeling a little down and crying a bit more than you think you should. All of a sudden you're diagnosed with whatever (which really cheapens the case of people with real issues who really need help). So a lot of people take medications they really shouldn't.
Add to that:
- Obesity and its impact on sleep quality (eg: a LOT of people with undiagnosed sleep apnea, which can have depression-like symptoms)
- Nutritional deficiencies (big lack of reliable info around this so its hard to figure out whats real and whats not, but shit like lacking magnesium supposedly can have consequences in this area?).
All around, lots of stuff can lead to depression, suicide, etc, beyond "the world sucks".
There is a clear curve upward in the 15-24 and to a lesser degree the 25-34 group starting in 2013. I don't think there was a big economic downswing at the time, so it could be other cultural or technological factors at play.
The suicide rates by ethnicity are very interesting as well - white people have a significantly higher suicide rate (2x) than most other ethnicity, despite presumably facing fewer problems overall.
My theory is that they can't attribute issues in their life to things like racism/discrimination, so they perceive failures in their own life as their own fault rather than the fault of a racist society. That also seems to fit with suicides dropping during the world wars, when there is something else which you can blame for your problems, suicide rates are lower. I have nothing to back this up though so idk but it makes sense to me, blaming someone else for your situation is a common way to make yourself feel better about it (and is reasonable in many cases I think, there are lots of things you can't control which contribute to failures in your life).
Maybe, another theory I've heard from Chris Hedges is that minorities never believed in the myth of the American Dream.
White americans have been told as kids that if you go to college, and then work hard, you'll be rewarded with a good life. This generation of people are finding this to be a con. Look at the lack of wage increases since the 70s even though productivity has increased a lot or look at the student debt crisis for some proof that it was.
Minorities, on the otherhand, were never taught to believe in the American dream, because they haven't really had it in the past.
Now that white people are figuring out it was a myth, and that they are going to likely end up with a worse life then their parents they are commiting suicide, commiting mass shootings, etc.
This rings true to me. They told me that if I worked hard, then I'd be successful by default. At some point in my early 20s, I realized that it wasn't true at all, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was severely depressed and felt like a failure, right up until the point where I accidentally stumbled into being a programmer and turned out to be good at it.
I know this feeling very well, made considerably worse by the fact that I happened to be friends with some people who for various reasons did end up being very, very successful. It took me a very long time to realise that they were the outliers rather than me being a failure, and I still doubt myself.
I think a lot of it is also due to minorities becoming better educated and being treated more fairly in the job market (both domestically and due to globalization), there is more competition for jobs now, so you can't just be successful by default because you are an educated white person who shows up on time. And a lot of people are probably seeing their standard of living decrease from childhood->mid adulthood as they are affected by this transition to a work environment where race plays less of a factor. Another factor is that the percentage of people getting bachelor's degrees over time keeps going up, so degrees are also getting more common and are ending up to be a less competitive advantage.
> White americans have been told as kids that if you go to college, and then work hard, you'll be rewarded with a good life.
People should add an addendum that you need to think about what kind of job you are going to get after you graduate, and it's still kind of true. I know people who thought like this, not at all exclusively white people, and those people are at this stage of their lives (early-mid 20s) seemingly a lot less happy than people who actually thought about their potential careers before they turned 22.
Freakanomics did an interesting podcast about the same theory, what they called the "no oney left to blame" hypothesis.
>DUBNER: The most compelling explanation of suicide I’ve ever heard about — discussed with the fellow who promulgates it — because we don’t really know that much about suicide, because it’s taboo, the research is very distant and so on. But he calls it the “no-one-left-to-blame” theory. Which is that if you have problems in life, but you’ve got a toxic environment or a nasty government, you can always imagine that life will get a lot better. But if you’re surrounded by happy, shiny people and you’re not happy and shiny, it can be — so can you talk about that notion in a place that’s so happy?
WIKING: Yeah. So there is a term, “the happiness-suicide paradox,” that talks about exactly that — that it might be more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society. If everybody around you feels that life is great, that are oh-so-happy, and you yourself feel unhappy, then that could create a stronger contrast and maybe you start to blame yourself. And more developed countries have reduced the reasons why we should be unhappy. You know, eliminate poverty, have eliminated lack of education — then if I have all these opportunities, why am I still unhappy? We start to internalize that cause and blame ourselves.
Those rates to not appear to be normalized to account for the proportional differences across ethnicities. Based on the 2010 census, ~75% of the population identifies as white[1]. Based on that, the white suicide rate appears to be lower than their minority counterparts. From the link in the GP, based on 2017 numbers:
The Native American number is the most striking to me because, again, from the 2010 census, only 0.9% of respondents identified as Native American[1]. Perhaps that number is also including Latinos?
That chart is already in Deaths per 100,000 people, so it does indeed show the white and Native American suicide rates to be significantly higher than black and Asian rates.
More precisely, it is deaths per 100,000 people from the target group. I think the parent is interpreting it as "suicides by white people per 100,000 people in the general population", when it is actually "suicides per 100,000 white people."
Correct, but it is not normalized to account for population differences. The white suicide rate is ~2.5x higher than the black suicide rate, but there are ~5.75x more white people than black people in the US. Therefore, normalizing for population proportion, the black suicide rate is more than twice that of their white counterparts.
> The white suicide rate is ~2.5x higher than the black suicide rate, but there are ~5.75x more white people than black people in the US. Therefore, normalizing for population proportion, the black suicide rate is more than twice that of their white counterparts.
No, the population share has already been taken into account. You may have mistaken those numbers to be percentages of total suicides and then compared them to percentages of the population. They aren't, they are deaths by suicide per 100,000 people. You don't need to know anything about the sizes of the groups involved to compare those numbers, and the rate doesn't change. 100 suicides per million people is 10/100,000, just as 1000 per ten million or 10000 per one hundred million.
There are many confounding variables here that make it difficult to draw a convincing conclusion. The ethnic disparity can partially be explained by the fact that white men have higher handgun ownership rates than other demographics (my guess is this is because white men also have higher incomes, not because white men inherently like guns), and such access to guns is associated with increased suicide risk.
I'm sure that's not the whole story though. And statistics on suicides are notoriously unreliable, as many communities consider it shameful and are incentivized to rationalize the person's death with another explanation.
What part of that fact sheet contradicts something I said? The "what are some of the barriers" section actually demonstrates my point - it provides external reasons for depression and mental health issues, which only apply to minorities. If you are not a minority, you can't really use these to explain why you are depressed or in a bad situation.
> My theory is that they can't attribute issues in their life to things like racism/discrimination, so they perceive failures in their own life as their own fault rather than the fault of a racist society.
Maybe your saying that the perception of who caused the failure plays into the response to it. I would say that depression in the Black community has been normalized -- that is, no one is really talking about it, but the large part of folk that I've grown up with, the large number of ancestors that I've heard stories about, the ladies in my church who would start crying for no apparent reason, the people that I've known in several decades of being Black, these people are fighting through depression. We need to normalize the healing.
In other words, even though you may know the difficulties you're against are caused be a racist system (typically knowing that racism is really at play takes months, years, even a century to piece together), taking it on does not guarantee that you will be supported by the community, you are likely to be cast into the same conditions and isolation that exacerbate mental health crises.
I don't know of a more poignant indicator of "depression as a state of being" than our creation of Blues
How many of these deaths are being wrongly reported -- young men and boys seeking out the right combination of circumstances to be on the wrong side of a gun barrel? My personal experience and theory is that probing these deaths you would find the majority to be set in motion by a mental health crisis.
As I talked to older relatives and thought through the stories I'd hear as a child, they run rife with of undiagnosed mental health issues. Relatives who succumbed to suicide, people who simply decided to leave/disappear, people who suddenly went completely silent forever. The recurring theme you hear in those stories -- elaborate plans to defeat a segregated housing covenant that fell apart, a grown man being too many times being called "boy" -- people take this pain on themselves and the torment lasts generations.
I was initially surprised to see the relatively high rates in the early part of the 20th century. Some of these seem intuitively obvious, like the higher rates during the Great Depression.
What's even more interesting is how suicide rates go down during WW1 and WW2. Sebastian Junger spoke about this in his book "Tribe" where he cites lower psychological disorders in Great Britain at the height of V2 bombing which then increased again after the war. I think his thesis was war created an increased sense of camaraderie/solidarity and sense of purpose. It was a really interesting, quick read.
The suicide rate always dips after wars, at least historical wars. Wars, again speaking historically. reduced the male population. After the war, surviving males easily find mates and settle into stable homes, resulting in baby booms. It doesn't take much. A change of a few percentage points can radically change the dating scene.
I have read about this trend in smaller societies. It has been implicated in the 80s/90s aids crisis in US black communities. A substantial percentage of 20-30yo black males were jailed during the drug war. Those males not in jail found dating far easier. Females had to compete for the artificially reduced number of males. This lead to reduced condom use, accelerating the heterosexual spread of aids in these communities. Also, a baby boom. Changing the male/female ratio in an extremely powerful driver of change.
I think what you're referring to may be different. If you look at the data in the initial graph, suicide rate increases after both WW1 and WW2. It actually went down __during__ the wars and not after, which falls more in line with Junger's book.
Epidemiology was in its infancy during that time period, I wouldn't compare or analyze those rates too closely. This is during the time of Freudian hogwash, before DSM, before knowledge of genetics or any current understanding of neurophysiology. Cultural awareness of psychology has also changed vastly, and broader awareness leads to broader diagnosis in many disorders.
The interesting thing about early 20th century is the wild swings in the suicide rate, a much more extreme series of swings than any time later. It seems like an indication that during that time, some greater degree of "contagion" was going on relative to later time (not sure from what). Another factor might be spottier records and a smaller population. The suicides from the 1929 stock crash were fodder for much literature and the seems to show an increase up to 1929 and then a steep decrease.
I know that during the 19th century, Goethe's "The Sorrows Of Young Werther"[1] was reputed to have provoked a rash of suicides.
Looking at historical rates of suicide is really hard because it was still a crime in many places, and there was strong social convention to not name something as suicide unless the evidence was overwhelming.
In England the law changed in 1961, but coroners still had to use "beyond all reasonable doubt" to come to a conclusion of suicide until 2018. There was a case (Maughan) that changed the burden of proof to "balance of probabilities".
In the US you have the added complexity of different laws for each state, with different standards that coroners work to. Getting coroners to work to common standards is notoriously difficult.
Women struggle too, but get scared away by creeps and being put in scary situations. Women need to feel safe, not fear rape, and not feel treated just like a sex object.
Yeah, my girlfriend has told me so many stories of the men she dated from Tinder. And of the men she spent time with in the singles' club we met in. And frankly it's understandable that those men are single because most of the stories were of them either not actually attempting to connect with her as a human being, or they were stories of them outwardly objectifying her before even introducing themselves, or they were stories of crippling social anxiety. And as a rule none of them gave any indication they were aware of these things as problems that could be worked on or solved. So it doesn't surprise me there are a bunch of single men out there desperate for attention from women, because there appear to be a bunch of single men out there who are totally unable to take responsibility for or to fix their own problems.
How one knows what to fix regarding character and behaviour, if for the person nothing works? Not a little bit, less often, a little bit later, a little bit different, with different kind of person. Nothing works, never.
Please save me from the objectifying story, as both genders are gravely guilty of this (height requirements, demanding certain position and status from the men, very demanding list of character traits in general, all this while expecting appearance of someone professional like actors or celebrities).
>. And frankly it's understandable that those men are single because most of the stories were of them either not actually attempting to connect with her as a human being, or they were stories of them outwardly objectifying her before even introducing themselves, or they were stories of crippling social anxiety.
I wholeheartedly support the notion that random girls on Tinder have no business being some random dude's therapist. But, the idea that crippling social anxiety is pretty much the same as being an objectyfing creep, and it's no wonder socially anxious people are single, is a bit cold.
The jump from statistical behavior to personal advice is kind of odd. I'm not saying it's bad advice but we're talking average behavior of population - the average person obviously isn't going to hear this personal advice.
I mean, both women and men suffer from relationship problems but men certainly commit suicide more. Discovering why that is, in a non-judgemental fashion, seems like a useful inquiry.
I've been where you are, and I suggest you consider that you're setting yourself up for failure through very poor internal monologue/narrative of what's going on. Dr. Nerd Love's videos [1] and blog on this and other related topics are highly recommended.
It's been ~4x since 1999. If whatever "it" is were only affecting males, the ratio would have changed. But female suicide is also going up. The article shows a spike for 15-19 females around 2012. 20-24 females have been steadily going up since 1999 but no similar 2012 spike. I don't think this study and the New Scientist article are using the exact same data, but the drift is similar (US young people are killing themselves more).
To me the date that stands out most starkly is that everything was improving until 9/11, until it started back upwards. Suicide rates by veterans (due to PTSD) aren't broken out separately but they are notoriously high, and the US has been at war since then.
May also be worth considering school shootings and the psychological impact of "preventative" drills inducing fear of them.
technology & social media which lead people into isolation and despite promising the opposite, a less-connected live.
meeting people today is much easier than it was 20 years ago (organized events on places like meetup.com, etc ... even tinder make it easy). But the quality of these connections is shallow and very short.
also the more time we spend on social media the less time we have to work on real connections (which is massive effort).
I'm not surprised by the high rates of 35+ age group as it is very difficult for people (and males in general) to form new meaningful long term bonds after setting down. Add the likelyhood of divorce, burnout or unemployment rates in those age groups it is no wonder. :(
Popular media conveys this conception that the Amish are opposed to technology for religious reasons, but this is incorrect. The Amish place a high value on maintaining their culture, and within that culture familial and community interactions are among the most important ideals. Consequently, each community takes a considered look at technology and how it might influence their culture, and simply choose not to adopt those that they believe would have a negative influence.
I think there is something the rest of us could learn from this.
Probably in the realm of "can't be manufactured within the community leading to a reliance on the outside world for something we don't really need". Not relying on the outside world is also a pretty big theme of their culture.
They feel pressure socially and academically; they look ahead in time and see inequality, climate change and automation; they look at their phones and see social media and its ills; they look around them and see others committing suicide, being addicted to something or other, or they just generally see a shitty society in the US today. Their politicians are old white men catering to old white folks and rural folks. They see the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars and the financial crisis, low wages, hollowed out Rust Belt...It's not hard to list many reasons why my peers have been lost to suicide in increasing numbers.
I myself have lost a close friend from scouts. He was a complex person, orphan from another country adopted into affluent US family. Struggled to fit in, he was short and heavy, but he had a kind soul and loved to blacksmith, making swords and weaponry. He never quite succeeded with girls or social circles, but eventually he met a girl on WoW finally, moved across country for her, since he felt he had nothing else positive in his life. She married then divorced him within 2 years, and he killed himself soon after, feeling he had no other prospects and having no adequate treatments for his depression.
More fundamentally, it's a problem with secular society. Really, if the only goal of life is achieving material prosperity, and you're not achieving it, there's no particular reason not to kill yourself, other than holding on to hope, which is quite irrational in some circumstances.
Everyone wants to jump on this with their personal theory of what's wrong with the world (because that's what bothers them), but suicide isn't based on rational negative beliefs like the ones we have. It is a symptom of mental illness, which has completely different causes.
Mental illness is one - very modern - modality for why one may want to do any number of seemingly irrational things. I think that a blanket lumping of everything into the bucket of "mental illness" is problematic for a few reasons:
- the only implied remedy is seeking help from a mental health professional.
- said professionals are in short supply and high demand and are inaccessible to many people for financial and other reasons.
- there is often a proximate cause of acute depression that may be remedied to prevent suicide without addressing deeper underlying causes.
- a blanket labeling of "mental illness" is about as specific and helpful as "demonic possession" or any similarly vague term.
- many psychological issues have organic components that are better addressed by a doctor.
All of those apply to physical illnesses: they usually mean you should see a doctor, doctors are in short supply and often inaccessible for financial reasons, oftentimes there is a proximate cause that a healthy lifestyle can get rid of, and being told you have a "physical illness" isn't specific enough to be helpful. All of these things are true, but it doesn't make "physical illness" a non-true or useless idea.
Indeed, and just saying “physical illness” is pretty meaningless. Beyond that though, there’s sadly a lot more empirical data and practices behind medicine than psychology/psychiatry. You go to a doctor, you can get a diagnosis and effective treatment for many conditions in relatively short order. Therapy is generally the start of a years-long process. Psychiatry is more guesswork than science. That’s not to say they aren’t extremely helpful for many people, but I don’t see the two fields as being equivalent.
You don't have to have a mental illness to want to take your own life. Although some mental illnesses are associated with suicidal tendencies or increased prevalence.
>without a similar increase in rates of diagnosis of mental illness.
This is a bit misleading, deaths by suicide can be quantified but the rates of diagnosis depend on people's and willingness and access to mental health resources.
For this age group we need to get away from the idea of mental illness and focus on things like rapid onset despair. Another reason we need to move away from the idea of mental illness is that there's considerable stigma around mental ill health, and this is a barrier to help-seeking.
Yes, the idea of mental illness can freak one out, there's a lot of stigma that comes with it initially.
But once one learns that a lot of people have the same issues when they push past their limits things become easier to handle. It can even become a telling episode of how not to abuse oneself by accepting stressors that are not worth it.
I don't get where you get that idea. I'm in no way saying "only mentally ill people thinking killing themselves". What What I'm saying is that from time to time we all find ourselves with poorer mental health and we can learn from it.
I agree with your larger point (that suicide is not a directed rational behaviour) but I want to take a stab at a trope I see repeating here again and again. The trope of the 'alien' mental illness that infests and infects our otherwise entirely balanced minds.
(This is all naturally just my own understanding of an incredibly complex topic.)
Mental illness isn't some entirely distinct entity or disease that overtakes the body like a cancer or parasite. It is a failure to regulate within what we deem 'normal' bounds of neurological and behavioural homeostasis. This failure to regulate is complex and still not well understood. Some 'disorders' are due to deficiencies in specific neurotransmitters, as far as we can tell. Others may even be related to gut biome or general inflammatory response of the body. We know that 'mental illness' in later life is highly correlated with exposure to adverse childhood experiences. We also know that environmental factors such as sunshine, nature and bodily movement somehow affect the prevalence and expression of behavioural disorders. Why should all of this be the case if 'mental illness' were just a simple disease?
"Mental Illness" unfortunately grossly oversimplifies a set of different things. It's like characterising a person with a broken leg, another with cystic fibrosis, and another with a stomach ache due to over-eating all as simply "bodily ill" and ignoring the vast differences in prognosis and treatment between them.
Suicide like all other behaviours humans immerse themselves in is complex and not clearly attributable to any specific cause or set of circumstances. There are correlations that would invite theories but it is not a simple thing. As euthanasia rights increase across the globe, as well, you can see old and young people alike taking a cognitive view of their status and concluding that death would be the best course of action in light of extreme and chronic pain. There is no singular defining distinguishing factor between the cold-hard cognitive rationale of euthanasia and the ostensibly 'infected' mind-state of suicide. There is not single reason why people commit suicide. If we are to say that suicide is due to "mental illness" then we may as well say that it is due to "bodily disfunction" or "misaligned bodily tissues". Closing off the arena of understanding by oversimplifying a vastly complex behaviour is not of service to reducing that behaviour.
The belief in blame the victim of suicide and instead of what's encompassing the victim is going to die out in the next generations. Faith is dying and along with it comes analytical people that observe their life rationally to what the previous generations experienced.
Interestingly, the trend of suicide among females seems to be unaffected. The rate is steadily increasing, but the trend has been nearly the same since at least 2000. There's a noticeable increase in the suicide trend for males starting in 2013. (If I'm interpreting the graphs correctly)
Since the media is all about feminist propaganda nowadays, this fact is not being mentioned in the headline.
Although it is the most important part of the data. Why are men increasingly chosing to end their lifes?
Could there be a relation between the growing dominance of anti-male 4. wave feminist viewpoints in society and propaganda in the media and this statistics?
Coincidentally the fourth wave feminism started exactly one year before the increase in suicides.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
It's ideological battle, which the site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do on HN. Once someone starts going on about "feminist propaganda" or any other classic ideological flamewar topic, curiosity departs, the same way wild animals depart a forest fire. Please don't do that to the threads here.
The overview is that for gun violence, one act makes the next one slightly more likely. When people see someone perform an act, ones like shootings or suicides, others see it as somewhat more acceptable.
Here's a relevant quote:
> In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
Take out riots, and add suicides, and there's a match.
I know people can have different opinions on Gladwell, but I feel this is a very well thought out writing about it, and in a way that isn't talked about.
Here's a podcast episode where he talks about it too:
I'd expect to see a sharp increase. Hope is a key component to mental health, as hope erodes people will feel lost and sad.
The very real crisis that many of us have start to feel will only get more pronounced as time goes on. Further resource constraints like less water, additional heat and bad news as people will have to move, causing local instabilities that balloon into regional or international conflict.
The future for young adults is grim, where I live they compete with multinational banks to buy homes. Then end up renting from the same people.
Like many other large issues in our country those entrenched in power have taken the 'it doesn't exist' approach to the current climate destruction. This further exacerbates hopelessness. It is not a very good situation to be in.
No this isn't it at all, things are real bad right now, we need to take charge if we want a future and we should be preparing for the coming storm. Life is tough but we are tougher.
Do these charts not coincide exactly with the introduction and pervasiveness of smart phones and social media? The rates were dropping until 2007 when the iPhone was introduced, and it only went up from there as more and more social apps rolled out.
A) They might be directly affected. Maybe their family lost their house.
B) Kids (and young adults) aren't stupid. They know they're not gonna be kids forever - and when the world is suddenly starting to suck more than you were told it would, it's normal to get kinda bummed about that.
I attempted suicide at fifteen years old (~2009)--three schools, two countries, and dad had lost his job twice in just three years. I'd say for me it was entirely based on social isolation and lack of self worth. I hadn't been able to participate in any sports teams or academics like I wanted since I started over twice back-to-back (in different countries, even). Very hopeless time for me and didn't feel like our family was ever going to get out of that situation.
Computers did not help me because I spent long hours on them in my room alone and if I didn't have them I likely would have found some group at school to fit in with.
I was surprised to learn the suicide rates were so much higher before WWII. I suppose that's not too shocking given the events of the time, however I never see todays suicide rates noted in that context.
The highest risk group - men aged between 18 to 41 - were conscripted.
It's likely that counting of deaths was disrupted by the war, and it was already inconsistent because of the criminality of suicide and the desire of coroners to "protect" the relatives from a highly stigmatising suicide verdict.
In that time, the US has waged the longest war in our history, average college debt has only increased, easily accessible good paying jobs have continued to vanish, health care costs have continued to skyrocket, the minimum wage has stayed pitifully low, and real estate investment firms are gobbling up housing in the places that do have jobs.
Because it's not as simple as you think to do that. I'd have left permanently long ago. I have lived abroad a few times but could never get legitimized because of my wrecked health and life collapsing interrupting the process each time. You cannot just go swap your passport and be done with it. I'd have signed up for that program in a snap. My quality of life was measurably better in Europe. I hate that every time this topic comes up the nationalistic egos come out. You can like America and think it's amazing without trying to argue down anyone who does not. It's not a threat to your identity if someone criticizes this country or doesn't find it the "greatest in the world".
Not trying to be nationalist. Just it seems to be a bit odd for people to say life in the US is atrocious, so much they'd end their lives, yet do not seem willing to take the somewhat less drastic option of moving to another country.
My sincere apologies if I ascribed intent to you that wasn't there. Your comment is the sort of thing nationalistic egoists say all the time and I am self admittedly extremely sensitive to this because of how much the topic has affected my life.
The confusion many have comes from not understanding how complicated it is to immigrate even in the best conditions. It's the same sort of idea people in the US use against immigrants here claiming "they can just do it legally". You cannot just "move" to another country because you want to. There are legal, financial, situational requirements that must be met and it's not something just anyone can up and do. Quite often those who want to move to other countries the most due to ideological or quality of life reasons are the least able to legally as a result of their experiences in their home nations. I lost my health and financial security due to for-profit healthcare. Then the adversarial and broken social security system denied me help. There is no social safety net here and opportunity to rebuild once you are crushed. So with that in mind I'd LOVE to immigrate but cannot meet the requirements because of what was taken from me. I have tried and worsening conditions as a result of the above derailed the process. You have no protection until you are legitimized and/or attain citizenship. To add insult to injury did you know that the USA is the only country that CHARGES a fee to give up your citizenship? It was nearly $3000 last time I checked and increases based on assets. Also one of the only that taxes it's citizens' income earned abroad. I'd happily exit this place and never look back were it an option.
I believe you'd need to expect significantly better results elsewhere and/or an easy transition. For somebody with a well-paying job in the US, few other countries promise an equal or better future. For somebody that struggles in the US, transition to Europe for example isn't easy, and it's not like they could reasonably expect to make a lot more money there.
Pretty much everybody from, say, Ghana, can expect to have a better life that is worth the transition in Denmark, but few Danes can expect to have a better life in Belgium that offsets the cost of moving, learning a new language and switching cultures. If European cultures were more similar to the US and there was no language barrier or bureaucratic difficulties, I'd expect more migration, similar to how people will look for greener pastures within their home country.
Non-Argument.
Good luck finding any data on that, no one seems to be keeping any records. Likely in part because of...
They can't. Call up an immigration lawyer in another first world country and ask about what would be required. The moment you say you are from the US, half of your available migration options vanish.
What cultural foundation? Racism? Misogyny? Because we’ve always been an inclusive, multi-cultural society, and the US has, at least over the last 75 years or so, been viewed as something of an anti-culture beyond its cultural elements imported from elsewhere.
[citation needed] There are many equally plausible assertions, like existential fear/despair over the various ecological and climactic disasters, increasing alienation as the nation and world move towards authoritarianism and nativism, unhealthy impacts of social media consumption etc...
... at least those are the things giving me anxiety and stress.
There's a theory that circulates on 4chan and on the edges of "rationalist" blogs that having a conservative society that puts everyone in their place improves mental health by making most people feel like they have a place. Probably the least radical place this has been expressed is on Scott Aaronson's quantum computing blog, where he argues that some of the troubles he had in his youth would have been averted by the strict social traditions of the jewish shtetl. (That's why he named his blog "Shtetl Optimized.")
There's literally hippy communes that operate this way. You don't need to be conservative to see the benefit of everyone having a place in society.
This sounds a lot like public work programs like the Green New Deal is proposing, lots of high-paying opportunities for skilled labor and training to become a skilled laborer. There's lot of able people wasting their potential in call centers and retail jobs. Everyone wants manufacturing back in America but no one wants to pay for the costs of educating a new generation of tradesmen.
>There's literally hippy communes that operate this way. You don't need to be conservative to see the benefit of everyone having a place in society.
Although I recognize that most political words are used as euphemisms for Republicans and Democrat, by the dictionary definition of the word conservative, those hippy communes are pretty conservative. Imagine trying to get them to watch reality TV and eat Big Macs!
Conservatism has consistently been on the wrong side of every social issue in history, so I feel safe calling this 'theory' out as nothing more than teenage angst at a world they feel has left them behind.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle for quite a long time. We've asked you repeatedly to stop, but you've repeatedly continued. You've broken the site guidelines in many other ways too. All of this would justify banning you, but I don't think you're doing it on purpose, so I'm not going to ban you right now. Would you please take the spirit of this site more to heart, though, and stop doing these things? Because we'll have no choice but to ban you unless you do.
> Conservatism has consistently been on the wrong side of every social issue in history
Given that Progressivism was very much on the side of things like Soviet Russia, Maoist China and Pol Pot's Cambodia, as well as all sorts of "fun" stuff like racist eugenics in the U.S., I'll gladly take the "consistent" losses of conservatism over the know-it-all attitude of progressives, thanks you very much.
Ideological flamewar will get you banned here. We had to ask you not to do this just recently. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please stop doing this.
> All you've done here is show me that you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
Well, apparently you aren't familiar with the fact that progressives used to be very much in favor of eugenics (in the early 20th-c.), that progressive/leftist intellectuals and academics did support the Soviet system, that Maoist China was a huge influence on radical youth movements of the 1970s and 1980s that largely define what we think of as "progressive" today, that Pol Pot literally was introduced to extreme leftist politics by those same radical movements in the Paris of his day, etc. etc.
"Conservatives and traditionalists fight against social change and have to suck it up eventually" - is that supposed to be a problem? It's literally the definition of what conservatism is all about! Sure, some of them might have opposed abolitionism and universal suffrage, for a time (Though many didn't, least of all in a practical sense. Even Carlyle, as rabid as he was from a "modern" POV, understood that slavery was very much on its way out). But so what - conservatives also fought Mao and Pol Pot, and in this latter sense they were far more important!
Stricter norms and racial homogeneity don't seem to have prevented high suicide rates in countries like Korea or Japan. At any rate, it's awfully easy to diagnose broad cultural problems as the result of one's personal bugbears.
One thing to consider is that life circumstances that make us stressed and feel suicidal are transitory, but suicide is permanent. I felt pretty bad when younger, but I am fine now. It would have sucked if I'd killed myself back then.
>One thing to consider is that life circumstances that make us stressed and feel suicidal are transitory, but suicide is permanent
Mine haven't been transitory. If anything they get worse. Sure it's sensible for a kid to see if they can get out into life and improve their circumstances, or someone in some acute situation like losing a loved one etc to navigate the situation, but the "it gets better" and "permanent solution to a temporary problem" tropes are fallacies beyond a select few groups.
Well, one counter point is the religious one. If one holds onto hope until the natural end of life, then they are guaranteed a great final situation in heaven that will never get worse. Conversely, despair and suicide are often considered the sure way to enter hell. In this hypothetical scenario, the tropes of "it gets better" and "permanent solution to a temporary problem" are literally true, regardless of how difficult a person's life is.
I didn't downvote you and don't like how that tool is used as a "disagree" button. However, you are describing the well known "Pascal's Wager" and it doesn't do it for me. IF, and I don't think it likely, there is a god who would punish someone for not being able to endure suffering, and who has created a place like "hell" then we are all screwed anyway because that's a horrible and cruel thing for anyone to do, let alone a creator. It all sounds like a very human construct to me anyway since so many humans do love inflicting punishment to feel some sense of control and justice.
There are a lot of qualifications around the scenario I wrote. For example, in Catholicism, for something to be a mortal sin a person needs to have at least performed the action voluntarily and with full knowledge of its gravity. So, there are caveats that could potentially make suicide not punishable by hell. However, going to hell is a possibility that we would probably all want to do our best to avoid, although it should not be our only or even primary motivation.
Additionally, the concept of hell is surprisingly prevalent across many religions and philosophies. It is not just in the Christian New Testament. Plato describes something like hell in the dialogue Republic, for those who have repeatedly chosen their passions over their reason. There is a similar concept in Buddhism. The idea is that hell is not a place people get thrown arbitrarily for actions beyond their control, but it is essentially a place they put themselves through their repeated, knowledgeable and voluntary choices.
All that being said, thinking about the possibility of hell I believe was helpful at least to make me reconsider whether things in my life were really all that bad, all things considered. Trying my best to imagine endless torment (tough to do, try it!) is at the very least sobering and a bit of a wakeup call.
I am sorry you are suffering like this. I get it. It upsets me to see your words downvoted/greyed out. That's a big part of the problem in that people attack things that they don't want to hear or that make them afraid...rather than having empathy. I don't understand at all the kind of person who would signal "WRONG" with a button press to someone suffering like that. Either leave it be or show compassion.
If you want to die, just wait until you're old enough. Most suicide methods are too unreliable and if you fail, you might not attempt suicide a second time. You don't want to take that risk. My method will work even if your life has improved and you no longer feel suicidal.
They are dedicated and spend monthes/years not only perfecting the method (most serious candidates always mpick smthe sale one) but talking about themselves about these problems:
- how can I minimize at most the damage done to my close ones? Yes suicide is a transfer of pain, but only a partial transfer. Full transfer would make life unlivable
- what do I do if I'm saved and everyone knows?
- Is there a hell waiting for suicidal persons? Is reincarnation real, and if so will this hellish life begin again?
- What's the best way to minimize the persons discovering your body?
They are dedicated and spend monthes/years not only perfecting the method (most serious candidates always pick the same one) but talking about themselves about these problems:
- how can I minimize at most the damage done to my close ones? Yes suicide is a transfer of pain, but only a partial transfer. Full transfer would make their life unlivable
- what do I do if I'm saved and everyone knows? -
- Is there a hell waiting for suicidal persons? Is reincarnation real, and if so will this hellish life begin again?
- What's the best way to minimize the trauma inflicted to the persons discovering your body?
An opinion I understand and respect, but that I don’t share. Anyone with sufficient education can be absolutely terrified of the soul-crushing future we need to deal with, but what makes life enjoyable is overcoming any challenge put in our way.
> but what makes life enjoyable is overcoming any challenge put in our way.
Life is pretty fucking miserable for a large part (perhaps even most) of the world on a daily basis. I doubt they'd share your can-do attitude on this subject.
Climate change is probably inevitable, but we humans will adapt to it; we will solve the problems that come from it; I actually see a high chance we will get basically unlimited free energy from renewables before we destroy the world.
Capitalism will get changed/fixed. At a local level, move to a sane country ;) At a global one, first realize we are much much much better globally than at any other time in history; we will keep improving.
Even in the USA, we're arguably better overall that at any other time in history; yes, Trump is a step back, but it's just so we can get impulse
> we're arguably better overall that at any other time in history.
Even a basic look at where we are shows this as untrue. Our health care is more expensive, life spans are declining, wages dropping when compared with inflation, housing costs rising. We don't have to dig very deep to see that we are going downhill.
We have problems. I believe they are solvable. But we've got to stop denying that we have them.
I see you got downvoted for it, but I respect your faith that the problems will be solved. Just don't let it lul you into inaction, because believing they will be solved and believing they will solve themselves are two different things.
The unlimited free energy part could have happened today but we as humans have collectively decided that letting the planet cook a bit until the fry pan is starting to vaporize is a reasonable trade off in exchange for a little profit. The solutions are obvious and right in front of us: a carbon tax to compensate for the externalities. It might be radical in some people's eyes (it really isn't) but it is guaranteed to work.
Capitalism is just a system to allocate resources fairly. Under some very optimistic circumstances it works amazingly well. But if you forcibly distort the system and don't account for processes that are a net benefit for individuals but produce negative value for society at large then it's nothing but self destructive.
Capitalism isn’t a “challenge”. Capitalism is the reason our world is much more comfortable today than ever, as the cost of luxuries goes down through competition between multiple companies.
So really, just climate change is our problem. We need a sustainable way to obtain resources to further fuel capitalism and approach post-scarcity society.
> Capitalism is the reason our world is much more comfortable today than ever
At any given point I'm one week away from homelessness or starvation. Having skin cancer is better than having pancreatic cancer - but neither of them are good.
Having been in the position of wanting, in a very real and immediate sense, to end my life, and having sought help for it, let me relate my experience a little:
You get what you pay for. Yeah, all this "seek help" stuff is actually kinda just marketing. No one really wants to help you, at least not enough to commit serious effort to do it. This is the unfortunate reality.
However, I obviously did not end up killing myself either. For me, escaping the crushing hopelessness involved a deep examination of why I felt the way I did, which ultimately resulted in two significant realizations: 1) The universe is under no obligation to make sense to me, and 2) most of my criteria for judging myself came from people trying to sell me something. These seem obvious on the face of it, but knowing and understanding, it turns out, are different things.
I'm not going to suggest that what helped me will help you, because I remember hearing all sorts of bullshit advice from others when I was in your position and it only made it worse. I'm not even going to suggest that life is worth living, because that's very subjective, or that there's hope for you, because all situations have their own nuances that I would be exceedingly arrogant to assume I could understand.
So what am I trying to say? I don't know, man. I guess that despite your pleas for help being met with this low-effort "help" from the great internet wanking session known as Hacker News, and how that must make you feel right now, there are sometimes ways out, if you can manage to find them.
So you don’t kill yourself over what looks to be an overly skewed perspective of the world? There might be bad things going on, but that doesn’t mean everything is horrible or unfixable.
Yes, living does irreparable damage to everyone. The best you can hope for is to not put your family and friends through the unnecessary hell of coping with your death, dwelling on what they could have done/didn't do to prevent it. You can come back from how you feel now - that's the nature of being alive
Because you’re betting your life on something which may or may not occur. Why take the risk that you’re wrong? Why not try instead to see if you can help fix the problems you’re seeing, or getting help to do so?
One day you may find something that is worth living for and you'll leave the darkness behind. After that day when looking at your current thinking process, it will not make much sense. Of course when your mind is cloudy no outside words or solutions register, they seem like empty words. They will only make sense once you're past that point. That's why is good to have hope.
I am not the person you replied to but I want to ask you when this happens? I am 45...have been dealing with this for 15 years in a bad way on top of a miserable childhood. I had some good years in my 20s when I was able to make my own path but that was derailed by the negligence of others and after that it has been downhill. Since then all the "help" you speak of has ever done is make it worse and push me down further. All they have is weak science and pills that often make things worse. They also never address the root causes and are mostly just expensive, egotistical, bandaid dispensers at best. It's irrelevant now anyway as I have no insurance and cannot afford the "privilege" of American healthcare.
I have lost everything and nearly everyone. Only three people in all that time have ever TRULY helped. One of them died this Winter. One of them is a member of this forum who had no obligation but has tried to anyway. The other is the only old friend I have left who stood by me as all the systems and family who one would think should be there, who had the aforementioned obligation, turned their back.
So tell me when? And what then as I have nothing...no foundation...no security...more needs. So when does it "get better"? And don't say "well if you don't wait and see then you will miss the chance to find out" because why does that matter? Do YOU think suffering a lifetime is worth it for a moment or two toward the end of things being better when you die anyway? How much do people have to suffer before they are allowed to say "enough"?
I don’t know, I really don’t have an answer for you. But I listened to what you have to say and feel empathy for you. I hope one day you will find the answer and will find peace. I hope you will always have hope. My words seem empty of meaning to the situation you are in, but try to be kind to yourself. Hug from a HN user.
Do you really think real people (rather than hyper-partisan internet trolls who may be sockpuppeting both sides) are sincerely cheering a rise in white male suicide?
Not cheering the rise of white male suicide, but viewing it as a side effect of an important social shift which topples the historical dominance hierarchy
I think it might be orthogonal. The problem exists for everyone but is only visible in this demographic because it is balanced out in the others by improvements from recent social change.
It seemed to be important enough to cover in this news article, and then important enough for 50+ (as of this comment being made) comments to be made on hacker news about it.
would be awesome to overlap the data about suicide rates with levels of physical activity and social media involvement among the concerned age group during 2000-2017.
Any type/form of exercising act as the detox for the mind's negative energy. Not saying this is the magic pill (I understand, depression is a real thing and needs to be treated) but I am sure exercising can help in some cases.
Similarly, we are all too familiar with the negative impacts of social media.
I'd say that's consistent with my claim. While the official Catholic teaching is suicide is a mortal sin and deserves hell, Protestantism has no official teaching on the matter. Plus, numerous Protestants believe they cannot lose their salvation regardless of what they do, in which case suicide is a quick ticket to heaven.
I went to a "college prep" high school that was harder than my college. As I became independent, I realized that intense academics stole my childhood and didn't have the value that the adults believe they have.
At the same time, when I lived in Palo Alto, I used to hear about how one of the high schools, (Gunn?) had a very high suicide rate due to the stress of academics. Someone (Caltrans?) put fences around the train tracks to try and stop suicides.
(I wish commenters wouldn't immediately blame social media.)