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).
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.