Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem. It is where they go to communicate and cope. My sole qualification to post this: I have four kids that are either teens or in their early 20s, and one who will be a teen next year. Here is what I see out there:
1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work things out mentally. School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.
2. Everything is conflicted and unclear. Schools teach cultural tolerance while enforcing zero-tolerance policies. Diversity is good, but being ____ is bad. So many areas where what we teach and preach are the opposite of what policies and actions actually do.
3. The stakes are too high. View the wrong website on your chromebook and get referred to law enforcement. Have a kid send you the wrong selfie and get charged with a sex crime. Get a bad grade and you are off the volleyball team, and you won't make the team next year - so done forever. Misbehave and you'll be arrested by the resource officer and face time at juvi, and potentially a conviction that will be held against you for a very long time (in some states juvi convictions count against three strikes laws).
3. Kids are targeted. Sexual predators, gangs, fringe and mainstream ideologues looking to recruit followers, sports agents and talent scouts all have one thing in common: they want to exploit kids or sell them something.
It's really hard to be a kid right now, and that needs to change. We need to lower the stakes, the stress and have something that resembles consistency.
It's not the only source of the problem, but social media is certainly a big one.
Back in the day you didn't get rape threats from 50 anonymous accounts, or see pictures of you photoshopped sucking dicks, or feel like even more of a loser because you see in 4K detail how everybody else in class is having more fun outside of school. The internet is a threat and embarrassment and envy machine. You feel like you're constantly losing a battle to be relevant and have a good time, and you pathologically monitor feeds of other people's lives to try to stay ahead. When that doesn't work you lose yourself in mindless entertainment to avoid mental stress, also avoiding processing hard emotions.
That's not all new, but it's at a level higher than ever before.
The internet was certainly a lot lower stakes and fun in the 90s and early 2000s. We had fun taking over the mic and singing karaoke in Yahoo chatrooms, watching albino black sheep, and playing flash games on kongregator. Even early Facebook was just making funny groups and posting in each other's walls.
None of those activities really had me envying anyone else. I remember the first thing that made me feel worthless and unaccomplished was TED talks!
I agree the problem is that it's hard to separate our online life from our offline life now.
And here it is, perhaps the actual issue: TED talks. And everything else, that is, all of the information of the information age, including social media.
Life for kids and everyone is drastically different from what it was just a few decades ago, because we have drastically different access and exposure to information, in general. This has changed the human experience.
I suspect it is because I have not looked hard enough, but I do not see enough about how much this has changed us. We try to pinpoint specific aspects, like social media, but I rarely see discussion about how just the raw exposure and access to information has changed us.
The value of knowledge is decreased, because it is accessible to everyone. This fact changed how people find their place in the world, find meaning and purpose, make social connections, etc. How much did this change us? I believe it has completely altered the human experience. Technology only hits this hard a few times every 1000 or so years. Gunpowder, printing press, electricity, internet. We're in the midst of a big shift now.
Here's an example: consider magic and sleight of hand. Until easily accessible information, the method of 'doing a trick' was arcane knowledge. This was the case for thousands of years. Knowledge was generally obtainable, but you had to go out of your way to get it. No adult believed in magic, but the fuzziness around the knowledge was enough to allow the audience to suspend belief that something wondrous happened.
This aspect of wonder is now rare. To what degree is the lack of access to wonder a root cause of the decline in teen mental health?
For what it is worth, I was that person in 2007 who warned everyone I knew about social media, for the exact reasons we are now discussing.
A recent experience of me and my daughters: a few months ago we thought of making a submarine. I had the idea to use a lunch box as a water proof container, then began experimenting transmitting power through magnetic coupling. Then I found a video of someone who did the exact same thing (maybe even better) with Lego's: 20M+ views on Youtube. Project stopped straight away. Actually my daughters wanted me to go on but I was demotivated (side note: maybe not the best example I gave my kids).
It is a long time ago I impressed my class at school by programming the "biorhythm" on a Casio pocket calculator. Whatever you do, someone did it better, larger, shinier and posted the video on Youtube.
Of course it is not that gloomy and there is still a lot of fun experiments to be had. Currently we have a photographic trap and try to get pictures of wild animals: it is quite hard and that makes it all the more fun. It is a also a way to know our immediate surroundings better and that cannot be replaced by an online experience.
[edit] In low income households smartphone+subscription take a large share of the free income, yet are felt as necessary. This leaves no money for leisure other then social networks, which are costless.
I love this comment. This is a hugely under-appreciated fact of the now-mature Information Age: that we are oversaturated with all the ... information!
This occurs across a variety of dimensions: too much information about the goings-on of our friends and family, about the world at large, about all the things we're supposed to do to "stay healthy", etc.
> To what degree is the lack of access to wonder a root cause of the decline in teen mental health?
This is grasping at straws. While the expectation is you'll create and maintain curated online presence tied to your real life identity in a world of increasingly economically stratified society.
The value of knowledge has not decreased, and I would say that knowledge is more valuable than ever. What has decreased is the quality of much of the information that is widely available. For certain searches or websites people are likely to be driven towards misinformation and sites promoting conspiracy theories. The signal to noise ratio of much information is now more noise than signal.
Click bait is the perfect example of this. You see an ad telling you about a story that sounds interesting, so you click the link. Suddenly you are drawing in to a website with 1 sentence of text per page that you want to read surrounded by crappy ads and pop-ups. You want to know how the story panned out, but are overwhelmed by the garbage. Lesson learned, but how do I teach Google to stop showing me that crap?
Personally, I think this all comes down to the cost of publishing. When a publisher had to shell out real money to print a book by an author, there was an incentive for the publisher to hire editors that did a good job of making sure the books they printed were of value (the same applies to newspapers). When the marginal cost of putting a news story on a website is $0, there's not really any point in hiring an editor anymore.
The same parallel exists in the phone network today. Back in the 1980s when it cost $0.34 per minute to make a long distance call, the people calling you probably thought twice before calling. Today's VoIP networks charging less than a penny a minute have enabled farms of robocallers to harass you with garbage calls. The near zero cost of international calls means that call centers in poor countries can profitably harass the elderly in rich companies with endless new scams.
Again, the same pattern exists with videos. 20 years ago a slickly produced video took time and money to produce. Now any teenager with a phone or laptop can throw a bunch of clips together, add some voice over and hit publish without spending a penny.
The only path I see forward from here is that this entire situation will get worse. Technologies like GPT-3 are amazing, but they come with a cost: it becomes cheaper to write walls of text. People will use it or perhaps are using it to create websites devoid of real content. Search engines that are already having trouble distinguishing between real thoughtful content and the wasteland of content farms will have an even harder time to produce relevant results for search requests.
I hate to say, but we were better off when the cost of people's attention was much greater than $0.
The same was true with religion. There was no wonder, just gospel.
Again we’ve made a truism that we’re doing for the greater good by setting ourselves aside for the hustle. Yet no science gives anyone omniscience; we follow along because what else to do, but the high minded goals we follow along with do not have to be rockets to nowhere.
Notice how all the rich people do little real work to provide material things they need? They externalize the necessary effort required for their survival, despite being mortals who are expected to support themselves, they gossip and babble and produce little that truly supports them.
The public needs to let go of the Protestant work ethic, the mountain man struggle and become a better negotiator. The grind keeps them from imagining in detail for themselves.
Yeah same, the internet of early 2000s was a super cozy place for me, I remember everyone at first was like "wow it's so amazing how you can be someone else online," now the internet is just a giant window to your life. I remember my mom telling me to never share any info about me online, now everyone has their entire lives uploaded, full name, face picture, phone number, it's all there.
Funny thing is it didn't actually get any less dangerous, people just decided that if everyone did it then there's no problem.
That's also how I remember it. It changed when Facebook became popular around me. Myspace, Tumblr, Twitter (my group of friends had it way before Facebook) were all about "nicknames" and random pics as avatars.
But a strange thing happened with people I knew was that after FB's "Real Name Policy". Anyone who kept using a pseudonym was viewed as outdated at best, sometimes a downright weirdo. Only people part of Twitter/Tumbler niche communities kept using fake names.
I also remember around the 2010s a "friend of a friend" bragging about reporting someone using a nickname to Facebook and having Facebook accept the report and force the person to change.
Interestingly, some teens that I know are sort of going back to that. They don't have Facebook, if they have Instagram, it is just random pictures of objects, more like Tumblr was, no interest in being influencers.
Its a common misperception that "everyone has their entire lives uploaded", because humans are subject to availability bias. I recently spent some time living with young university students in a non-English-speaking European country, and most of them had one social media account (generally locked or pseudonymous) plus text apps. Data brokers are not able to collect and resell anything they please in most civilized countries.
Always remember that the Internet and social media are dominated by people who put an unhealthy amount of time and energy into the Internet and social media. Those people are not real, any more than the old-media commentariat and their taboos are real. Most people are much less visible because they have lives.
What do you think they’re doing in text apps? Why do you think Facebook bought WhatsApp
Sure, your WhatsApp conversations are end to end encrypted. Except if you’re in a group conversation. Or if you have the on by default backup turned on.
IME, mostly one on one chats with people they know IRL. Several of them are very serious about not being photographed without consent and time to prepare.
Yeah... But we also saw countless dicks on Chat Roulette and watched terrorists sever heads of journalists on LiveLeak and talked to plenty of perverts on AIM.
True, there was some crazy shit out there back then, but we were also more in control of our own circumstances.
If you don't want to see dicks on Chatroulette, don't use Chatoroulette. Or use it, but leave when you see a dick.
Some creeper on AIM? Block them. If they keep making new accounts to come back, create a new account and invite your friends to that one.
With bigger social media, the social cost of not being where your peer group is is high. Things are engineered to try and limit your exposure to the crazy stuff but it's still out there and in higher volumes than ever before.
It's also much harder to avoid now if somehow an algorithm decides you should see it. And you can't just create a new account and leave a dead one behind you, or at least it's much harder.
Chat roulette was random. Chat roulette was not pushing the dick streams to more people because it was getting the highest engagement.
If you wanted to watch terrorists sever a head you had to at the very least search for it (it was usually more complicated than that). Facebook wouldn’t stuff it in between videos of kittens doing cute stuff while you endlessly scroll your newsfeed.
>If you wanted to watch terrorists sever a head you had to at the very least search for it
Or just happen to stumble onto 4chan during the summer period of each year where it would be flooded with gore and other shock content*. Or be unlucky enough to be on a site which had been targeted by a raid by 4chan or other imageboard users and flood those with shock content.
* to provide historical context for the younger folk here, 4chan would receive a flood of new users every year roughly corresponding to the American summer holiday period, and there would be a noticeable decline in posting quality during that time.
To ensure that only people who fit in with board culture stuck around, the site (or at least /b/ which was where I spent most of my time back in those days) would be flooded with the most offensive content possible to scare away the bulk of the new users. This was rather effective at filtering out people of an emotionally sensitive nature and leaving only the most jaded and persistent to become regular users.
Much like the so-called "Eternal September", the board eventually had a culture change and became more welcoming of new users, and this practice declined. Although that was a long time ago and I think perhaps it may have been more that the introduction of CAPTCHA, rate-limiting, and other anti-spam measures prevented the use of automated image dumping software that was used to flood threads with shock content.
Back when I was a fresh-faced youth I recoiled in disgust. Now when I see it I greet it as an old friend, a wistful reminder of a time when the internet was still largely wild and untamed by corporate interest.
I think you underline the problem. Comparing yourself with others and envying is a source of unhappiness. Social media allows for this, as do TED talks.
But I think another factor is the sheer existence of our ancestors. As more time goes on, the more history there is with more people having achieved great accomplishments. Younger generations will naturally just have more to live up to (with the potential to feel depressed if they don't).
So we must all change our concept of “greatness”. Perhaps more effort to embrace and value what is considered “less” rather than always trying to level up.
When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I had escapes from the social hell of high school. I could go home, invite one or two close friends over, and play video games. I could find a super niche community on IRC and hang with them virtually. I felt like I had somewhere I could belong.
Now, as a teenager you are plugged into that social fabric 24/7. I can't imagine how difficult it must be to find yourself in that hyper-connected social graph.
That’s a great point and it gave me the epiphany that perhaps being always on/connected, i.e. smart phones combined with everything else is actually the cause of change. You can’t just get up and walk away (obviously you can put your phone down, but then you are cut off!)
I think about this often. Without smartphones, none of the problems we blame on social media would exist. We've gained a lot from the smartphone form factor (I haven't been lost in 10 years, for example), but whether we've lost more is a really open question, in my view.
I had an epiphany below that it’s not just internet/social media as much as ALWAYS being connected to it via smart phones/tablets. Back in the day you got up and walked away, went outside, watched TV and you were completely away from it. Now we all carry it with is everywhere we go.
This is a great point. When logging onto the internet meant no one could make phone calls you spent 30-45 mins on AIM, caught up with your online friends, sometimes worked hard to sound funny and clever, had a great time, and then found something else to do.
But now that kids are connected to each other 100% of the time (being in class in school is also not excuse enough to not be connected) you have to be funny and clever all the time. An off hand comment while distracted by a million other things can lead to havoc in your social and online life.
I wonder what social media discourse would look like if it wasn’t full of ad spam, lamenting inequality, freedom to be oneself without old politicians being mad, and environment concerns for young people.
It’s not social media at all; it’s the reality they live in which happens to include social media. It’s plain truth; the majority don’t give a fuck about their future.
I’ll counter that with the caveat that my kids are grade 5 and younger. We’re very involved in school and other activities - my wife is a PTO president and long time member, I coach youth sports and other community type programs.
The kids we have seen mostly don’t engage with social media directly. But the ones who transition from cute 5-6 year olds to problematic 10-12 year olds have a key common factor. Tablets. You see kids as young as 2-3 hiding under a table engaged in some awful kiddie YouTube trash or a game. It ends up being a pacifier that induces anxiety, and I think that effect combined with social media is powerful and difficult for kids to manage.
In terms of targeting, i actually think that things are better today. Through lawsuits and reporting, I learned that my childhood Boy Scout Troop and church was infested with pedophiles. The Boy Scout leader basically roamed the country and landed in NYC where he was eventually arrested for an unrelated rape. Today, there’s extensive background checking everywhere and it’s more difficult for a known offender to be in that position of trust.
Sports and the college recruitment funnel are another thing hurting kids. I had a kid drop out of little league because his soccer academy coach flipped out that he, as a 10 year old, isn’t fully committed to soccer. So he’s playing “elite” soccer, at a cost of almost $4k, because that’s how you make the high school team.
> Through lawsuits and reporting, I learned that my childhood Boy Scout Troop and church was infested with pedophiles.
It's really sad to see things like this. Boy Scouts was one of the best parts of my childhood. Both my parents were heavily involved - dad was the Scout Master, mom was the merit badge counselor for backpacking and other woodland activities, my younger sisters came on many of the trips.
It served as a healthy foil to my absolute infatuation with learning about technology.
I was emotionally and psychically abused in cub scouts, led by the pack leader because I did not buy into her specific image of evangelical Christianity. This was in a suburb outside of NYC in the 90s. the lack of oversight and vetting allowed this to proceed and turned more than a few kids off Boy scouting.
I would send my kids to Baden-Powell scouting if that was an option.
Had a similar experience with Cub Scouts in the 70's. I just stopped going. Joined the Boy Scouts because I had several friends who'd joined and were talking about the awesome camping adventures they had. That went well until the Scoutmaster quit 2-3 years later for whatever reason. The new Scoutmaster wasn't into the high adventure camping and believed the troop should head another direction. That was the end for me.
That's the single biggest problem with scouting - your experience is going to be largely dependent on the adult leadership. You can have dramatically different experiences depending on what pack or troop you're in and leadership changes often make what was a good experience a poor one.
> The new Scoutmaster wasn't into the high adventure camping and believed the troop should head another direction. That was the end for me.
The high-adventure trips were the best part for me. The multi-week canoeing trip in the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada (northern-tier), multi-week sailing trip and snorkeling in the Florida Keys, the Philmont backing trip, etc. Our troop took backpacking trips on the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, Talladega national forest in Alabama, etc. Many fun memories with family and friends.
I was in 3 troops as a kid due to moving around. The troop in the Chicago area was a fantastic example of a by-the-book Boy Scout troop. The scouts ran the show and the adults only got involved if we were about to do something very stupid (making non-dangerous mistakes and learning from them is an important part of maturing), or if the decision required an adult to sign off (spending troop money, etc.). The one in Alabama was more laid back, kind of boy and adult led, but the adults definitely did more of the work than the chicago area troop. The one in the bay area I joined ended up being a rich kid dick measuring contest and I quickly left the troop, which was the end of my time in the Boy Scouts.
Baden-Powell scouting is co-ed, non-religious, and founded in the 70s. Boy Scouts of America is the 'original' version, and, as recently as 15 years ago (I think some of this has changed since) explicitly excluded atheists, girls, and gay kids. BSA leadership is (or was, I think this has changed) heavily influenced by conservative Mormons.
Also, they culturally appropriate the fuck out of Native American culture. Think white suburban dads dancing around with costume jewelry and plastic headdresses dancing 'native style' dances to 'commune with the Great Spirit of the land'.
I'm glad of my time spent in BSA, but I wish I'd had the opportunity for BP instead.
I have a similar story about a crazy hyperchristian scout leader from suburban SE Michigan in the 90s. I ended up getting de-facto kicked out for my atheism.
I mean, I get it in ways. Boy Scouts has many policies which contrast with the liberal/progressive worldview the members of technology industry tend to hold - explicit religious affiliation, a religiously influenced moral code, gender exclusive, military-esque conduct, etc.
For an organization that explicitly advertises itself as a morally driven environment, it's extremely hypocritical for it to have any level of an abuse problem (sexual or otherwise).
That being said, it's been having an identity crisis for years, far longer than the circa-2018/19 attention on getting them to allow women. Obviously, like school, all of the troops are difference and experience their own unique sets of issues.
I was in Boy Scouts from 2004 to 2010, and Cub Scouts before then (1999 to 2004). I suppose I was lucky to start my adventure with a pack and later troop that was located in a liberal and wealthy suburb of Chicago that counted many highly educated people among its population (right down the street from Fermilab).
By 1999, they'd already started allowing women to participate as leaders. My den leader was a woman, many of the instructors were women. Cub Scouts (at least my experience with it) didn't have the same religious aspect that the boy scouts did. Our pack was chartered with a school, in contrast to Boy Scouts which typically charters with a religious organization (church, mosque, synagogue, etc.).
The actual material in the handbook and the overall organization has been ever increasingly non-denominational and non-christian-specific for years. While it wasn't explicitly accepting of atheists or agnostics, most troops don't really care that much about it. Religious service is not a required part of the activities, and by 2010 it'd been watered down to the point that you could barely recognize that you're participating. I was openly agnostic in my troop in Alabama. Moms were also openly encouraged to participate as leaders in the troops I was in. My mom was the backpacking merit badge counselor among other outdoor and survivalist activities.
The whole "exclusion of young women and homosexuals" sentiment can be taken a few ways. Obviously in 2022 it's a lamentable position. It's definitely rooted in the very American religious theme that sex before marriage is bad, therefore anyone who creates a situation where it's possible is also bad. So in order to avoid temptation, you must separate the sexes. Homosexuality turns that on its head because the boys can be attracted to the other boys.
No one had an answer how to resolve concerns, so no one changed anything. When the social progressive movement really got off the ground in the late '10s and was flagrantly demanding sweeping and immediate change to long-standing groups, they were kind of blindsided. Venture crew was a co-ed organization that allowed women to access the Boy Scout high adventure camps, but Girl Scouts was not an equivalent organization to BSA. It has a lot less national direction and troops were very different. Some of my coworkers in California have their daughters in it, and they sound like their having a similar experience to what I had in Boy Scouts. However, when my sisters went in Alabama, they were trying to turn them into proper southern housewives. Hence why they tagged along with my troop as "honorary Boy Scouts".
The appropriation of Native American culture other comments mentioned is also lamentable, at least the part where "white suburban dads jump around in costumes". For the most part it's not too bad, most of the call outs use their culture as an example of one that was more respectful of nature, in contrast with the European colonial worldview the US was largely embraced in their interactions with the Native Americans.
Morals and principles don't mean much without rules and authority behind them.
The genius and nasty aspect of Boy Scouts is that they integrated with other institutions. So they got to inherit the authority of the sponsoring institution, but they also inherited the negative and had a bias to look away from things. They also tended to be tight with local law enforcement, and alot of sexual abuse was never dealt with because of those informal relationships.
In my mind, this stuff isn't a political issue. My original point was that today, every one of these organizations requires that people in contact with children get background checked and have some level of training. That's not perfect, but at least known abusers are kept out. I don't care about political bullshit - whatever you believe whatever TV you watch, your children should never get molested.
> For an organization that explicitly advertises itself as a morally driven environment, it's extremely hypocritical for it to have any level of an abuse problem (sexual or otherwise).
Unfortunately, any category of organization where adults have authority over children will have some level of sexual abuse. Our daughter's fancy--and extremely progressive--private school recently investigated itself and concluded that it had protected teachers who had relationships with students over several decades: https://www.capitalgazette.com/education/ac-cn-key-school-in...
Indeed, studies show that sexual abuse in schools is extremely common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment_in_education... ("In their 2002 survey, the AAUW reported that, of students who had been harassed, 38% were harassed by teachers or other school employees. One survey that was conducted with psychology students reports that 10% had sexual interactions with their educators; in turn, 13% of educators reported sexual interaction with their students.").
Your points about the Boy Scouts are will taken. Coming from the opposite side of the aisle, I would say something similar about what happened at my kid's school. It was an outgrowth of the school's liberalism--specifically the male-dominated sexual liberalism of the 1970s and 1980s that tried to normalize sexualization of teenagers. Teachers would have parties and invite students--this is a K-12 school mind you--and relationships between students and teachers were open secrets. It's not that nobody knew, it's that nobody thought it was a big deal.
But the larger point is that sexual abuse happens in pretty much every class of organization, though the specifics are different in each. My complaint is that the media reports on sexual abuse in churches and Christian-oriented organizations in a very different way than when the same thing happens in secular and liberal organizations. And that's not actually good for anyone.
It doesn't sound plausible to me that there has been any point in the last several generations where it was considered "not a big deal" for high school teachers to have relationships with their students. That apparently happened at my high school, once that I know of, during my time there, and it was a very big deal indeed. I can't give you proof that my experience generalizes, but I claim that it does, and that my claim is unremarkable. Whatever you claim the norm was in the 1970s, it clearly didn't survive, which seems fatal to your argument.
I think there are probably a multitude of factors, and both social media and too much generic screen time both are unhealthy in quantity. Many things are unhealthy in quantity after all. My oldest is 12, for context. Another factor that I think is really important is that I observe a lot of kids aren't given any responsibility at all. A lot of parents are control freaks. After all, it's easier for me to just do it myself than clean up the mess you make when you do it. 100 years ago you sent your 10 year old out to plow the field because that was the only way the family survived winter. I'm not saying those were better times, but those kids might have had the satisfaction of a job well done, and that's definitely good for mental health.
What's also interesting is that many of the kids that do get responsibility are the ones in really crappy situations. That is, responsibility is forced on them because of circumstances. So these kids might do poorly in school, but end up with a better work ethic than rich kids with education. Or they end up dead or in jail. It's all messed up and there are no easy solutions. We all just need to do better.
After my son (19) got a regular job I noticed a much better disposition and level of responsibility. He was in college for a year and got tired of it and wanted to work. His life was mostly video games before that...zero social media.
I played on, probably, one of the worst soccer teams in the country. Weekly double digit losses. In soccer. Still had fun. I didn't go pro as it turns out. Somehow, I suspect I wouldn't have, even if I'd been on the best team in the country... Is soccer skill actually a realistic long-term concern for your kid? Most people don't become professional athletes.
I mean, it is literally a game, he shouldn't feel the need to "fully commit." That coach just seems like a jerk, to me. Look for a lower-stakes league, maybe? Plus if your kid has put in a couple years on this super intense team, he'd probably be a super-star in a normal one.
> Through lawsuits and reporting, I learned that my childhood Boy Scout Troop and church was infested with pedophiles.
Yes! My freshman biology teacher was extradited and imprisoned in Australia for this. [1] The Marianist Church knew and shuffled them to new congregations rather than doing the right thing.
Some call this "problematic" behavior of kids starting around age 10-12 puberty. I've not seen any peer-reviewed studies linking it to tablet use but of course it's possible that tablet use is a contributing factor in causing puberty in teenagers.
It’s pretty easy to observe - when parents use a Skinner box (ie Youtube) to keep the kids quiet, the kids don’t develop the same social/coping/etc skills.
There’s lots of study on the topic. The decline of toys and play is another related thing.
Used to be TV back in the day, no? Not that this isn't happening but bad parenting has been a thing forever going all the way back to prehistory.
As always blaming the medium seems a bit short sighted. Who are the people controlling all these apps and social media sites? They're not run by aliens. And who are the parents letting this happen? There seems to be a much larger problem with society as a whole. The problem isn't the tech, it's how we use it. And if kids are developing more and more mental problems, maybe there's something wrong with the adults and how they run the world those kids are born into. "My child's brain is like a sponge", is what I often hear parents say. Feed them toxicity and that's what you get.
Problem was you couldn't take your television everywhere and it was a limited resources, e.g. one per household. Not one per person with mobility to boot.
Yeah there's a framework for reporting abuse now at least, in the early aughts the game in my high school was to catfish dick pics from desperate boys over AOL Instant Messenger and send them to others randomly for shock value. It was vile, and at least one victim switched schools because of it, but no one ever got caught. It was reported to the police, but no one had any idea how to track down the person doing it.
If this happened to my kids today it's very likely someone would be charged with a crime (rightfully so).
> If this happened to my kids today it's very likely someone would be charged with a crime (rightfully so).
I have a sadistic stepdaughter who did similar-- on one occasion, I caught her catfishing lesbian girls and publicly accusing them of sexual abuse. From talking to a few of her (now ex-)friends, this was not an isolated incident. Enough of her lies caught up to her that she ended up changing schools, crying victim the whole time.
Kids these days know how to exploit privacy laws, be it HIPAA for their Munchausen-by-internet campaigns or anti-wiretap laws to conceal their targeted cyberbullying.
Evidence obtained from someone else's phone is generally inadmissible, so anybody positioned to discover such activity is going to have trouble reporting it.
> Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat,
On HN that's likely to be a popular opinion, given how many members here probably work in social media corporations.
I have lots of experience looking after relatives' kids in the UK and your points don't apply at all to them.
It's anecdata vs anecdata, but yours doesn't refute the article, and given your opinion may well suit HN biases well (we don't want to think of our work as causing mental illness) then I think the top voted comment needs a stronger counter argument than "my kids are like this".
It's not certain, but it looks pretty damn likely that social media has caused a dramatic increase in mental health problems amongst kids.
Maybe teachers could contribute something here with their experience? Parents see such a tiny sample size but teachers see 1000s of kids over a few years.
Yeah, used to be a high school teacher until pretty recently. A lot of what OP says about stakes (or perceived stakes) is on point, but social media amplifies all of those stressors; I'm sure it's a recuperative outlet for some, but I don't think that's the average experience.
My teacherly anecdata (from about a decade of teaching) led me to think (in no particular order):
* Anxiety is way more prevalent and central to teen experience than most people realize. Definitely more so than I saw when I was a kid. You could say we use the language of mental health and anxiety to conceptualize experience more these days, and that's true to a degree, but it doesn't fully account for the prevalence or centrality.
* Social media is absolutely an amplifier of the problem. You can really just ask a kid -- they're often very self-aware about it. Many will say something like, "Yeah, I hate it, but you have to be there" or "I hate it but I'm obsessed with it."
* Further to the last point, kids are often a lot smarter about social media than we tend to give them credit for (and often a lot smarter about it than adults). Many are good at compartmentalizing online experience onto different platforms and different public or private or anonymous or real-name accounts -- since they've grown up with it, they've had more impetus to develop adaptive mechanisms. A lot of them create relatively private or close-knit digital spaces to retreat to when the big screaming public square gets overwhelming.
My own kid's a toddler, and I definitely worry about what all of this will look like for him. I want to expose him to technology and teach him to use and understand it, but at this point I'm super leery of exposing him to YouTube/anything with a whiff of social media any time in the foreseeable future.
Yeah, every now and then my wife takes a break when she starts getting this overriding feeling of being inadequate. Maybe it's a placebo or maybe not,but atleast it works.
> The stakes are too high. View the wrong website on your chromebook and get referred to law enforcement
Whoever implemented the surveillance of children should burn in hell. Since that probably doesn't exist the next prison with strong similarities should be chosen. You teach them that this kind of 24/7 surveillance is normal and I think they have enough problems with peer pressure through social media. You also teach a zero trust behavior. That can be good in a context and it can be really bad if it becomes learned cynicism.
I could understand it until age 10 perhaps but at some point you want your kids to be independent. If they aren't bots by that age.
> I could understand it until age 10 perhaps but at some point you want your kids to be independent.
There's surveillance (parental supervision) and then there's "surveillance" (corporate psycos / overbearing governments).
You want your kids to learn independence in a gradual and some what safe / controlled way (not too safe of course). There are still some things I don't want them exposed to at age 10. Unfortunately unsupervised internet isn't the best option here. Outsourcing it to tech is a really bad choice for sure. You need to be present as a parent to help them navigate and answer questions. If you aren't, then some youtuber (or worse) will do it for you. There's also an argument that being present as a parent has become harder than ever on average for economic reasons (double income, wage stagnation, inflation, etc.), and also the problem that many parents have no clue how to navigate the internet responsibly themselves.
I agree completely, but blocking access is something different than surveilling their every click. At some point children will look at content the parents don't approve off and for many that can be important. You probably just have to remind yourself of your own childhood. Perhaps a few years longer than 10 stronger supervision is needed, granted, but at some point children profit from a little distance from their parents.
Absolutely. Best we can do is try to gradually prepare them for the horrific (/s) things they will be exposed to. I constantly worry they are too isolated from danger these days to be honest (compared to my childhood).
i still tend to believe that the only lesson kids learn from content filters is how to bypass the content filter. electronic s̶u̶r̶v̶e̶i̶l̶l̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶ supervision seems like it will yield a similar result.
kids are going to see and experience the things you don't think they are prepared for and my personal anecdata suggests that they will survive. you cannot force them to be safe but you can be the one place they can always turn to when they do wish to seek safety.
Blocking something is very different than looking up what they click. After 12-14 it can very well get dystopian in my opinion. Kids have and need to have secrets from their parents at that point.
You also don't want moral busybodies at school make mountains out of molehills to make it more traumatic than the content they perhaps consumed and wasn't age appropriate. A while ago parents were oblivious to what content their children consume and didn't even have blocks. The children survived too although a bit more engagement might indeed be sensible.
As I said, it was criticism of surveillance, not blocking content or in general curating content for very young children.
I both agree and disagree here. My qualification is 3 teenage boys.
1. My kids have slack in their schedule. No, they aren't going to Ivy League schools. That's OK. They will survive somehow.
2. This is certainly true, but it's a complete joke to my kids. They aren't confused. They just wonder why all the adults are. Teenagers already think adults are incompetent.
3. This isn't true at my school. My kids have made egregious errors and the school takes it in stride. They know they are kids. They understand kids make mistakes. It's OK. We work through it and move on. The cops are not called and nothing is escalated. At most, the send us an email and we talk to our kids and that's the end of it.
3. I have no idea on this one.
My children don't have social media accounts and never will on my watch. Even as teenagers they don't because they are not allowed. They could, yes, but they don't. However, I have boys, not girls. Perhaps that would be a non-starter if I had daughters.
> My kids have slack in their schedule. No, they aren't going to Ivy League schools. That's OK. They will survive somehow.
Thank you! I think we need more people with this mindset speaking up. Everywhere there's this paranoid fear in parents that without a totally filled schedule, tutors, AP classes and more their children are going to be destitute. Not going to an Ivy League school is fine, and likely anyway; having free time to play in their own self-directed world is also fine (and healthy).
To add to your response to #2: kids are watching their parents behave poorly on social media, and spend their time with their noses in devices. When parents of older kids still have trouble "adulting," that is bound to trickle down to the kids. Certainly, I don't look like my dad did in his late 40s, but I also have a pretty firm grasp of the responsibilities I have.
My kids also must avoid social media until they are 18. Heck, my older son had a feature phone until just two years ago, when he absolutely needed a smartphone for tools required for his position as a coxswain on his rowing team. Even then, he couldn't install apps, couldn't use a web browser. Since he turned 18, he's tried out some social media and other things, but mostly avoids them.
We also held out on smart phones until our kids were 15 / 17 respectively. You held out even longer, so kudos for being able to do that. Our kids weren't mocked. They didn't feel left out. They didn't even complain because they had never had a smart phone so they literally had no idea what they were missing out on - which is nothing. They missed out on nothing.
In the end, we wanted a way to keep in touch with them and see where they were as they began driving and working. That's NOT a healthy reason to get a kid a smartphone, BTW. That's just a reflection of my fear and insecurity.
In the end, we wanted a way to keep in touch with them and see where they were as they began driving and working. That's NOT a healthy reason to get a kid a smartphone, BTW. That's just a reflection of my fear and insecurity.
> 2. This is certainly true, but it's a complete joke to my kids. They aren't confused. They just wonder why all the adults are. Teenagers already think adults are incompetent.
I was going to give the same pushback. My father-in-law is a teacher approaching retirement. He says that the only people confused by this are the parents. The kids are not confused at all except about what is so confusing.
It'd be interesting to know how OP is "seeing" this problem, whether the kids are relaying it literally or if OP is interpreting or what.
I’m led to believe from my experience that social media and anxiety are two dark stars in a system spiraling into collapse. Social media causes anxiety; and anxiety increases social media use because we’ve been conditioned to dissociate negative thoughts by looking down into our screens. Engaging in one initiates a self perpetuating loop.
When I have no stress (on rare occasions I’m able to detach from my problems), my desire to use my phone at all is non-existent. So I think you are right that’s it’s difficult to attribute causality when kids are constantly under stress.
This study, in fact, appears to only assess correlation. Haidt also strikes me as someone guided by a maverick worldview (he’s a serious thinker usually and I’ll read anything he writes)
This sounds like how a bunch of old dudes on HN see the "teenager world," with very adult interpretations. I also have teenagers and have worked in schools. I think there are two truths that this comment overlooks; 1) today's youth, generally speaking, are pretty impressive and resourceful, and 2) being a teenager has always sucked. Just because their experience is different doesn't mean it's worse. Every generation of teenagers has known awkwardness, stress, and confusion. All of these studies about how x is a million times worse these days often can be attributed to more accurate data and measurements.
I read the posted paper. Please point out where the authors factor in improvements to how we elicit, diagnose, and catalog mental health problems today. I was specifically looking for it and couldn't find it. The paper mentions the historical increase in 1.2 and 1.3 but offers no context or mitigation for long-term improvements in mental health reporting. Their NYTimes source in that section only goes back one decade and starts right off with an exploding upward trend. That could absolutely be attributed to improved reporting standards when the problem got attention, but the authors don't acknowledge any impact of reporting improvements.
My parent comment was based on my experience as a teenager, compared to the very different way my teenage children are monitored and evaluated for mental health. It's night and day.
“1.2. The crisis is not a result of changes in the willingness of young people to self-diagnose, nor in the willingness of clinicians to expand terms or over-diagnose. We know this because the same trends occurred, at the same time, and in roughly the same magnitudes, in behavioral manifestations of depression and anxiety, including hospital admissions for self-harm, and completed suicides.”
Mental health being a thing probably does though. I'm 31, and even when I was a kid, mental health issues were very stigmatized. Nowadays, they're not. Why wouldn't you expect more mental health issues?
The point is not that there isn't more willingness to report mental health issues, the point is that the research already accounted for that effect, and it doesn't change the conclusion.
While the risks you bring up are valid, many of them are not new but amplifications of preexisting ones. In the past, children have largely managed to navigate these on their journey to adulthood. An unsolved problem with social media: it's an amplification of parking lot scuttlebutt. It will entice you to see catastrophe and share it with others. Perhaps despite your position on this, you are being affected more than you realize.
Another amplification is that many many parents haven't even solved this problem for themselves. How are they going to help their kids navigate social media use when they're pissing about on Instagram, and retweeting outrage garbage, etc.
Indeed, one generation breaking the loop can support the next. Perhaps the antidote to social media is regularly sharing with your children: it doesn't matter what Alice or Bob think of you, ignore them and do what you enjoy most with this gift of life.
I appreciate the sentiment, but question how realistic this is. Social media is where my kids interact with their peer group. By the time they hit their teens "sharing with dad" can't compete with that. I still try but I don't expect to have the power to break the cycle.
I'm not a dad, so these are but grains of salt. What I meant was not that you have the power to force your children out of social media - they're gonna do what they want. More a lead-by-example life where you present an example to them of a life (a social one) that is enhanced by not reacting to what Alice and Bob think. They may see it as out-of-touch. They may change their minds years later. Or not.
So you can break yourself out of the loop. And maybe your kids will be inspired by it. Or maybe it skips a generation.
It's funny how I see parents complain about their children's social media use/phone addictions when I see them doing the exact same thing they're talking about before my eyes. Like you're literally playing on your phone right now and you tell me you don't like your kids doing that all the time - come on.
The article makes a strong claim, based on evidence, that social media and not anything else is the real culprit. Why is it wrong? What evidence supports your alternative proposed causes?
It's not even really correlated. The timing is off. Teen Social Media usage exploded in the early to mid 2000s and all the bad trends started 2010 or later.
Plus, it was a seismic event. We went from little social media in 2000 to ubiquity by 2010. We should have seen one big rise to a new steady state not a continually increasing problem.
Social media definitely picked up 2000-2010, but the current manifestation of it didn't really lock in until ~2010 with the advent of the iPhone, instagram, snapchat, and all the other social media mobile apps that compelled people to constantly be sucked into it throughout the day rather than just whenever they were on or near a PC or laptop.
Exactly. By 2018 around 95% of teens used social media. We would thus expect the trends to have spiked more before then rather than after. Instead we see a linear trend.
The author mentions in his testimony, that the correlation between social media use and mental illness may be around r=0.10. This means in general terms that it it explains about 10% of of the impact. This leaves a lot of room for additional factors, and factors with much greater impact.
Actually it explains 1% of the impact, since the R-squared will be 0.01. But there's a huge amount of random noise in whether people get depressed, which we would always struggle to explain. A measure of the effect size is more interesting than a measure of R^2.
> Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem.
It's the War On Drugs all over again.
We understand addiction enough to be able to say that a person's mental, emotional, and psychosocial states are the greatest causes of addiction and not the drug itself.
Social media leads to an increase in a cortisol and dopamine. It also increased oxytocin by a large margin. Behaviors linked to its use are similar to that of other substances that increase those hormones directly.
I think I know what you are saying, but I think you're misusing the war on drugs as a rhetorical device. I think you're just talking about treating the symptoms of addicts rather than looking at the causes.
The phrase "war on drugs," at least to me, is about all the collateral damage caused by criminalizing drugs. No one is criminalizing Facebook usage.
Social media also impacts people's mental, emotional, and psychosocial states as well as their relationships to many of the people in their communities. So it both hits the hormonal triggers AND the social support systems.
As an example from my son, a 13 year old white kid, gave me is that if you have one of the "diversity cards" (minority, LGBQT+, female sometimes, or some other thing) than you get to joke and talk in a way than those that don't have such a card. So his friends that are gay or black or indian or disabled are able to tease each other about it and have more liberty to use terms that my son is not allowed to. The gay kid can joke with the indian kid about wearing a turban (they are middle schoolers, their understanding of life is still a bit shaky) or whatever. My son is on the bottom of the pack for all of that. We talk about it and we're still working through the fairness of the situation. He's an empathic kid, and is decently informed for his age, so he gets it, but it also sucks to grow up in a world of "bias is wrong except against white people and especially against white males".
I see this often with gangs I grew up around. Black people can call each other niggers in a casual, non-attack way. But as soon as a white person does it, it’s racist.
It will be interesting to see if music changes this. I mostly listen to classical and older pop/rock/folk but recently decided to see what is current and so listened to the entire Billboard Hot 100.
There was a lot of rap and hip-hop with lyrics that prominently and repeatedly used that word. I wondered then about what happens when non-Black fans sing along with such a song on radio or streaming or at a concert.
I did some research and it seems that a small minority of the artists think that people who sing along should sing all the words regardless of race, with most thinking non-Blacks should not sing that word. Some in the latter group also feel that it is a losing battle to try to stop it.
I think those that want to stop it can succeed--for now. If I ever feel the urge for example to sing along to some rap or hip-hop song I'll have no trouble remembering to skip the N-word part. I've long known that this is a word I should not be saying except under special circumstances where it is clear I should say it and that singing along is probably not special circumstances.
That works for me because I'm adult and when I learned the word as a kid I learned it as a derogatory term.
But now that the N-word is in popular music that plenty of non-Blacks listen to, there will be kids who grow up from the start with that in the music they listen to. It will be a word they naturally learn as part of normal language acquisition without learning the most negative connotations.
I bet it will be lot harder to get that generation to not use it when singing alone, or to not adopt it with the positive meanings that it sometime has when used in rap or hip-hop.
kendrick lamar is a good example regarding your first example. he has this song, good kid maad city, where nigga is used in about every single sentence. the whole hook is full with it.
at a concert, he invited a white girl to rap the song on stage. of course she went full with it. he stopped the track after she rapped nigga a few times during the track l and began to.blame her on stage for it. of course the whole crowd went with it.
i mean. what a god damn motherfucker. seriously. i dont want to know what the girl was going through mentally. it must have been horror.
the obsession with the n word is crazy anyway. of course i dont use it in mh regular life..but when i quote a rap song, i quote it literally ofc.
Because there is a contextual difference!
Historical context matters, and saying things like "all lives matter" or "we're all the same (so we should be able to use the same words?)" actually undermine the collective struggle this group of people has had to deal with.
Life isn't binary, it's always more complex than that. It's not rational to just do a "reset" at this point in time and say "oh, i have nothing to do with what my predecessors have engaged in, so i can't be held accountable"... because that's not true, the predecessors lives and actions directly affect ones life.
I understand that sometimes the direct outrage over something small might seem ridiculous, but at the same time I don't understand why people have such a problem with just not using a certain word. It really isn't hard...
It means "servant" basically, and it's about an apparent difference in social classes. If I ask a barista "you can also mow my lawn if you want to make some money" it's an insult that the barista can't even refute, but if I ask my friend the same, he'll take it as a joke.
I understand this quite well, I've felt this myself in the past too, that feeling of being "not in the club". Thanks for your explanation. One does get over it, and one also learns eventually that it's something not restricted to race / sexual orientation etc., it can be similar just with a group of people from a certain neighbourhood etc. But having it be based on race can be hard for a kid in the "out" group. How to deal with that, basically, to learn to let it roll off your shoulders, to learn how to navigate your own position in a group, is a lesson to be learned, sometimes not easy to get the intricate ins and outs of how to behave. I completely get it.
Thanks for the nuanced understanding! We've been giving our son basically that advice as he learns to navigate the situation. It's tough because he's a pretty strict rules-follower, and so it upsets him to hear kids breaking the "ism" rules! We say, "let it roll of you like water off a duck's butt" :) He's learning ... I think.
Intersectionality at play here, your son is part of the "oppressor" class and is essentially viewed as beneficiary of privilege by virtue of his melanin content, therefore he is not allowed to say, do or question certain things. It's a sad state of affairs.
FYI I'm an immigrant from Africa with 3 daughters but I've instilled in them the values I was raised with, that everyone is deserving of respect, dignity and are precious in the eyes of God.
I'm curious how white (as a percentage) the school is, as I could imagine a correlation with the extent/intensity of this experience. If white kids are enough of a majority, that alone probably offsets the effect somewhat, but where white is also a local minority, perhaps the collective privilege starts to get so cloudy that the notion of "punching up/down" starts to fall apart. And substitute "straight white male" as needed, of course, although I've refrained above in order to use the words "majority/minority" in simple terms.
I feel so sorry for your boy. He deserves a dad who loves him more than virtue signaling. Your boy is thrown into the world with no preexisting moral guilt. And you, his father, are justifying rather than decrying the racial discrimination of your own son, while apparently trying to stand on the alter of that very discrimination.
My son is fine, he is well loved and he knows it - I teach him compassion and understanding while still standing up for himself. I'm sorry you live in such a black and white world lacking nuance. It must be a struggle for you such that you need to tell an internet stranger how little he loves his son.
“[born with] no preexisting moral guilt” — Is that some attempt to re-frame ignorance?
I have teenage kids and they sure as hell have been raised to understand, from a young age, that while they are in an unfairly advantaged group today, a few generations ago and they would have been rounded up, stripped of everything they worked hard for, and put in camps. And yet, even that fate was objectively better than other groups at the same time. What you call “moral guilt” I call empathy. Maybe this is simply what you mean by “virtue signaling”, but I want my kids to always look for those around them who are stumbling, unable to get back up, or who may just not have enough, and then to give help. But they won’t see them without empathy for those situations, and they won’t have that empathy without an understanding of the struggles.
Just commenting to confirm that they are not actually handing out anything called a diversity card that gives you permission to do anything.
edit: also want to make sure that "teen mental health" includes the 75% of kids that are not straight, non-disabled white boys. If those kids are included then this probably isn't a reasonable explanation.
So ... funny story there. There is the concept of the "N-word pass" that black kids will "give out" to non-black kids "allowing" them a use of the n-word in front of them. I had heard about this several years ago, but now several of the black kids in my son's school are giving them out occasionally. I advised my son to never use the option were he to receive one!
Not a physical card in this situation, but there are stories that some kids in other schools actually give out physical cards.
It's not a real concept.. it's just a meme. There's no "pass" that will grant you anything, and if there is a black person who says such a silly thing to a white person it's just shenanigans. Still won't change the context of the white person using the N-word after that anyway, especially it's historical context in the US.
Also what I surely find interesting is that I only ever hear white people talk about an "N-word pass"...
It's a very real thing, literally happens weekly in my son's friend group, and yes kids are allowed to "redeem" it. Ask a teacher at a diverse school if it is real or not.
Can you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We've already had to ask you this and, I'm sad to say, you've posted a ton of such comments. That's not ok here, and we ban such accounts.
I don't want to ban you because your substantive points are interesting and welcome, but this sort of internet attack is not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
They have a say in what remains of the power structures created by their white supremacist ancestors, the privileges that system provides and the inequities those privileges feed on. They could be working to dismantle those power structures, but they have to recognize that they exist first and that yes by default all things are not equal.
Ignoring that fact or obsessing over petty things like not having a pass to say the n-word doesn't help anyone or accomplish anything productive.
I'm going to put this as simple as possible: Stop having kids fight or worry about adult problems.
Surely, we don't have to write a five paragraph essay on the problem with perpetuating hate cycles among children in a thread about plummeting teen mental health.
Let it go. You got a million other places to open this debate.
>Stop having kids fight or worry about adult problems.
Have you ever seen Mister Rogers, or grown up poor or in a bad neighborhood? Kids have to worry about adult problems all the time. They often don't have a choice in the matter.
Leaving them to learn about the adult world only when they become adults is cruel, and beyond the point at which they will have ceased to care unless they were taught to at an early age.
>Surely, we don't have to write a five paragraph essay on the problem with perpetuating hate cycles among children in a thread about plummeting teen mental health.
I never said anything about hate, nor does the linked article make any implication about "hate cycles," but it's telling that you immediately tried to make that link.
They don't have to be fighting for your cause, even if you believe that cause is noble. If someone driving a white honda totals your car, you don't harass random drivers of white cars. This cult of skin & genitals, that's called "progressive" for unknown reasons, is a shallow lunacy that's appealing to people who can't see further than the skin color.
I don't understand this intentional misreading of comments that's so pervasive. Even if they're not entirely clear, you can usually deduce what they mean.
Why is his son singled out based on his skin color and unable to do things that his peers are officially sanctioned by the school? Not sure what that sounds ok to you? That seems like regular ole racism to me. That's a bit insane don't you think?
You interpret the anecdote as involving something official? I interpreted it as pertaining to social norms being enforced by only the students themselves. Kids hassling each other for "playing nonexistent white/straight/male cards" or "playing a card they don't have" is quite different from authority figures imposing equivalent policies. I mean, on some level the subject of the enforcement is in a similar position regardless of the nature of the enforcement, but we should at least agree on what we're dealing with here.
People tell stories on hackernews. If you don't take the story to be true, take it as hypothetical value. Not everything on the internet needs a scientific study to be discussed.
I would think the existence of an inherently inequal standard here, and/or the idea of watering down the impact of harmful speech, is the problem more than wanting some perverse privilege to tell bigoted jokes. When and where I grew up I still remember black leaders critical of hip-hop for trying to normalise the n-word - the view being it was objectionable for anyone to launder the term.
Not OP, but the processing of learning that being X isn't a joke in and of itself taught me respect for other groups. You compare the joke about being gay vs a joke that someone is gay. One is a funny commentary on the gay experience, and the other is homophobic. Learning that difference, through experience help teach me where to draw the line between appreciating other cultures and cultural appropriation. And yeah a lot of these lessons can be taught other ways, but I have often found experience to be the best teacher. We should encourage kids to discover better morals and not just follow the morals they are taught. We learned a lot over the past century letting kids do that, we shouldn't stop now. The youngest generation has constantly shown the older how to be more accepting of neighbors, and kinder to our friends.
We like to “celebrate diversity”, but if you diverge from whatever the people in charge are doing, or worse, whatever they think you should be doing, you’re very much on the outside.
Kids and teenagers need stability and trust. As adults, we’re bad at fostering that environment in our institutions for a variety of reasons.
What does it mean to "diverge from whatever the people in charge are doing", with respect to diversity?
Considering your overall comment, my initial response is, well, in school I did, and everyone else constantly did, things that pissed off the people in charge. Pushing the envelope has always been part of being a teenager. Exploring the boundaries is how they begin to understand society and their relation to it. Enforcing rules and making teens see why some actions are okay and some are wrong, is part of the whole idea of teaching and nurturing and bringing up healthy adults.
However, I'm not sure how any of this applies to "diversity".
In any case, I get the overall sentiment that there is not enough stability, but doesn't this just stem from adults in fact not agreeing with each other on what the rules are/should be? What can be done about that? Adults will always disagree on basic principles, because having a personal point of view is part of being human. Perhaps the earlier kids learn that, and that they have to start forming their own opinions, the better.
The important thing is to guide them on forming those opinions, for example helping them be informed opinions instead of "gut feelings", helping them distrust what they read online for instance, and helping them pick up clues on when to trust or distrust a source. It's too bad that even adults are bad at that, though. (I include myself here.) I think the problem is also that we are _all_ learning that skill these days, not just kids.
Okay thanks, that actually works here. I'm still not sure it's what OP meant, but I prefer to assume apolitical motivation unless otherwise stated, so I like your interpretation. I actually couldn't get what he was trying to say, not trying to posture.
You absolutely know what they're referring to, playing coy about it was understandable a decade ago but the mask is obviously off. If you live in the western world, even living in a shack in the middle of wyoming, the fact you are online means you are fully aware and these types of comments are not only non-productive, but disingenuous which is a becoming a trend among people that propagate the diversity initiative as a way of being openly anti-european while retaining a moral high ground. It has to stop or hatred will come full circle.
Sorry if you see it this way but I very, very honestly did not understand what he was trying to say. Yes I'm quite aware of the issues you are talking about, but it was more the structure of the sentence that I just could not follow.
I assume they mean for you to insert any minority? Black, brown, whatever. With words companies and schools and whatever like to be diverse and woke, but their actions are often the opposite. I'm just guessing.
Sorry, still lost. What is "the 50% of diversity"? Are you trying to say "white"? (Not sure that's 50%...) Not judging, literally just trying to understand the semantics here. This is some kind of code that I'm not getting.
That’s because we have a history of white supremacy in that country though. Similar to how in Germany you’ll get weird looks if you’re echoing nazi talking points; there’s an existing history and cultural context to that sort of thing in that country that the country now wants to not repeat.
There are effectively no Nazis in Germany but there are still ethnostates and genocide in Africa. I really don't see how White people are special here.
EDIT: As usual with the social justice crowd: no discussion just downvotes. It makes a lot of us feel like there legitimately is no argument for your position.
I think this is whataboutism. I’m merely making it makes sense that white pride is viewed at less positively than black pride in a country that has experienced nationwide, systemic, brutally violent white supremacist behavior within living memory.
Gee, I wonder why people are downvoting an obvious fascist stooge.
[1]
> Twenty-nine police officers in the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia have been temporarily suspended after their unit was found to have shared extreme rightwing content on a WhatsApp group.
> Images shared by the officers, most of whom are members of a unit in the town of Mülheim an der Ruhr, reportedly depicted Adolf Hitler, the swastika flag, a collage of a refugee inside a gas chamber and the shooting of a young black person.
[2]
> A far-right extremist has confessed to murdering a pro-refugee German politician who was found dead outside his house on 2 June having been shot in the head.
[3]
> A gunman killed nine people in two apparently racially motivated shootings at shisha bars in the German town of Hanau, police said. The suspect then killed himself, according to officers, after also killing his mother at his home.
> [...]
> The Bild newspaper said the gunman had expressed extreme rightwing views in a letter of confession he left behind. A video in which he explained his motives is believed to be part of the investigation.
That's why I said "effectively." Yes you can find small groups or individuals but if we want to trash an entire race based on behavior of small groups then maybe you should have another look at US homicide statistics.
The Nazis in Germany have absolutely no political influence and no real cultural influence. The whole ideology is literally illegal there and people get fired just for talking about it.
This is not correct at all, sorry to inform you. For example, people like Götz Kubitschek[0] for example have close ties to the dominant groups in e.g. the AfD, his rethoric is full of antisemitism and fascist dog whistling.
The "entnazification" never really happened. In the 60s, there were more people in the ministry of justice who had an active NSDAP membership during 1933-1945 than there were in the 30s and 40s.
It took several decades to repeal fascist laws, influential politicians (federal minister e.g.[1]) stated his admiration of the Waffen-SS and held speeches full of anticommunism and antisemitism - these are the core tenants of german fascism and they get regurgitated ever since the few innocent German citizens were liberated at the end of WW2.
One of the the main representatives of the german green party unironically defends the Person giving orders to fascist paramilitaries for the extrajudicial killing of communist and social democratic leaders in the 20s.
The influence and long lasting after-effects of fascist thought and leadership in Germany must not be underestimated.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6tz_Kubitschek
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Strauss
Ya, but a lot of the time you have ostensibly well-meaning people spread around the attitude that it's wrong to be intolerant of others, unless that person is white, or a man, or you're a transphobic woman if you didn't use a particular definition of woman, or you're a creep by default if you're a man. In the last 8 years this sort of rhetoric has been amplified more than ever before, and not just in the states (though arguably that's the dumb dumb epicenter). It also sounds like sort of meme right-wing talking points, and I'm tired of those conversations too (which are also amplified by social media in the same way), but they do come from somewhere.
It shouldn't be controverial to say "This is a space that's welcoming for everyone, unless you start obviously making people feel like they don't belong. It's not ok to harass or attack someone because of their skin colour, or religion, or gender, no matter what that is."
Can you source me how social media has made “this is a welcoming space for everyone unless you start behaving badly” a controversial statement?
Also I am super confused by your rhetoric. Earlier on you mentioned that people have spread intolerance of, say, transphobic women or people who have wrong definitions for women. But in your second paragraph you also say you want a space where it’s not okay to make people feel like they don’t belong— a transphobic person obviously makes a trans person feel like they don’t belong… so… wouldn’t it make sense to be intolerant of transphobes by that logic? Can you explain plainly what you actually mean with concrete examples, maybe with a behavioral rubric, of what you want?
No, I can't provide concrete sourced examples with a rubric. I'm not writing a paper. These are largely impressions I get from speaking to people in the world, and kind of being taken aback when people have what I think are kind of absurd views. Some, I know from speaking to people, are amplified by YouTube recommendations, and Instagram feedback loops. I don't really think it's a controversial take to say that recommendation algorithms paired with bubbles that match a few different tropes are going to amplify those views.
If you're confused by my rhetoric, that's ok. I'm confused from time to time.
I’m merely asking for something more concrete because the logic stated in the post appears self contradictory. I feel I don’t have a great sense what you want in your social media experience.
I guess re-reading it, it seems I could have used 'except' instead of 'unless' and that might have been more clear, but it wasn't very eloquent in retrospect. The idea that everyone is entitled to equality, except some people have a somewhat exclusive definition of everyone and equality. Growing up, I was taught that even if you have good reasons (in the realm of prejudice, probably not good reasons) to not get along with someone, being in a healthy society means you should try and treat people with the respect you'd hope to get from them regardless. I don't expect that I'd change a racist person's mind about ingrained prejudice, but I'd expect them to treat everyone equally anyway, or leave. The examples I used weren't great, but in the real world situation I merely said everyone in this outdoor space should be treated and welcomed as people. The person I was speaking to assumed that I was implying everyone experiences discrimination with the same magnitude, and therefore are equally likely to be targets. Obviously that's not true, but regardless of current inequal distribution of various kinds of discrimination, this is a space of equality and peace. If people want to act on prejudice, this isn't the place for it, and I think that's what we should be aiming for.
I don't think I've ever experienced that. I mean, I've lived my whole life in the US, but never experienced anyone being intolerant of me because I am a man or because I am white, nor have I ever heard of that happening to anyone else. Honestly I just don't think that's a thing that ever happens.
>It shouldn't be controversial to say "This is a space that's welcoming for everyone, unless you start obviously making people feel like they don't belong. It's not ok to harass or attack someone because of their skin colour, or religion, or gender, no matter what that is."
But where is that controversial though? That's what we have now.
This was from a recent conversation I had in the world. In Canada, by someone I later discovered was regularly posting rants and shaming people and businesses on Instagram. They essentially accused me of drawing from hypothetical strawmen to paint myself as a victim, but all I said was (it's important that I said this after saying this is outdoor public space is basically a safe space from discrimination) "If a white straight man harassed or attacked someone because they're X, that's not ok, and they won't be welcome to stay. Do you think it would be ok if someone did the same, but they happened to be Y attacking someone because they're white or a man?" and they dodged the question, which to me justifies the question in the first place. I don't feel unsafe as whatever I am, and nobody should be made to. Seems like a pretty liberal viewpoint.
I'm sick of people getting sucked into right wing YouTube and then trying to rope me into the most boring imaginable anti-cancel-culture shit on one side, and I'm also sick of the surprising reality of what they're pissed about actually sometimes happening, possibly as a result of both groups' own polarization. Not a lot, but enough to vibe me out from being around them, not remotely enough to be prejudiced against any particular identity. It just happens sometimes, it's a form of social grandstanding, and it's very tiresome.
When someone expresses black pride my interpretation is that they are reclaiming, trying to manifest and celebrate that they no longer live in times where being born black meant that you were a second hand citizen and that you should/could feel no pride.
When someone express white pride I can't interpret it the same way because there hasn't been a time where the structures were so that being born white made you inferior to someone born black purely based on skin color.
I'm from east Europe. In my country there have never been black slaves. There have been white slaves. The rich would sell the poor as salves to other rich people.
However if I wanna be proud of being middle class white person today, that would raise a lot of eyebrows and not a few people would assume I'm a "white supremacist". You cannot be proud of being white. Doesn't matter what your country history is, or what your personal context is.
My hypothesis is that American history has been conflated with "white" history so now all white people are privileged and oppressed black people and have no reason to be proud.
If someone is a descendent of white slaves and they want to be proud of how that group overcame their predicament, they wouldn't say they're proud to be white (not only because it would raise eyebrows, but because it's not nearly precise enough), they'd say they're proud to be Slavic or whatever the case may be, right? And hopefully that doesn't raise eyebrows.
I don't think I ever said anything about Europe not having problems with white supremacists. Can you point to the part of my comment that made you think that I said that?
> I'm from east Europe. In my country there have never been black slaves. There have been white slaves. The rich would sell the poor as salves to other rich people.
> However if I wanna be proud of being middle class white person today, that would raise a lot of eyebrows and not a few people would assume I'm a "white supremacist".
Maybe I misunderstood, but this comes across to me as "Even though there have been no black slaves here, I still can't say I'm proud of being white"
And my point is that Europe, despite not having black slaves, still has a very good reason for that (the time a European white supremacist tried to conquer the continent).
You did not misunderstand, that was indeed the core of my argument. The parent argument seems to say being proud of being black is good because you went through slavery (well, your ancestors did, not you). But white people should not be proud cause they were responsible for slavery.
I'm not from Germany, I'm for a poor east European country that never was part of any empire and never conquered another country. Why can't I be proud of my heritage? Why do I have to hide the fact that I'm proud of my heritage because English and Americans enslaved African people? Also wasn't it white people that then fought to abolish slavery? Wasn't Wilberforce white? Wasn't Lincoln white? Didn't British ships then police the international waters to stop the slave trade? Why do you decide that being white means "the ones that started the slave trade" and not "the ones that stopped the slave trade" and assign a negative connotation to it?
But I fail to understand your argument in this last phrase. Your argument is because someone in Europe was a white supremacist, then nobody in Europe can be proud of being white (aka proud of their heritage)? Because the mustache man took advantage of the German people living in really poor conditions and being miserable after the first WW and brain washed them into committing hideous acts, being born a German now is forever a curse? You can never be proud of your heritable before and after mustache man? What exactly is the algorithm based on which you decide if someone can be proud of their heritage or not?
It comes down to interpretation. Droping the word pride, the idea is that you can love yourself and be comfortable in the skin you are born with, and see value in your family culture and history.
We should teach this to all children and encourage them to feel this way.
We should not teach some children that they are inferior or carry the the guilt for crimes committed by others just because they share the same skin color.
Is it doublespeak? It seems to me that we have Black pride but not White pride for the same reason we have Black history month but not White history month.
We don't have White history month because every month in the US is White history month. Same for Gay pride month but no Straight pride month. Or National American Indian Heritage Month, National Deaf History Month, and many others.
I remember being a teen and early-20 in the 90s-2000s and there were things like a hippie festival circuit, raves, goth culture, club culture, and so on.
I keep hoping I'm just old and don't see it, but I remember back then it would seep out and get covered by the media and get chatted about on the nascent Internet. I see nothing like it today. Sure there are concerts and IDM shows and the like, but they don't have a mystique. It's just entertainment, not a coming of age subculture. Subculture is dead.
I think this is a factor from personal experience. If I hadn't gotten into the rave/club culture in the late 90s I'd probably be dead from suicide.
These cultures were where kids that did not exactly fit the popular mold would be able to go out, make friends, have experiences, and have a sense of belonging. I still miss it to this day.
Genuinely and speaking in the kindest way: I think what you consider culture has aged out. Youth culture does exist, but has simply changed in a way that no longer appeals to your definition of culture. It’s also covered in the news, see: the Astroworld crowd crush. There’s new terminology (bussin, deadass, bet, etc.), new aesthetics (cottagecore), and new music consumption (the rise of kpop). And my knowledge is likely a older now (the teenagers I know are aging out into college).
Is/was there a sense of being part of something special and exclusive in those scenes or was it just something fun to do?
I didn’t say it in my OP above but I have heard young people bemoan a lack of interesting culture that is “theirs.” Hip hop, IDM, etc are all things from GenX or earlier, though obviously with a fresh coat of paint.
Of course young people don’t realize their own culture. They literally are incapable of serious self reflection and critical thinking. When I was a kid I wouldn’t call IRC culture, but looking back it was definitely a subculture!I wouldn’t consider my music a culture either, but have you ever did karaoke with a wide range of age participants? You bet young people will be belting out different songs than the 40s folks.
Youth culture is still very much alive. It is primarily online or in school, and kept into circles largely out of sight of adults. You wouldn't come across them unless you happened to pass by, actively seek it out or cultures cross over.
The above is further amplified by communication between children and adult strangers being seen as a big no-no.
I feel this is very true, I'm still in my twenties.
When I was a little bit than ten, I remember that things like "teenage rebellion" and unbearable young people were still a thing.
I feel like a certain stereotype of the teenager of the 90's has completely disappeared.
Being a teenager a few decade ago was all the rage, even in self identification, I feel now people just go through 10 to 20 progressively, with maybe their set of problems but nothing as typical.... like I did.
In fact I think I just saw it died when arrived in this age.
How can you confidently say social media is not the source of the problem when the author of the PDF has researched it for as long as it exists and makes strong evidence-based claims? With his key point being the change being sudden and dramatic, which exactly aligns with the rise of social media in the timeline.
He's one of the leading authorities on the matter, and your take is...nah, not true.
I wouldn't say OP's take is not true, but simply based on anecdotal evidence from a very small sample size. However, I still disagree with that take personally.
Agree. I didn't necessarily mean to attack those points, rather I'm annoyed by this entire discussion on HN.
Clearly, most people didn't bother to read the PDF, check additional sources or do a basic background check on the author, whom is a well known authority on the matter.
With just a headline as input, people confidently disagree with the conclusion. Completely dismissing the research. And by posting such disagreement in a way that is relatable to all parents and by wording it in a fancy way, it seems an insightful comment, so it gets traction.
Superficially, it looks a healthy and intelligent discussion. In reality, almost all of it is way off and baseless. There's no truth finding. It's just Reddit with more steps and fancier language.
The other half of comments is people projecting, with random thoughts on housing and inflation, as if a 12 y/o gives a shit about that.
> He's one of the leading authorities on the matter, and your take is...nah, not true.
My take is that social media is often a coping mechanism for mental health issues, and therefore in reports like this, correlates with mental health issues.
They have your kid for the majority of the working day, that's more than enough time for work. When they're home the last thing they should be doing is school.
Eg math problems solved in class would be solved as a group so everyone learns the process, and homework is for problems which use those same concepts, but require more careful thought. Most of my math skills were solidified by solving challenging problems like that at home. Simply learning the concepts in school was not enough to build a deep enough understanding, but adding in a good homework component took me from having trouble handling basic algebra to unwittingly deriving basic calculus in an exam when faced with problems I didn't realize weren't intended for me.
Homework as just mechanical work intended only to take several hours per day is pretty stupid though.
As another point, how many of us truly shut out work when at home? Many of us still end up spending a few off hours a week programming personal projects or just reading up on and learning new technologies. I think homework serves a similar function for kids.
Very. I only ever did the most important graded assignments when I was in school in early 00s and I came out fine(ish)! I hope it's similarly easy to get by with the minimum required these days. If nothing else, learning how and when to skip homework is good practice for future work/life balance~ ;)
The sort of environment you're describing only applies to a certain socio-economic strata of the United States; specifically upper and upper-middle class suburban America. Most children do not have that experience.
I'm sure depression is more acute in that population but even poor teens are growing up with social media.
I have to agree with most of your points, even if they seem to be US problems to a large extent. What social media does, so, IMHO is enabling and aggrevating those problems.
I'm not from the US and I've never lived there, but from what you're describing (except point 4) it seems like stress is one of the fundamental values in the US society. Stuff like not having public healthcare, exorbitant college costs, being fired at any moment, etc. It seems like kids are taught that early on with the stuff you're mentioning through the imposition of cultural values, rules, etc.
I'm from Europe but I grew up and have lived in different cultures/countries which have a much more relaxed attitude towards life. Reading your comment actually made me anxious.
A lot of these anxieties are psychologically self imposed and a cultural failing that focuses on materialism. In the US, you are considered a failure if you don't own your own mansion by European standards and achieve a high degree of professional success. Essentially being compared to a standard that only 1% of people will ever achieve.
This number looks a lot scarier than it is. Food "insecurity" is an arbitrary threshold based largely on how people feel. Based on the same data, children very rarely go hungry in America.
0.6% of children skipped a single meal in a 12 month period.
0.9% of children got hungry at least once in a 12 month period.
alternatively, you and your children are considered insecure if in a 12 month period they answer yes to the following:
A parent lost weight
Adult(s) cut size or skipped meals in 3 or more months
Relied on few kinds of low-cost food to feed child(ren)
Here is the actual USDA survey data that supports that fact:
That's what happens when you allow adults and kids to play together in a highly unregulated environment, cough social media platforms cough.
Please just build a social media platform just for kids. We don't need weird adults playing in the same sandbox as little kids. We also don't need helpless adults dancing in the same recreational teen dance.
I'm surprised we even allow this to happen in the first place. Go figures.
Your post refers to upper middle class kids in progressive schools, with dare I say helicopter parents, aiming for 4-year universities. I grew up like that. Your average hispanic kid in east LA has a very different life. You have to remember 99% of students are not heading to elite colleges, and even a majority aren't going to a 4-year university. Most are headed to 2-year programs, vocational schools, or trades.
All of this except number 3 applied to adults as well, which means a couple things here.
1) How come adults don’t have the same issues with mental health? (I think we do)
2) If adults face the same issues, is this not life preparation?
I’ll grab the lowest hanging fruit, cancel culture. How many careers were ruined because of this? Is all this control on speech causing damage we’re not even aware of yet?
> Kids are targeted. Sexual predators, gangs, fringe and mainstream ideologues looking to recruit followers, sports agents and talent scouts all have one thing in common: they want to exploit kids or sell them something.
This was the same for a long time. The main difference now is that they are also very targeted by ads on social media.
That is a great summary. Social media isn’t the source but it is a multiplier of mental issues for kids.
They are also manipulated purposely by our enemies. Take TikTok (owned by China). In China it promotes being a scientist and athlete to kids, off at 10pm. In USA it promotes how to set your farts on fire and drink your own piss.
But which of those things has changed over the past 30-40 years? All things being equal, it seems like social media has amplified the problems. Kids were always bullied, but they could escape it when they went home or left school. Now it follows them 24/7 from a device in their pocket.
Tolerance doesn’t mean tolerance towards everything. Some ideas - like flat earthism - are just stupid, but other - like Christian fundamentalism, the associated ideas about woman being not quite human (ie calling for abortion ban) are not only stupid, they are dangerous to society.
(1) is an upper-middle class kid problem, I don't think your average public school B- student is dealing with that level of stress, so if that class stratum is also seeing plummeting mental health, I would look elsewhere for an explanation.
"1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work things out mentally. School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair."
By "kids" you mean upper middle class suburban kids. Working class kids aren't overscheduled in this way. The bulk of kids in the US don't live the life you describe, and for the most part are under supervised. Your anecdotal information is tainted by the bubble you live in.
#2 and #3.1 are quite specific to the US, afaik those don't really apply here in Europe. So it would be interesting to see a similar study done over here or indeed any other part of the world.
#1 - don't have a say in this as a parent, like don't enroll your kid in those things if you / they don't like it? Or is there a lot of pressure?
Personally I do think social media is more to blame than we realise. As a parent of toddlers I'm a bit worried about what the future will hold for them.
I like idea (1), where kids don’t have mental space to sort thoughts out. Although I disagree that most kids are too busy for it. It may be that habitual social media use decreases kids’ free time, as they use social media/their phone as soon as they’re free, rather than sit, think, and process thoughts.
I think this is also applicable to adults, although it’s effects could be less since smartphones weren’t prevalent when current adults were children.
> Social media is a great scapegoat, but it is not the source of the problem. It is where they go to communicate and cope.
I am sorry, that's an absolutely naive way to look at it. The fact is that it is being increasingly recognized that current Social Media networks are a stress inducers in kids and thus causing mental health issues in them. It is in fact not a great medium to communicate with someone too - if any kid prefers to talk to a friend through social media, than in person, it indicates social anxiety issues that need to be addressed, as otherwise the dependence on SM will actually aggravate the symptom. Not to mention parents should be teaching their kids not to share personal and private feelings on SM with questionable privacy policies (and lack of laws) that will one day be used against them publicly, directly or indirectly.
> School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.
Sounds like all our childhood (with slight variations) before social media. Now add social media to this mix as one of the daily rituals / chores and you will begin to partly see how it can add to the stress in teens.
All your arguments are very specific to yourself and is not necessarily indicative of "All teens". 20 years ago we didn't have the so called social media we have today. And back then we didn't have that problem atleast not to the extent we have today.
About your #2, adults always lied about everything. School staff doubly so. And about your second #3, do you think it's more because of the media (including social one) or is it actually more? (Either one is a problem, but those are different problems.)
I don't think it's the source of the problem either. Social media exacerbates the symptoms, like firearms (technology to kill things easily at a distance) make it easier to do serious harm, intentionally or accidentally.
Your argument seems more positioned around public education than it does social media. This seems to be the same problem, new generation. TV in the 50s. Video games in the 90s. Now smartphones.
But what changed since 2009 to make what you say worse? Why 2009? (or whatever year the research says this all became worse in).
It makes the case for social media = bad much stronger.
How do you reconcile (1,2) with the observation that similar health problems are occurring in other countries?
Isn't (3) now heavily mediated by social media?
" Schools teach cultural tolerance while enforcing zero tolerance"
The zero tolerance you mention refers to the punishment of a particular situation not that the school doesn't tolerate anything. It's not a contradiction just another use of the word
Also, kids are smart and they can see what's going on.
They compare notes on Facebook and realize that everything is pretty shitty. They see the memes put together by people who have and have not done the research that decry the condition of the environment, the condition of employment, the condition of their fellow man. And honestly, a lot of the negativity is simply true.
There's a huge risk that we confuse the medium for the message... If people who watch television at the same rate that young people consume social media are more optimistic, it may not be because things aren't actually so bad... It may merely be that bad news drives away television advertising dollars and viewers.
And not to inject too much of my own pessimism, but I'm not sure a governing body whose membership has a mean age of 64 (!) Is constitutionally ready to wrestle with the notion that long after they're dead, the legacy they will have left the younger generation is a very depressing one.
I kinda agree and kinda disagree. My context is that I was youngish (late teens) when Facebook first arrived in force, and we'd had MySpace/MSN before that. My other context is that I have had an anxiety disorder for a while and was diagnosed with asperger's (we still say that in Europe) not long before I turned 30.
I think I would always have had an issue, but I can quite directly point to the pressure cooker environment of getting into University. It is "not enough" simply to be good academically (which I was), you also needed to be a well rounded person, so you better use all your spare time doing activities to signal your well-roundedness!
I don't feel I was explicitly trying to do this, but I also, being 17, didn't really say no - I mean how do you say no to a bunch of career advisors telling you "you have a chance to go to the top university!!!" etc.
In such an environment, there's little respite, because there's always some kids telling you what they are doing.
I don't think social media in and of itself is to blame, but what it does, in concert with phones, is remove any and all "downtime" from this messaging. There's an encouraged perfectionism, so young people are bombarded with images of how _great_ everyone else's life is. Not only are kids pushy/perfect in the canteen, but now they're pushy/perfect at 10pm on your mobile too.
I struggled very badly with this at university. By that time I was a guy with panic attacks trying to keep up with a course, and I wanted to do all the normal stuff too like party. Of course since I _couldn't_ always do this it ended up being interpreted by most people as "let's not invite him". Social media wasn't directly responsible for this situation, but it is definitely a negative contributing factor. When you're far from home doom-scrolling facebook and all the stuff you missed that you're being left out of, this is really not helpful.
So what I think is that social media will reinforce people who are naturally self-confident, but it will not help people who have issues. I suspect every experience is slightly different, but the inability to escape constant reminders of your own inadequacy, if interpreted that way, is a problem.
Or if I can sum it up, it is simply the same old social/peer pressure, extended to 24/7.
What helps a lot is a moderating influence, a reminder that it is OK to be just normal.
I am also very, very glad I grew up when I did. All my early teenage years were free of any of this - we had MSN and texting and all the usual teenage angst, but you never had mobile doom-scrolling late at night - at best, you could text until you ran out of credit. I feel sorry for young girls particularly growing up with Instagram.
However, I agree that social media is just one factor. Pushy parenting, or pushy schooling, is also a huge risk, as are all the traditional risks like teenagers being horrible bullies to each other.
Addendum: the net impact of pushing me to go to a top university so hard was that I did not go to a top university, and dropped out of a pretty good university officially at the end of the first year, but unofficially I was "done" 6 months in anyway. Absolutely none of this career advice and "enrichment" activity helped me achieve any kind of potential, it just made me miserable and blow up with the stress of it.
1. So drop the sports and volunteer work. Let them do schoolwork, homework and then free time.
It is a myth that kids have to do all of these things. Sports should be extracurricular activity, i.e. outside education. You don't need to do sports to be healthy or to learn about team work.
And volunteering? Volunteering is called community service if you're a criminal. Why punish kids like that? They will soon have to be grown ups, let them have some years to remember positively.
2. applies to adults too, and has always been true.
3. has always been true.
Social media maybe somewhere frustrated kids go, but it is also a place where the shit starts or festers.
If you think it's a fault of the society and parenting, hey everyone, stop making your kids suffer.
Work ethic doesn't come with being overworked as a kid, work ethic is something you can rationally explain as being beneficial for the individual and the group, and I would dare say that work ethic is strongly correlated with physical health.
You have to remember that the teens going on social media now are meeting a cesspool of nonsense that has been there for over a decade. The cesspool was long in the making before they showed up, and by older individuals, themselves arguably a product of our messed up society.
Capitalism, marketing, fanning the flames of consumerism, maximising profitability — these things feed down into society and create bad parenting habits and bad habits in individual measures of self esteem as well.
I happened to look at Instagram the other day someone was showing me their account on their phone, and the sheer amount of commercialisation was horrifying to behold. People of all ages will eventually be quite unable to determine art from advertisement, because they will have been bombarded with so much kitsch advertising that they'll equate the two.
People are more or less just turning themselves into adverts as well. And those that pay attention to it feed into a sort of tribalism. Each brand forms a tribe of supporters. I've noticed this with fashion, food, music, and more.
And if people are being pushed into social media, it still occurs to me that social media is pretty much the last place I would want kids to end up. People are impressionable and naive, and for them to end up somewhere where blatant falsities and conspiracies are viral just can't be good.
I'm not suggesting free speech be stopped, but the problem is that journalism used to be profitable because it was a source of truth or at the very least a source of feasible opinions.
But it has turned out to be more profitable to instead churn out bullshit, and profitability is all anyone cares about.
And this is to say nothing of the implications of having all this data about people and what they do, flying around between tech-marketing giants that could probably afford to buy countries if there were an appropriate mechanism...
Social media is nothing but bad news. It's not confined to kids either, you may have noticed my use of the word "people" not "kids". Many adults are just as impressionable and easily taken in by the same bullshit. They're just as glued to their mobile devices. They're just as dysfunctional. And they will go on to raise kids.
Dysfunctional parents raising kids in a dysfunctional society results in what? Probably dysfunctional kids.
Some will prove resistant and able to carve themselves their own identity and think critically in the face of it all, but they will probably be vilified or at least ignored or considered crazy.
Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment that teenagers have lived through their entire lives. Multiple major recessions, a global pandemic, rising inflation, housing and education getting more expensive by the day, prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation, climate that will be unlivable in a few decades, political extremism becoming the norm, and massive government gridlock that has made fixing any of this impossible. Can't really shield kids from this reality anymore when all of it is one click away. Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it.
One. They lived through one major recession, and here it wasn't really major, and is not something they lived through recently. They were younger than 6 when it started. I've lived through two. The 80s weren't a happy time, and there are no signs that that had such an impact on teen mental health. If it did, it would be proof that the impact of a major recession is temporary.
> prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation
Situation wrt to teen mental health is similar in Europe, but there's a much smaller graduation debt.
Don't try to downplay the role of internet, mobile devices and social media. Here's a thought for your correlationism:
> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it.
Perhaps it's social media that makes that they are either too aware of it or simply mention it more often.
> Situation wrt to teen mental health is similar in Europe, but there's a much smaller graduation debt.
We have other issues here, though (speaking for the situation in Germany). I’m quite some time out of my teens at 36, but for many years now I’ve been told that all that tax (technically not a tax) I pay for my pension will not result in me getting any meaningful pension.
For people who are currently teenagers it probably sounds like this: "Once you get a job, which won’t afford you a house, you’ll pay a decent chunk of your salary so the people who managed to destroy the environment and don’t care about you have a better end of life. You’ll not see anything of this money ever again."
And that is without including all the messaging during the pandemic that young people (more towards people in their early 20ies, but still) are at fault for nearly everything.
edit: I should mention that I’m still not discounting social media, I couldn’t, as I know next to nothing about it.
You think teenagers are thinking about pensions... If they are they are probably already having mental issues because that's not something someone pre 20s should be concerned about.
People in this thread need to stop projecting their problems and worldviews as universal social issues.
Idk but in France, when I was still a teenager, it was not that uncommon to talk/joke about the fact that we will never be able to retire. In high school, most of my classmate already started to have a political conscience and where thinking about this kind of stuff. Same with the environment.
We already had social media at the time (mostly facebook) and yes, I won't deny that there was already something anxious about feeling pressured to always show yourself/self yourself to other. When I look at Instagram today, I feel like it got even worse.
But, as someone still under their 30's, I think we shouldn't also deny what the original commenter said. In the case of Europe (and in my case France), we have seen the come back of extreme conservatism in politics, the slow decay of our public services, the inability for politician to make important decision for the environment, the idea that we will never retire/have a pension (which is not necessarily true but is definitely a strong belief), the imbalance in wealth creeping higher and higher every year, home ownership becoming harder and harder ...
Whereas the generation of my parent (those from the 60's-70's) had, in general, a more positive/peaceful outlook on the future, I find that my generation and those younger that me tend to be more skeptical, if not negative.
I really think that the current mental health issues are a combination of multiple factors and that social media is just one (but maybe a big one) of those factor.
>Idk but in France, when I was still a teenager, it was not that uncommon to talk/joke about the fact that we will never be able to retire.
The same in Italy. It was very disheartening and certainly contributed to our discontent.
>home ownership becoming harder and harder
This is starting to weigh more and more in our life (mine and my age cohort). The average monthly pay in my region is 1200EUR while the average cost of an house is 250000EUR, so 17 years of salary. On the other hand my father bought two houses with a manual laborer stipend and my mother never worked a day in her life and she had four children. I really don't know when (or better, if) I will be out of my house.
I don't know if it's a useful data point, but my sister made me a Facebook profile when I was 16. I never really gave a crap about it and would read a few posts maybe every other month or so and use the poke feature back and forth with friends because texting cost money. I was active on forums specific to my hobbies and that was honestly the extent of my social media use until the last couple months when I figured out I could just join local groups and hobby groups and continue to bullshit with people about aquarium fish and learn about local events. I had my first severe bout with depression shortly before I turned 16. I think it was actually a few months before I got that Facebook profile. It's been an ongoing struggle with anxiety and depression ever since. Recently, I found a balance of meds, mindfulness, and a fulfilling job and the symptoms are finally what I would consider to be minimal.
I was super active on reddit though from late college until recently. People go back and forth on whether that's social media, but it definitely didn't help me. Short memes about how awful the world is, you could look at 100 an hour and ruminate for 3 more how messed up the world is. Stories of injustice, both real events and creative writing projects, were available by the dozens. Find something you want to be outraged by and join the sub because it feels good to feel irate with other people.
Again, my mental health took a nosedive years before I got on reddit. But having that echo chamber where the world is terrible and we're all getting taken advantage of was definitely not helpful either.
I used to read news every day. I've noticed that I dread every coming day. Quitting the news for two years helped me a lot. I still read the news but not in the volume I used to.
Most of the things are outside my control so I just don't worry about them.
Conway, too, found much to interest him, apart from the engrossing problem he had set himself. During the warm, sunlit days he made full use of the library and music room, and was confirmed in his impression that the lamas were of quite exceptional culture. Their taste in books was catholic, at any rate; Plato in Greek touched Omar in English; Nietzsche partnered Newton; Thomas More was there, and also Hannah More, Thomas Moore, George Moore, and even Old Moore. Altogether Conway estimated the number of volumes at between twenty and thirty thousand; and it was tempting to speculate upon the method of selection and acquisition. He sought also to discover how recently there had been additions, but he did not come across anything later than a cheap reprint of Im Western Nichts Neues. During a subsequent visit, however, Chang told him that there were other books published up to about the middle of 1930 which would doubtless be added to the shelves eventually; they had already arrived at the lamasery. "We keep ourselves fairly up-to-date, you see," he commented.
"There are people who would hardly agree with you," replied Conway with a smile. "Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know."
"Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940."
"You're not interested, then, in the latest developments of the world crisis?"
"I shall be very deeply interested—in due course."
With the Elon Musk news, I finally decided to try reducing my Twitter usage. With the exception of 3 or 4 specific tweets that I viewed because of a discussion on a site like this, I haven't been on Twitter in 10 days. I already feel much less "on edge" than I used to. I was already mostly off Facebook, basically checking once a day for 5 minutes max since a parent group I help lead in real life uses it as a primary form of communicating with the group at large.
Now to get off of Reddit and be more judicious with my usage of this site.
> Idk but in France, when I was still a teenager, it was not that uncommon to talk/joke about the fact that we will never be able to retire.
UK here, 42 years not dead, and my pension plan in my 20s as I started work after University, and most of my 30s too, was to not live long enough to need a pension¹.
I don't think it was anything I thought about at all as a teenager though, nor that teens (or very early 20s) today have it so much in mind. Those I know are far more concerned about being able to afford housing and other essentials² now, pensions are something they can't really plan for until they have some income left after paying for those things.
[1] in pursuit of that plan I invested heavily in alcohol
I know this is not reddit, and I know HN discourages posts that don't contribute to the discussion, but ...
Man did footnote [1] make me laugh. I feel like I have not invested enough in that asset class. It's a bittersweet laughter, for various reasons, but still. Thanks for that.
If you've managed to limit your investment in alcohol, feel grateful. I massively increased my investment starting around 2019. The pandemic was a boom time for my portfolio. I'm now looking to take some profits and diversify into areas that are less harmful to my liver and other vital organs.
Running shoes sounds like a future investment opportunity I'd like to explore.
Coincidentally running/walking/crawling around the countryside is one of my key investments since rearranging my portfolio. I can heartily recommend it.
Unfortunately, the way I've felt during my childhood, French schools don't teach critical thinking. Basically every student comes out of school saying exactly the same thing: more government, more power to the government, politicians, public services... Most schools are run by the government after all, and obviously governments will claim they need more power or society will decay.
So from a young age students are basically taught to give up their power if not their lives to authorities, to politics. It has to be politics, it can't come from the individual. So they don't care about freedom or personal sovereignty (that's evil), they ask for government, rules, laws and taxes like would seniors. And they call that protection, if not "progress".
I don't blame you, it's hard to stand across a tidal wave, especially when young. But how about standing out a bit from the herd once and think outside of the political box?
> I don't blame you, it's hard to stand across a tidal wave, especially when young. But how about standing out a bit from the herd once and think outside of the political box?
That's a lot of assumption about me from one comment. You don't know me, we never met nor discussed, you should refrain from talking to people that you don't know like that.
> Most schools are run by the government after all, and obviously governments will claim they need more power or society will decay.
This is far from true on many level. Also, the only class that talk about politic, society and such is teached in high school, when most teen already started to develop their own critical thinking, and is very short.
> So from a young age students are basically taught to give up their power if not their lives to authorities, to politics. It has to be politics, it can't come from the individual. So they don't care about freedom or personal sovereignty (that's evil), they ask for government, rules, laws and taxes like would seniors. And they call that protection, if not "progress".
What ?
I had a lot of friends who were anarchist and communist in high school and after. Unions and the french communist party were often coming to the high school giving literature to teens who would accept them. So no, a lot where not "asking for government". That and there was often student protest (blocus, when you block your high school).
And even then, what is wrong about asking, and fighting for, the government to improve ? The political class to improve ? What is your solution ? It's not like the government is going to go away.
So what do you want ? Massive privatization ? We saw the result of such policies in many other country. Asking for public services and fighting for them to improve is not "asking the government", it is being involved and being able to think critically. Critical thinking is not about being a libertarian ancap.
You are just acting like a pedantic know-it-all making a lot of assumption about a whole class of people without making any meaningful proposition and insightful criticism.
I can subscribe to the last sentence more than the rest.
French are generally very interested in politics from youngish age, for better or worse (the amount of outright communism supporters there among young anywhere I spoke to is disheartening, especially for somebody like me who went through proper communism and saw first hand how it always fucks up individuals and nations for generations, and consistently fails to deliver on every single promise that looks nice on paper). I attribute this to their naivety, seeing wrong in the world and instinctively going for some direct quick solution, despite proofs that it never worked that way and side effects were nasty.
French and some other southern states have really rich social support, even in decades it will be above-average for western world. So french complaining about it going south need to travel the world a bit and get a reality check.
There is too much information readily available, and humans for some reason tend to focus much more on negative part, as do media. So if already pre-teens are watching gruesome combat footage, hardcore porn, reading about depressing future prospects re climate and environment, demographic curves, terrorism and so on and on... its hard even on grown ups, and not even kids that should be carelessly running outside without a worry in their head. It can be just few in the group/class, but they will easily 'spoil the rest of the basket'.
> French are generally very interested in politics from youngish age, for better or worse (the amount of outright communism supporters there among young anywhere I spoke to is disheartening
I think it is normal and even desirable for young people to be interested in extremist politics. Communism but also anarchy, dictatorships, etc... Modern day "free market" democracies are really a "least bad" system, there are many things wrong with them, things that communism or why not a ruling king can address. In practice, most people discover soon enough that it doesn't work, but to go to that conclusion, you have to at least consider it, and it is better to do that when you are still young and not involved in actual politics.
Also, being able to consider other systems is a sign of a well functioning free country. If any idea other than "democracy is the best" is being suppressed, then it is not really a democracy.
It may be bullshit, but certainly not obvious bullshit. Communism is a real solution to a real problem, thousands of people fought for that. It didn't work out in the end, but if you think it is obvious then you probably didn't think about it enough.
History books? Let's look at the French Revolution, often credited with so many great things. The period following it is called "the terror", you can't get more explicit. Anyone reading just that part would want to bring back monarchy, and that's actually what happened. But anyways, for many young people, me included, history books are either stuff to memorize for the test, or something that reads like The Lord of the Rings, but with slightly less magic.
It takes some experience to actually understand what's behind history books, and considering "obvious bullshit" as you call it is the kind of experience that get people to better appreciate history books. At least the ones that are not an excuse for propaganda.
Communism was obviously bullshit to me based on just a basic knowledge of human nature. It didn't take much life experience to figure that out, and reading a few history books only confirmed what already seemed obvious. Thinking deeply about nonsense is a total waste of time; I had better things to do. The problems were real enough, but Communism has never been a solution to anything. If young people saw it as a solution then I have to assume they were just too trusting and naively believed the lies that ambitious idealogues sold them.
Because it is a fallacy to attribute to nature what is clearly at least significantly product of social relation.
This is one of the very interesting things everybody (no matter their political affiliation) can learn from Marx and the whole group around Adorno and Horkheimer, but you will find this echoed by more conservative sociologists and historians, too.
Zizek also frames this quite nicely in The Perverts Guide to Cinema, where he explains, that ideology is never a pair of glasses [EDIT]you wear[/EDIT] but the very eyes through which you see.
Right now I sadly cannot look through my books to find you less leftist references for the topic.
If you are interested I can link to some less controversial works of sociology once I have access to them again.
(Edited for some typos and the marked addition.)
> French and some other southern states have really rich social support, even in decades it will be above-average for western world. So french complaining about it going south need to travel the world a bit and get a reality check.
No. We are just not naive and we know that all of our social support comes from the WWII aftermath, thanks to communist politics. This implies that we'll probably not have anything more than what we have now and we know it. Most of the french don't want anything more, but we will absolutely fight against every aggression against our social security net because we are really confident that anything we lost is lost basically forever.
They support communism because they see the current leading power, unbridled capitalism, also has its downsides. It's a classic case of figuring out consumer desires from what they say.
Most of them just want some kind of regulation which keeps greed in check and allows them to be confident in a future of relationships, family, home ownership and security. Surely the success of games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Sims and and such would showcase how important this is to individuals.
They support communism, like in Italy, because it is customary for teenagers in affluent blocks to do so or to join extreme right wing parties. Half of my friends have been senior members or founders of minuscule communist parties before finishing high school.
It has nothing to do with their understanding of capitalism, whatever that is supposed to be.
Because Italy is an elderly care state with a hierarchy that is so rigid it might even impress the Japanese. No wonder everyone young leaves or becomes an extremist.
>Because Italy is an elderly care state with a hierarchy that is so rigid it might even impress the Japanese.
This is the best description of my homeland I've ever seen. By reading the Italian news one would think the main enemy of the Italian State are young people that are constantly berated, ridiculed and forced to keep hearing how lazy they are.
If I get stabbed in Italy the newspaper would title “A 34 year old boy has been stabbed in the park”, if a 18 year old get stabbed in the UK the newspaper would title “A 18 year old man has been…”
Wow. Italy's demographics are basically reverse pyramid in just a decade. New babies are still precipitously falling off a cliff. There are actually an astonishing number of 80+ year old women.
Communism is not right wing. Maybe a typo, but historically the young on average prefer left leaning idealogies and become more conservative as they get older.
You have to differentiates between French Socialist and do communists of the east. French Socialism was very successful in the 70s and 80s. The reason France is so successful today is because of the communist regime in the 70s and 80s.
> French Socialism was very successful in the 70s and 80s. The reason France is so successful today is because of the communist regime in the 70s and 80s.
This is wrong as in those two decades there were at most 4 years of socialism ("programme commun de la gauche"):
-----------------------------------------------
Party | President ........................| Tenure
-----------------------------------------------
Right | Charles de Gaulle ..........| 8 January 1959 – 28 April 1969
Right | Georges Pompidou ........| 20 June 1969 – 2 April 1974
Right | Valéry Giscard d'Estaing | 27 May 1974 – 21 May 1981
Left ..| François Mitterrand ........| 21 May 1981 – 17 May 1995
(yet soon the number of people out of work topped 2 million, and in March 1983 they drop most socialists policies when they introduced the "austerity turn" and in 1986 Jacques Chirac (Right) was prime minister up to 1995)
My bad. I meant 80s 90s.
And even before and after that presidents had to interact with a strong socialist parliament. Living in france and germany I see the benefits of that time. I mean we have health care and transit systems and etc….
There is a huge difference between the democratic sovialist movements of the west and the totalarian socialist regime of the east.
Edit: litle other example. In france there is a shitload of free culture sponsored by the state to make it accesible to everyone.
Oh there was no real socialism after 1984 either. The Parti Socialiste always had an unclear/contradictory agenda, pro banks, anti industry, pro unions, anti low pay/service workers.
The insanely huge "code du travail" distinguishes between many kind of workers. Depending on your status or the kind of branch you work, you might work 35h/week, 48h/w or 60h/w. In the two later cases exceeding working hours must be compensated at a minimum of 50%, but it can be at suitable times for the employer.
Daily work duration must not be above 10 hours per day but it is permitted to work 12 hours per day if there is a "convention collective", the employer has only to permit a rest time of 50% of exceeding working hours.
For some categories of workers this daily work duration limit legally does not exist at all. For example employees on a flat rate in days (like "cadres"/low level executives) are not subject to this limit.
Fortunately for the Parti Socialiste, service workers, lorry drivers, housekeepers, nannies, etc do not vote much and it is very difficult for them to integrate a union, as most unions (CGT/CFDT/SUD) only protect workers with a contract (roughly half of workers in France).
Ok thats true … but stil compared to the US there are some social goals. And there are many unions and rights for workers. For sure there is a shitload of bad things, I mean its france ..cmon, but there are some milestones compared to other countries. Specialy the US. Like right to abortion(downvotes incoming) and the right to maternal vacancy… they can even protest without getting fired….
To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher “Socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money”.
And the ironic part is when the people asking to maintain social programs complain too much attention is paid to economic growth - the very source of what pays for those programs.
The truth is as economies stagnate and the demographic shift happens, Western Europe will have no choice but to cut back programs.
You cant maintain the same system when you go from 1 worker and we retired to 1 worker and 2 retired.
It’s amazing how many fans of socialism, such as yourself, don’t see the connection.
The UK would be even less able to afford social programs if the economy had continued on its pre-Thatcher slide down.
And calling the UK third world just shows how laughable the understanding is - try “socialist paradises” like Greece where much of the economy has gone underground because the tax burden is so high in people who can barely make ends meet.
It was a dumb idea to conect the social system to the economie…. But still a social system has a lots of benefits that are apparent if you once lives in the us and europe. What would be your solution for schooling, housing etc… just keep dumb people dying on the street because somehow the market will regulate it??
Edit: because even if the economie goes bad there are humans living there that need a certain baseline of living. In the capitalist world there is only taking more debt , cuttings and hope … if that doesnt work.. what then??
Adorno once said that one cant do right in the wrong world. Right can only be done in a right world.
Its hard to sustain socialism if its bound to capitalism
I've known this since I was a teen in Croatia as well, two decades ago. Doesn't mean I was planning for retirement or depressed by it. There's a huge leap between knowing generational national pension systems are bust and being depressed about retirement as a teenager.
Teen years are about forming a self image - social media fucks that up in so many ways - it's really next level compared to what my generation had growing up. Glad it was just starting when I was a teenager.
My assumption, I'm in my 40s now, has been since before going to University that my state pension, if any, will be a bonus I can share with grand kids. I have to find a way to finance retirement myself, somehow. Which is bleak, even bleaker for all those low paying blue collar "job" that sprung up in the last two decades. And I don't think the gig economy is rock bottom for now.
Is this the root cause forental health issues? I don't think so. I'd rate climate change, uncertainty and media living of controversial topics and FUD as serious reasons as well. All topped by social pressure. And all of that is drven, enabled and aggrevated by the current social media. We will figure it out, as we figured out mass media before. Maybe we just started figuring it out. Until er do so, we will pay a price.
Would ve interesting to hear what the affected people, teenagers, have to say about all that.
This is also the case for Spain. Since I was a teenager (also in my 30s) it was a pretty common theme. Not only pensions, but pretty much everything is a scheme where yougnsters are doomed no matter what.
I remember my history teacher telling us about it and people saying they knew, and they also knew that they couldn't change it unless boomers were on board, which they weren't at the time, and definitely still in the same position.
Lived in Europe for four years and come back to my resident American hellhole and now the gray-haired extremists stacked our highest court so they can ban abortion after they legalized it when they were young and in control of society... slowly but surely turning towards fascism as a last ditch attempt to create the world that they dreamed of in their childhood while talking about "love and peace"... funnily enough just like the old Russians currently throwing a tantrum because their precious dream the USSR died.
Scholz and co. are too self-centered to accept a hit to their economy in exchange for de-clawing the next Hitler. Rutte and co. are too greedy to allow for a deeper union. Macron has a business-friendly "mandate" despite only being elected for not being Le Pen. We are all tired of the largesse of the old and the few.
> You think teenagers are thinking about pensions... If they are they are probably already having mental issues because that's not something someone pre 20s should be concerned about.
This is happening, based on my own experience. I am 22, I have a safe job with an above average salary but I still cannot find an apartment with my partner. I can’t imagine affording my own place with the current prices, especially not at the age my parents were able to. And all of that concerns are completely ignoring the current price hikes which make everything even worse.
For as long as I can remember teachers and my parents told me that the pension system won’t be able to support my generation. Everybody my age who can afford to does not expect any substantial pension payments and tries to support the own future by own investments (which is pretty hard when you pay +400€/mo into the mandatory public pension)
The situation is even worse for people with lower incomes.
This is not projection. Admittedly, this is my experience. But I know many many people who had similar experiences when they first entered the workforce.
> I have a safe job with an above average salary but I still cannot find an apartment with my partner.
Do you have an above average salary for the region you're looking for the apartment in? If so, then who's getting those apartments, if the majority of people cannot afford them? Is this a special case like SF where there's just not enough apartments being built for the size of population?
> Do you have an above average salary for the region you're looking for the apartment in?
Yes, the salary seems to only be part of the issue. Some of the landlords seemed to be slightly offended that a young person makes so much money. Other landlords were searching for long term tenants and did not believe that a young couple was looking to settle down for long enough.
> If so, then who's getting those apartments, if the majority of people cannot afford them?
The supply is super limited. Judging by the rejections I received the landlords are primarily looking for well off young families which the seem to find without a problem. One landlord told me that she received 120 messages within 48h, she basically can choose whoever she wants.
> Is this a special case like SF where there's just not enough apartments being built for the size of population?
This is generally the case all over (west-) Germany. In more rural areas and small towns there is basically no rental market, but purchasing is still unaffordable for most. In my hometown (rural with average income) land prices more than doubled in the last 10 years.
So many young people choose to move to the next city. In my target city, the cheapest apartments I could find for purchase were around 400k€ from 70s to 90s, new construction was usually well above 500k. Rental prices are equally absurd.
I don’t know if you were offended by that comment, but just because you may not have considered your future in your teens (don’t know if you did or didn’t, but that doesn’t matter) doesn’t mean that all others also did not. For example in my teens I was very much concerned with what I’d do when i was older and whether or not I’d be able to buy a house or afford to go to college.. these are not strictly adult concerns. Also kids see and hear their parent(s) worrying about money or student loans or mortgage or rent and it’s not unreasonable that they too become concerned about those things.
> “People in this thread need to stop projecting their problems and worldviews as universal social issues.”
But you are doing just the same thing by dismissing peoples perspectives and opinions as irrelevant….
This is part of the effort to kill it. If enough people believe it is a ponzi scheme, unsustainable, etc. then the political impetus to either privatize or get rid of it can be mustered.
Social security is very popular among the working classes (especially retired ofc) and deeply unpopular among the upper classes who see it as a tax burden on them that makes their workers lazy.
To be honest, I see it as a failing system that needs to be cut away amd replaced with something better (or be "reformed" if politicking requires it to keep the same name)
I was just providing my experience that my generation does think about it.
It’s more-so to do with the fact that the account was emptied, and now it’s a bit of a pyramid scheme. Also the board themselves saying they’re out of money in 2034: https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2021/
I'm 57 and I've been told that my entire life too. Born in Dec. of '64, I'm technically a boomer but have only seen the economic dregs and I identify 100% as a GenX. My political birth was the Sex Pistols.
I was told repeatedly starting at probably 12 years old that I'd never see my social security benefits pay out. Probably before that too, but I distinctly remember it around middle school. It was very similar to what the comment you're replying to describes. Just because you're not planning your retirement doesn't mean you're not picking up on cues from people who are.
But back then the age pyramid wasn't yet inverted. Right now it actually is literally upside down in some countries, e.g. in Germany. In the next ~5 years the biggest age group within the German population will retire. That inversion will continue for a few decades.
As the age structure 'moves upwards' it shrinks due to some people dying. What I'm guessing is that retirement ages will continue to increase to the point where that birth year group which is the biggest now won't be as large anymore due to attrition - that whatever band where the pyramid is still inverted will simply be defined as "working non-retirement age", even if that is decades older than now.
yes, and back then you could fully retire at a much younger age - in the US at least, the full retirement age keeps increasing, and neither party is going to vote for any policy that allows SS to collapse; just not going to happen.
The fear-mongers have been alive and well for 40+ years, have no doubt they will continue to push the fear - its good for news clips and web clicks, if nothing else.
> If they are they are probably already having mental issues because that's not something someone pre 20s should be concerned about.
they should be. Perhaps not worry or be anxious about it, but definitely should know about the financial implications of having to retire one day, and how they could fund that retirement. May be even work on how one might fund an early retirement, etc.
Not thinking about long term financial planning is a failing of the education system (or parents, as it falls onto them when the state fails on policy grounds).
> You think teenagers are thinking about pensions...
A lot of them will be doing that, yes. They're teenagers until their 20th birthday, and a lot of people start to work between 16 and 20. In Germany, all of them will be paying a lot of their paycheck for the current pensioners.
It's called a generational contract here, and it boils down to current workers paying the current pensions - so when theyre ready for theirs, it will be the responsibility of that workforce to shoulder that burden.
This will fail within the next 20-30 years, realistically speaking and arguably already failed, as current pensioners are often extremely poor.
The parent comment was spot on with their comment wrt Germany, which was the context they explicitly set
I've started working in my teens - retirement was the last thing on my mind, my peers as well.
If you're worried about that in your youth you're setting yourself up for a boring and depressing life. Youth should be about exploration, taking on challenges and risks, figuring out what you want to do in life - not thinking about what you're going to do past your productive years.
> You think teenagers are thinking about pensions... If they are they are probably already having mental issues because that's not something someone pre 20s should be concerned about.
I was actually just talking with a teacher friend about this very thing (he lives in Germany btw). He was essentially expressing his surprise that the high-school students (well Gymnasium technically), were at the age of ~17-19 already planning their whole live in terms of career, money etc.. That is definitely very different to how it was back when I was a teenager, where one essentially started studying what one was interested in, with career paths being somewhat secondary.
So in short, anecdotal evidence is that yes teenagers are already thinking about their pensions now.
> People in this thread need to stop projecting their problems and worldviews as universal social issues.
While this is correct, we should also not project our memory of what it was to be a teenager > 10 years ago, onto todays teenagers.
I agree with you - and I've noticed this trend with my teenage brother as well - it seems like prepping for career since kindergarten really peaked - but I wouldn't say this has much to do with retirement planning. I do think kids these days have a lot of pressure from early on to perform, at least from what I see anecdotally.
Being expected to go to a good college, and that being seen as a gateway to decent standard of living is having an effect on kids for sure.
> You think teenagers are thinking about pensions...
German here. Yes we absolutely fucking did, especially as our parents pushed us from early on to obtain as much education as we could because unlike even in the 80s, manual labor would not be enough to sustain a family or to have a comfortable retirement.
Retirement planning is a different thing from career pressure. I agree that's been increasing consistently - but even if your retirement was guaranteed - that wouldn't change anything about this problem - you aren't chassing a career so you can live well past 60s, and if you are, as a teen, you probably need to have counseling because you're setting yourself up for a depressing life.
It’s a decently big issue that’s affecting you more the later you were born, we already heard about it when we were teenagers, but now it’s far more prominent in the media than it was back then.
Aside from what other people already mentioned that some teens actually do care, I think you're making a mistake conflating "worrying about the future" (which teens absolutely _should_ do to a reasonable extent), and having mental issues.
It's a rather big jump from being concerned about one's future (and the society's future) to having mental issues just from that. It's also not very constructive to perpetuate the idea that being careless about the future right way to live one's teenage years.
In the UK, recent tax rises to pay off some of the Covid debt were pretty openly designed to avoid asking older people to contribute. (Roughly, national insurance, paid by workers, went up rather than income tax. Only after opposition in Parliament did they extend it to include over 65s who still work).
Young people are definitely extremely aware that they sacrificed a lot over the last two years to protect the elderly and now the elderly are not being asked to contribute back.
This is before you consider climate change, about which young people are generally much more informed and concerned.
Boomers don’t care because it won’t affect them. I know that sounds hyperbolic but I genuinely think it’s true. Those who are aware of the problems focus on helping their immediate descendants.
Also, it's really easy to see how social media is directly affecting kids' mental health. Instagram, TikTok, SnapChat, YouTube, Twitch, on these sites are an endless stream of people their who are better looking, smarter, more successful, funnier, more interesting than them. If you have insecurities, these sites will amplify them. And if you admire someone on one of these platforms, that person literally has no idea who you are and that admiration will not be reciprocated. But unlike the celebrities of yore, a kid can leave comments in a livestream or on a picture or a video and get a response, and they might end up developing a parasocial relationship.
It was bad enough when I was in high school when all we had was Facebook, because we were comparing the whole of ourselves to our peers in their best light. It is so much worse now.
I don't believe the social medias are that much different from what preceding generations were exposed to; TV, magazines, movies, etc all showed more idealized lifestyles.
The one difference I will point out though, is that with social media it becomes a lot more attainable to become like that. There's complete randoms that became celebrities through social media - and they don't even need to be conventionally attractive like the celebrities of old.
If you want to claim that social media is very similar to TV/magazine, then you should provide some reasons for this.
The difference you point out actually adds to the mental health issues. Because it is not at all "a lot more attainable to become" a celeb on SM than on TV. If this claim was true, then the percentage of celebs would be higher today than it was then; i.e. 0.1% of the population vs 0.01%. That is not the case. There is only one Kardishan family.
But because it seems easier, then it is also easier to blame yourself for not achieving it.
> I don't believe the social medias are that much different from what preceding generations were exposed to; TV, magazines, movies, etc all showed more idealized lifestyles.
It is: TV was never meant to make you believe it's real or that someone's life is actually like that. "Reality" TV was always deliberately focused on drama.
This is ignoring the popularity of shows like The Jersey Shore or The Real Housewives of ___, which I can tell you from experience, people took as "real life" and emulated.
> I don't believe the social medias are that much different from what preceding generations were exposed to; TV, magazines, movies, etc all showed more idealized lifestyles.
You're overlooking the demographic targeting, and how that seeks to place content before the user's eyes that generates the "most engagement". That mechanism right there makes social media SIGNIFICANTLY different.
> Situation wrt to teen mental health is similar in Europe, but there's a much smaller graduation debt.
But Europe has far lower professional salaries than the US.
Also economic conditions definitely have a big impact, I could finally buy a small flat after years of renting and it's such a great change to be able to make changes in your own home and buy your own things.
Both for you and the person you are replying to, I would caution that “Europe” isn’t one country like the USA, even just the EU is 27 smaller countries in a trenchcoat — the average may be lower, but bits are higher.
Yeah, I am European, I've lived and worked in 3 different EU countries.
But Americans really don't appreciate how lucky they are. An American CS college grad can earn more than almost all senior/staff engineers anywhere in the EU e.g. ~$150k.
The idea that the United States is conceptually a single country is our single greatest flaw. We’d all be so much better off if we just admitted strong consensus is vanishingly unlikely between every state and territory. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. People can disagree and chip in on a military to defend their shared interests, like staying alive, together.
I don’t think the EU and the US are very different. Then again, Texas isn’t exiting. (No disrespect, just pointing out the difference.) But divisions in the EU are very familiar to Americans and understandable for the exact same reason.
Asking a Californian to understand and relate to the issues of a Missourian deeply, and vice versa, is a little unfair to both and we’d all be so much happier if we were simply fine with that. People are different. The idea of the United States has been forcing it in a lot of unwilling minds for a long time, I think, and the consequential bitterness that really has no reason whatsoever to exist is unfortunate.
No offence, everyone is the same in the United States. You talk of left and right but you're both playing the same ball game. I'm from the American South and I lived in Europe for four years with the rest in the Northeast US, so I do actually know. Just because people pick the different color team doesn't make them different than you.
The same unstable people in New York go hard left and the same unstable people in Mississippi go hard right... and the issues just don't matter. Identity politics are some random anti-boomer gotcha thing. Abortion isn't even a subject unless you're Roman Catholic because it's never mentioned in the New Testament... and uh, abortion is legal in Italy by the way. It's the lowest brow, dumbest nonsense you could ever imagine when you come back from living in the real world.
Ever heard of a different language? What about a dialect? How many dialects are there in, say, the Netherlands? Hundreds are commonly spoken, and they are not mutually intelligible. Histories thousands of years old, deep cultural divisions, and we're "the same"? Lol, read a textbook. Hop on a plane, please. For the love of god
While we surely have more similarities than The people of the Netherlands have differences, we also have enough differences to not qualify us as the same. I think what’s not really understood is that picking democrats or republicans is not an end sum game. A sizable people probably don’t even know or care of either parties full platform. For some, certain beliefs that a party posses are enough for people to align with them and some of these beliefs are fundamental to who they are.
Can a person from Kentucky and New York share beliefs ? Of course. Are we the same ? Women and LGBTQ+ people might disagree.
> Can a person from Kentucky and New York share beliefs ? Of course.
What I'm trying to say is that extremism boils down to the same flawed mental processes, whether you are left leaning or right leaning. Once your first culture is "broken" by being immersed in another one for long enough, you realize that it is all a matter of circumstance.
> Are we the same ? Women and LGBTQ+ people might disagree.
If you lived in the South, you might understand that women are the biggest enforcers of the status quo. You imply in a very simple way that it's not in their best interest, but it is, really.
If you are from a wealthy family, being a white woman in the American South is great. You have all the control in the world. It's not hard power, only soft power. But who cares? Your husband with all the hard power is wrapped around your finger... who cares about the recognition? It's a small price to pay for real control. You are also never expected to work, maybe part-time at a flower shop, or at charity fundraisers... you can even hire a nanny and still be a "stay-at-home mom". Who is saying this isn't a good deal?
Most people, pretty much by definition, aren’t rich. What’s it like for the median person (split by gender or not as you like) in one place vs. the other?
The reality is that it doesn't matter. Most people don't hold the cards, the rich and influential do, even in the fairest countries. That effect is even more pronounced in the global South, the large majority of areas near the equator have higher entrenched income inequality than those farther away.
Did the thread drift without me noticing again? I thought this thread was about cultural differences between parts of America[0] rather than who has power inside it?
[0] a topic about which I know basically nothing, as I’ve only visited the USA for a total of 4 months total and not lived in it properly, and while that was both east and west coast and covered 8 states, it was mostly spent in the company of a literal self-described anarcho-communist Green Party activist who I strongly suspect isn’t even vaguely representative of any part of the USA.
This thread drifted the second ‘engineeringwoke’ (lol) responded to it and misconstrued my point so hard that it’s blatantly intentional.
The vitriol shared (i.e., that I need to “read a textbook for the love of god”) simply for advocating for understanding one another and pointing out that we’re not that dissimilar from the EU, despite less history, is kind of proving my point about people being snide assholes for absolutely no reason. It’s exactly the bitterness I’m highlighting to see people so keen to win an argument that they assume you’re uneducated because they disagree with you, and I guess it’s surprising to get it back on what I figured would be a universally agreeable opinion (that we should all chill out and appreciate our differences).
What a trainwreck of a response chain. Good lord. I didn’t say left or right once. I was alluding to the issues faced by people in different geographies which has absolutely nothing to do with politics nor identity politics. For example, water availability is a major concern in California. It isn’t in Missouri.
How ironic to advocate for understanding one another, apparently fail to communicate that point, and get put in my place for daring to dream.
You didn’t. Don’t worry, I can spot an advanced persistent troll when I see one. You still have a little 8kun on you that you forgot to shake off before you rolled that HN account. You’re not that good, either, because really I left that comment partially to smoke out that you’re refreshing old threads constantly just wanting your opinion to be loved. Satisfying to be right.
That’s why I talked past you. You’re irrelevant and transparent in your motivations, and a smarter site would have already flagged you for stirring a political flame war and stoking racial and socioeconomic divisions with nothing clever or unique to add to it. I read the troll right away. (Tip: You’ve encountered a better one, as evidenced by your comment.)
How precious, you lived in Europe for four years and run your mouth like an enlightened world traveler. You made sure everyone knows that, too, like it’s some kind of mark on your resume and somehow dismisses your arrogant American perspective of explaining the world to the world. Meanwhile, some of us got out of Soviet Hungary and have been to more countries than you have states, and still believe the world can be better. Crazy, I know. Hard to understand from the keyboard cavalry.
Yeah I read the threads in my comments when I post, probably every 30 minutes.
I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands. Learned the language, worked at a bunch of startups, started my own company. It's certainly a big part of who I am, as you found out ;)
It's funny because I know you're American because of the obsession of going to different countries like you're collecting boy scout medals. Oh, and collecting ancestries too, since Soviet Hungary happened over 100 years ago? How does that mean anything?
And I talk like this because I'm young and it's fun, I was never a 4channer. It's why Elon Musk does it, you should try it. It does seem to work! And yeah, I would like to not be mean, but like you're making accounts to get around reply restrictions, it's kind of ridiculous
Almost every Western country shows similar issues, especially given professionals working jobs most prevalent in cities and expected to go to office. It'd be more apt to name the exceptions that confirm the rule.
Generally speaking, cost of living is proportional to income; I could move inside my small country to a place twice as big, but if I were to get a job close to where I live it'd slash my wages by a lot to the point where I wouldn't actually be able to live there.
That said, if you can work remotely, you can move south or east and live a lot cheaper. It just has to be your thing to move to a new country.
In addition to what @nivenkos says, it lowers geographic demand for goods/services in the place you moved from, so costs in the old place go up slower (or even down) because you moved, while also increasing demand (and in turn potentially increasing overall economic output) for geographic goods/services in the new place. It’s a levelling effect in both cases.
Of course, remote working also seems to often cause pay cuts to match local cost of living, and also opens the possibility of being outsourced to extremely low income nations (same effect to a larger degree, especially as it might not be the same person doing the work).
> But Europe has far lower professional salaries than the US.
We don't have to pay ludicrous amounts for healthcare though, and rents are also way way WAY lower here than in the US - even London, Berlin and Munich are nowhere near US levels.
What are you comparing with? I'd really like to see some comparisons in Numbeo or similar. Rent takes similar portions of the budget in several of these cities for professionals, even compared to several American metropolises.
Uh, Munich has incredibly expensive house prices. It's over 1M Euros to buy for anything of a reasonable size. Developer salaries are around 65k. You can get a little cheaper by going to a neighbouring towns, but the stupidly high prices continue for many km. The main problem is the very low interest rates leading to crazy inflation.
Rents are a bit better, but compared to developer salaries it's much more expensive than the US. It's also extremely hard to find places to rent, and landlords are very picky about who they will let to.
> The 80s weren't a happy time, and there are no signs that that had such an impact on teen mental health
Are we sure about that? The fun thing with a lot of childhood trauma can take years to surface, let alone figure out. I personally wonder whether it has contributed to our race towards a kleptocratic society.
I can say that personally, while I was born in the early 80s, the recession had an impact on my family. Essentially, my parents chose to focus their efforts on making sure we could get as many college grants/scholarships as possible. An insanely intense focus on education and being able to sustain oneself. Didn't quite work out how they hoped.
'Don't try to downplay the role of internet, mobile devices and social media'
Exhibit A people: we have impeding total collapse of the ecosystem, and they blame 'too many phones'. Have you spoken to a teenager lately? All my younger colleagues are convinced they are the ones that will have to deal with the mess, and they are probably right
It's funny how people don't associate the endless stream of shiny gadgets they own, that are stuffed full with the latest and greatest in rare minerals, with the destruction of the ecosystem.
Buying a smartphone every year or two absolutely pales in comparison with having to rent a poorly insulated flat that is heated with oil in a city that forces you to own a car to get to work in a country that mostly burns coal and gas for electricity. Individual choices can only save a small part of your emissions. Blaming individuals for problems that need state policy is an effective tool of fossil fuel interest groups.
Ah so I'm a shill for the fossil fuel industry, because I believe in the power of individual choices? Fantastic. FWIW I had made no mention of emissions - I was talking purely about destruction of the ecosystem (which was the phrase used in the parent comment). I believe that (in some cases, deliberately) ignoring those impacts of our consumer habits makes us in the West the greatest force for planetary destruction. It won't matter if the planet is a few degrees warmer in a few decades, if there are no trees left.
The embodied energy of a person's collection of tech absolutely does sit in the same ballpark as heating and transportation energy costs. Once you've added up your smartwatch, phone, laptop, tv, monitors, etc, I wouldn't be surprised if it was about the same energy as that required to heat your home for a year.
"because I believe in the power of individual choices? "
"The embodied energy of a person's collection of tech absolutely does sit in the same ballpark as heating and transportation energy costs."
You believe in silly ideas like this because you never bothered tp grab a calculator. If you did, you would know that embodied energy of all you electronics in a couple 1000 megajoules. Thats the same as two tanks of petrol, and all you life choices add up to nothing.
We've been at this 'individual responsebility' crap for 50 years. They've got you right where they want tou.
>If you did, you would know that embodied energy of all you electronics in a couple 1000 megajoules.
A very quick Google will tell you that a laptop alone is 4500MJ, or about 4 tanks of petrol (although I'm not too sure about that source, as it claims that a refrigerator is even more than that).
Once again, I'll point out that I started out discussing the overall environmental impacts. CO2 emissions and energy usage are only part of that - how do you justify the mineral extraction techniques that are necessary for all of the nice shiny things we own?
Using your argument back at you, who benefits from claiming that it's ok to continue consuming as we are because the government isn't forcing us to behave better? They've got you right where they want you - a righteous eco warrior with all the gadgets.
Yes, the embodied energy of our gadgets and toys isn't everything (and is not the only "life choice" I make). However, it's significant, especially coupled with the other environmental harms. If it's so essential to save the planet that we must all switch to EVs (and for about a 50% reduction in CO2 output over the lifetime of the car), where's the argument that we need half the number of TVs?
Edit:
>a couple 1000 megajoules. Thats the same as two tanks of petrol
Yes, hydrocarbons are unreasonably energy-dense and cheap. I hope you're ready for them becoming very expensive/unavailable.
> a laptop alone is 4500MJ, or about 4 tanks of petrol
Doesnt matter, make it 10. My laptop is 5 years old. So, how it even close to the amount tou spend on transport or heating in 3 months. You claim is preposterous! They are small objects, they don't add up to much!
"how do you justify the mineral extraction techniques that are necessary for all of the nice shiny things we own?"
The younger generatuon owns less stuff than the generstion before. Car ownership is down, home ownership is down, tb owneship, fancy camera owneship. How many hundreds of smartphones do you think it takes to make up the resources consumed by one car?
>How many hundreds of smartphones do you think it takes to make up the resources consumed by one car?
Interesting question. According to this source[1], a car, weighing 20,000 times more than a mobile phone, takes 400 times the energy to manufacture. Alternatively, one car is 22 laptops, or 100 tablets. As we seem to get through electronics at maybe 5-10x the rate of cars, those numbers start to look pretty close. Hopefully, you don't have a desktop too, as there are about 10 of those to one car. Nor one of those fancy new ultrawidescreen TVs, as there are less than a handful of those to one car[2]
From that same paper, an obsession with just the energy cost of items completely misses the point. Eg:
"There is significant concern regarding the uncertainty around GHG emissions abatement for integrated circuit and LCD screen fabrication—particularly for perfluorinated compounds (PFC). PFCs range between 7,000 and 17,000 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide (CO2) based on 100-year Global Warming Potential GWP5. And while CO2 has atmospheric lifetimes between 30 and 95 years, PFCs can last 740 to 50,000 years (Pew Climate 2010)."
I'm not really sure why I'm complaining. Thanks to investments in the company my partner works for (a mining company), this renewables and tech boom is doing great things for our finances. Do you have any interests in mining?
Why do you keep trying to prove your original point which is impossible to prove because it contradicts laws of physics?
Your claim was that consumption of physical goods, and electric gargets in particular, is a bigger source of emissions than transportation and heating -> that is physically impossible because transportation and heating account for 65% of global energy use! All of industry is 20%, and only a tiny fraction of that is the smartphoens and gadgets. You are railing against 5% of global emissions and are trying to convince me that this is where the problem lies.
Also all of your 'individual choices' add up to nothing - residential energy use is 6%, less than half of industry is consumer goods, so add another 6%. So that's 12%, that's about all you can affect.
>It's funny how people don't associate the endless stream of shiny gadgets they own, that are stuffed full with the latest and greatest in rare minerals, with the destruction of the ecosystem.
You and others have insisted on making this a discussion about energy use, despite me repeatedly steering us back to the topic. Electronic gadgets are terrible for the ecosystem, and in more ways than just raw manufacturing energy usage (which is very high, considering the size of the units, and how many of them we get through).
>Your claim was that consumption of physical goods, and electric gargets in particular, is a bigger source of emissions than transportation and heating
In the places where I did make such comparisons, I was talking about domestic transportation and heating, as I hope was clear. As your above figures also show, they are quite comparable.
Does your 6% figure for domestic energy usage include domestic heating? If so, it seems that a lot of your 65% figure for "global transportation and heating" will consist of transportation.
What do you propose we do (or at least, get mandated)?
>Perhaps it's social media that makes that they are either too aware of it or simply mention it more often.
Here's a question for me to understand where you're coming from and you to examine your assumptions. How does "too aware" get defined? Who defines it? I am an 80s kid(though grew up in India) and seen some issues myself, but can't claim
I am worse off for knowing what I did.
And to be clear, I didn't have internet till the start of the millenium and relied on books, radio and newspapers and I still was more about the state of the world i was to inherit than my parents.
> How does "too aware" get defined? Who defines it?
It doesn't seem that difficult to get a proxy for awareness; perhaps "more aware" had been a better choice of words. But however it's measured, it's not unreasonable to assume that social media can promote awareness, and that thus the effect of social issues on mental health can still be mediated by social media.
> Perhaps it's social media that makes that they are either too aware of it or simply mention it more often.
Or rather, they see how historically threats were dealt with: lead was banned, CFCs were banned, sulphur in fuel was banned - in short, environmental threats were met with decisive action.
And then they see how scientists have warned for decades now about climate change and they can clearly see that nothing happens except a lot of useless bla-bla.
Children, even as young as ten, are not dumb. They can see and understand what is going on, and to recognize inaction and corruption in politics is not rocket science.
There are a lot of decisive action ideas to combat climate change (and a host of other issues). Right now out of the top of my head:
- impose a maximum limit on size, weight and fuel consumption of cars, ban SUVs and pickup trucks (and no, a tax won't work because the rich will simply buy their "freedom"). Exceptions only upon proof of need (e.g. commercial or farming usage).
- ban all inner-country flights of less than 2 hours duration (this one is not that applicable to the US but more towards Europe)
- improve passenger high speed rail networks in accessibility, affordability and speed
- improve (or, in some places, create) usable public transport systems to reduce the need for cars
- entirely ban naval cruise ships unless fueled by renewable fuel
- construct immense amounts of solar and wind electricity generation, invest into storage mechanisms and power-to-gas
- impose bans or limitations on concrete for construction (8% of global CO2 emissions result out of the manufacturing of concrete!)
- ban "fast fashion", impose durability requirements on clothing
- force all manufacturers to provide spare parts, 3D designs and tooling needed for repairs, no matter what kind of thing
- impose per-capita meat consumption quotas. Yes, this is communism-style, but we cannot sustainably continue with mass animal farming at the scale we are at.
> If the tax is enough to cover CO2 sequestration, where is the problem?
Social unrest, plain and simple. When the rich can continue their lives as usual and only the poors have to rein in their life style, there will eventually be riots. We're already seeing social unrest with the election results for the 45th in the US and the very near election of le Pen in France that runs on precisely this ideological framework.
Besides, we need to reduce the total CO2 emissions to keep the 2°C target, not just keeping the current emission amount.
> Why not the same exemption for sub 2-hour flights?
Same as above, plus the reduction in noise for the people living next to airports, and (more an issue in Europe) reduce the amount of space that is needed for airports. A high speed train is way more efficient in terms of energy, CO2 emissions and required staffing than an airplane is.
I don’t think any of these proposals are as strong as the case for banning lead in fuel. However maybe I’m biased by living at a time where it’s already banned.
I absolutely believe that much of social media is a cess pit at the behest of the advertising industry.
For some it will be liberation and an incredible tool to leverage but for many it will be just a waste of their life and even, for some, the end of their lives. I left Facebook years ago and recently left Twitter for higher quality sources.
But ... your "One." is distasteful ...
The GFC caused a decade of austerity and quiet unseen cuts in support and public service. If we agree there should, in fact, be some form of safety net, they had had many holes cut in that net in the last 15 years.
Where I am, I was one of the last who had their Uni tuition paid for, I had a relatively fun time growing up, my wife and I bought a property when they had gone through multiple incredible price increases, we have just paid off a mortgage, no matter what happens next short of a world war, we'll be ok. I cannot imagine how we would have done that in today's enviroment ... look beyond this forum and your own experience.
I feel absolutely gutted for the continuous squeeze the generation that followed me have endured. And, considering the outlook, the next recession seems on its way just to compound things at a time when exogenous inflation is all the rage.
It's a mess.
So, please hold both factors in mind. Social media is the cesspit that has amplified just an incredible economics and political mess of the last 15 years.
> Don't try to downplay the role of internet, mobile devices and social media.
The first thing that was said is that Social media definitely amplifies it. I don’t think that’s a dismissal.. you don’t have to be on social media, you just have to hear or read or watch the news.
Their parents experienced multiple, poverty is the actual trickle down economics. Middle class is the new living paycheck to paycheck having to do without insurance and requiring two individuals to do anything. Yet government thinks it's too much money and won't cover education costs and even if they did universities are ever more irrelevant and filled with money and politics just the same as Congress.
If seems like one continuous recession since 2008 - at least here in the UK, and I suspect also in many places. Nearly a decade and a half of austerity and failure: what does that do to their hopes for the future? My children (both teenagers) ask me "has it always been like this?" I was a child/teen in the seventies and I remember thinking the same thing.
Add to that the perma-war, the climate crisis, massive and pervasive social inequality, housing and employment precarity, Trump/Putin, Brexit...
> Perhaps it's social media that makes that they are either too aware of it or simply mention it more often.
Teenagers know what's coming down the road. They just, broadly, haven't developed the adult habits of denial and avoidance yet. We need to listen to them, not tell them that they are "too aware".
We used to have the cold war and the nuclear bomb threat, WWII, the Communist devastation of Asia, not to mention global poverty in general, and the old global warming". The "climate crisis isn't a new kid of psychological threat.
Are you claiming that the event referred to as the "Great Recession" and described by the IMF as "the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression" wasn't really major?
It depends where you are ? A male kid from Kentucky probably didn’t see his life get worse in the last 60 years. A kid from Yemen & Afghanistan (and now Ukraine) more than likely did.
Did this kid go to college? Did he buy a house? Did he get married and have kids? Did he buy a car? Did he have any sort of major illness at any point along the way?
If he experienced any of these relatively common life activities (and many more out there I'm sure) they are more difficult economically than they were 60 years ago.
Obviously it's a matter of degrees and I'm sure he wouldn't trade places with his counterpart in Yemen...but to argue that life hasn't changed for him in 60 years as an American seems a bit wrong.
If you were a boy 60 years ago in Kentucky, the timing was right for you to be drafted for the Vietnam War a little later in life. My father was. He was sent there against his will, injured during combat, and carried a lifelong burden from what he experienced. My father's friends and brothers avoided his fate by preemptively "volunteering" for service that would keep them away from combat. I remember that every time I envy how great the economy was for his generation. Life was hard in other ways.
I have family in small town Appalachia. 60 years ago their towns were still growing. New infrastructure was being built. Jobs were plentiful.
These days tons of those small towns are dying. People don't care to live out there anymore. Factories keeping towns alive closed in the late 90's. Coal mines closed. Rail yards are quiet since the factories aren't receiving and shipping and the coal mines aren't moving coal. Other than some fast food chains, its almost hard to find infrastructure built since the late 80s. States like KY and WV are largely these small dying towns, not mostly big cities.
I'm not arguing that overall life in the US has gone down in 60 years or that we should be starting up the coal mines. I'm just trying to suggest Kentucky probably wasn't the best place to pick to suggest life not getting worse; for tons of people in Appalachia life has gotten worse over the last 60 years. Note, this isn't even a small town vs. big city argument, there are plenty of small towns out there that have had their own booms and due to the US tendency to sprawl our cities out places that used to be small backwater towns are now shiny new mini-cities attached to giant sprawling city regions.
Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe.
The study in question debates young teens, ages 11-13 and 13-15, well before college.
In my experience as a parent of young teens, while they're sensitive to climate issues and of course "suffered" [1] during the pandemic, they aren't politicized, don't care about house prices, and don't know what "inflation" even means.
What they do know is what TikTok is, and what it means to be excluded from a Whatsapp group, and to spend hours each day wondering how they should reply to a perceived slight on some Discord channel.
I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat (I don't use them myself, at all) but can't really outlaw Whatsapp because all communications go through it.
It's an uphill battle but as a parent I'm extremely resentful to FAANG to put us all through this.
[1] I put this in quotes because my kids quite liked the lockdown; they didn't have to go to school and could play in the yard all day. (Of course their experience would have been different if we lived in a city with no yard.)
- - -
Edit: Many angry replies; it seems my original post failed to make its point clearly. Let's try again.
I was replying to a comment that said, in essence, that environmental factors (the economy, politics, climate change) were probably more to blame than social media as an explanation for teens' mental health.
As a parent of young teens, I disagree on that specific argument. I think social media is much more to blame than anything else, for harming teens' mental health.
But in no way do I dismiss the existence of said environmental factors, or their effects on the well-being of people, in actual terms as well as in consequences on our anxiety levels.
I was 14 when I had to loan my parents some money, and was acutely aware that I would not be able to afford college.
I read the news every day and was smart enough to realize that things were not going so great (according to the news).
To say that kids are blissfully unaware of the world they are born into is just wrong. Social media makes it even more apparent.
This awareness helped me make the right decisions for myself (deciding to not go to college, for example), but I am fortunately mostly optimistic. The weight of the world crushed some of my peers.
I think it would be safe to say the majority of kids (at least in America) don’t share that same experience. Also, I’m not saying that to try and discredit your experience, I’m just acknowledging the counterpoint may not generalize well to the majority of teenagers in America.
I would disagree with this statement. My kids are 13 and 18 and are both acutely aware of what is going on in the world right now. They have friends who know that their parents are struggling and that they likely won't be able to afford to go to college, something that they had previously been told was absolutely necessary.
When I was a kid, I barely knew what was going on in my friend's lives. Today they are all on Discord, etc, and they talk. A lot.
They absolutely know what's going on in the world. It weighs on them.
Many kids in my high school had to make tough decisions around college – weighing the universities they could get into against the costs of said universities
The classmates who decided to do pre-med in-state versus out of state to get better tuition because a full doctor’s education is expensive
The few who got into Ivy leagues but ultimately decided against it because they got some financial aid, but not enough
The ones who graduated college and decided to get into consulting not because it was their passion, but because it paid well.
Even harder is when these kids’ parents are not well equipped to help make these tough decisions, because they never had to make them themselves.
You can suspend it for quite a while, but at some point reality kinda sets in and you’re faced with tough decisions.
"The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe"
That's just not true, though. I'm over 40: My first formal 'current events' portion of a social studies class happened when I was 12, IIRC. The first gulf war was the current topic.
Middle schoolers would be told now that they need to think about going to college, how doing well in high school is their only hope of a scholarship, and so on.
They know about political extremism: They just might not use those words. They might know someone that is queer and see the hate they get. Heck, they might be spewing the same hate as their parents.
They likely know about inflation even if they don't know what it is. Poverty - or even a tight budget - affects you as a child especially in the pre-teen and younger teen years. Parents stress over money, after all, and some of their peers might have struggled with homelessness, depending on where you live.
At 15, I had started to care about politics. I mean, I knew they were a thing since elementary (and the mock elections they held), but I saw how it affected me.
And of course they know about the fun things.
You probably didn't successfully forbit FB and Instagram if their friends don't use it: This is more common with younger folks than their parents. Plus, if they are out playing in the yard (Which I quit doing during middle school and there was no internet) they might be too young to care right now.
Our view of that was from the news, as well. The events in Ukraine are much more real-time and on social media. They see stories of children separated from their parents, of parents murdered, or all of them being killed in bombings.
These atrocities have always happened in war but now they are barely filtered and easily accessible.
"If it can happen to those children, it can happen to me."
I didn't even consider that when I wrote the response. I mean, I remember seeing the bombs on television and being a bit worried about it, but I imagine it seems a bit more 'real' now and there is so much more available.
An additional "sad-but-true" aspect is that people can disassociate atrocities because the people look different than they do. The people in Ukraine, in general, look Caucasian.
It shouldn't make a difference, of course, but for some people this makes it all the more real.
Yes they know about that just like they know about the plague and the possibility of an asteroid stroke destroying life on planet earth. But is inflation a big part of their day to day worries? Probably not. Political extremism maybe, but they're probably wrapped up in that as well. We've created a society where if you aren't openly fighting the bigots you are seen as allowing them to exist. So teens are very politically active and I wouldn't be surprised if it stresses them like it stresses adults. But unless they're experiencing poverty I don't think kids are getting depressed because they're worried about wealth inequality. Unless the teen in question is Karl Marx
Around 11 million children in the US live in poverty. A great number more children are poor to very poor (just over poverty might not be poverty, but it makes your life pretty bad). It probably isn't so bad in a country with a robust safety net (still poor, but not getting the full effects of poverty)
I don't know about wealth inequality being the specific worry, but knowing things are getting more expensive definitely has an effect on children. Suddenly, the parent is stressed and the uncertainty gets passed on. Though, I honestly am wondering if I've missed something because while I see things about money and inflation mentioned, I haven't actually seen folks mention wealth inequality.
Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them.
And than we trivialize how dangerous it is for their well being being bombarded by stories of personal success over nothing (being a popular tik toker is 99.99% luck) and let them do it anyway, because having to actually talk to them, have a meaningful relation with them or simply entertain them is hard and takes a lot of time and effort.
so we let the screen rise them.
> Not op, but I don't think op is trivializing how pandemic impacted youth, I think he's saying that youngster are more resilient than we think they are and we project ours fears on them.
I would argue that Youngsters are also more vulnerable, raw and new to the cruelties and realities of the world as they slowly get older. The only difference I see is that they become a mental bomb of mental health issues on a wide range of a spectrum.
I do not believe a kid who sees their family lose everything during a recession comes out 100% okay. Especially when you factor in how the recession affects the metal health of parents and in turn children if the parents do no deal with it in a Healthy way.
What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play? Those whose parents lost their jobs? Those that have been evicted because their parents could not pay ever increasing rents?
Besides, living in an economy that moves from recession to recession has an impact on the mental health of their parents, especially in economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US), and I’d be very surprised if that didn’t have repercussions on their kids’ mental health.
I don't disagree at all with you pointing out the plight of families and children less privileged than OP (where I am, there is now a steady stream of truly awful stories about what happened to young children during lockdown when the monitoring and intervention of society as a whole, and social services in particular, is suddenly and completely removed).
>economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US)
However, as a resident of the UK, I have to ask - how does it have a non-existent safety net?
> However, as a resident of the UK, I have to ask - how does it have a non-existent safety net?
Jobseeker’s Allowance is one forth of the average rent in London and I’m not sure you are entitled to it if you have any savings.
If you lose your private insurance you’d have to rely on the NHS, which is not as bad as what happens in the US, but it’s not in the same league of the French, German or even the Italian healthcare systems.
>Jobseeker’s Allowance is one forth of the average rent in London
Tricky issue. I do know that where I live (Wales), there are huge numbers of people living relatively comfortably on a benefit-funded lifestyle.
There's also a whole lot more to the UK safety net than Jobseeker's Allowance.
>If you lose your private insurance you’d have to rely on the NHS
If you don't mind me asking, are you a UK native? That's a fantastic turnaround of the typical sentiment about the NHS, which is that it's a shining example of what the wonders of socialised care can do, and how we can do without the evils of privatised healthcare. FWIW I agree with you - it's actually a stinking dump of a money pit, and an embarrassment to anyone who has experienced any other 1st world health care.
> There's also a whole lot more to the UK safety net than Jobseeker's Allowance.
Fine, but given what I pay in income tax and NI (~80K£ last year), I’d expect a lot more than 4-500£ per month plus (maybe?) 500£ of housing benefit and access to a food bank. I would expect at least 2–3-4 times that for at least one or two years, no questions asked. I understand this money may be enough to live in Wales, but I can’t be expected to relocate there because I lost my job.
> If you don't mind me asking, are you a UK native?
No, I’m not. Hence I’m immune to the NHS cult. :)
Unfortunately several members of my family have battle tested the Italian and the German healthcare systems. Half of them would have died horribly in the UK.
Not necessarily, in Germany you get a higher unemployment benefit if you used to earn more (because you paid more taxes and contributions). If I remember correctly, you get 60-70% of your salary capped at ~2-3K€ per month (plus some money for the kids and pension contributions), which is enough to live comfortably everywhere in the country.
If I lost my job in London, I’d fall instantly into a form of poverty that doesn’t exist anywhere else in Europe, notwithstanding the exorbitant amount of taxes I pay every year. Yes, you get some pocket money, that’s why I said the safety net is almost non-existent and not totally non-existent.
Well, here we've just picked a different set of winners and losers. Can you imagine the outcry if here we changed our benefits system to something like that Germany? "I've been out of work for years, and now this schmuck gets 40k a year for free?"
Again FWIW, I prefer something like that.
Then again, it seems you are aware of the rules of the game you are playing.
Whatever, but the result is that in London you don’t have a safety net. You lose your job, you get a section 21 notice the day after you miss a rent payment and you are in the streets with a child to feed.
> What about kids who didn’t have a yard where they could play?
> Those whose parents lost their jobs?
If you acknowledge that, you should also acknowledge that heir only window to the outside World was a screen where some a*hole from Dubai whose only purpose was selling themselves and the things they were dressing to their "followers" for money, was saying all day that "we're gonna be fine" and then we didn't, "we are gonna come out better" and then we didn't and they interiorized the idea that they will never make it, because they missed the train, they are only teenagers but social networks taught them that you go big or go home at the age of 13.
No matter how much support they get from families, their validation nowadays comes from social networks, their peers and who their peers follow or what trend is popular ATM.
Compare that to my father born in 1941, in fascist Italy, his father lost in the Russian campaign, his house occupied by nazi, met his father at the age of 6 and lost him soon after for an undiagnosed infection, lived through 3 World pandemics, in 1957 during the Asian flu lost his sister aged 18, started working at the age of 6, lived through political turmoil of the 60s (my father was a socialist), terrorism of the 70s, oil crisis in 1973, heroin epidemic of the 80s, AIDS pandemic (he worked in an hospital), war on former Yugoslavia in the 90s, two Gulf wars etc. etc.
What saved him?
He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before.
Imagine putting him in front of IG and what could have happened.
> He could only look at himself and his own life, if it somewhat improved he could notice, if it somewhat got worse, he could hope things could change for the better, as they did so many times before.
Yes, but not only that. He also saw that he was better off than his parents and that throughout the years his life improved significantly, while a 30-year-old today is worse off than their parents and, rightly or not, feels that life is getting worse every year.
My salary quadrupled in the last 6 years, I managed to buy a flat and I can afford to pay for my child’s education, but to achieve all of this I have to be way better than my average colleague, way luckier and to work in one of the highest paying industries. All of this to achieve what a brute working in a post office in the 80s would have taken for granted (buy a house, send your kid to school and nursery, save some money, buy a car). This leaves me in a constant state of mild anxiety (what if I stop being good at my job? What if I become sick and I can’t provide for my family? What will be of my child in such a toxic environment?) and the only social network I use is Twitter, where I only follow reputable newspapers (practically I use it as an RSS feed). I understand that my views may be influenced by living in the UK, which is a more anxiogenic society than the rest of Europe.
> while a 30-year-old today is worse off than their parents and, rightly or not, feels that life is getting worse every year.
my question is: are they actually?
because if we factor in what it meant to live when their parents lived, are they really worse?
I'm not particularly richer monetary wise than my parents were at my age, but I earn a lot more money than they did, that I spend in a lot of things that didn't even exist back then.
My parents have never been on a flight before they were 65.
Also, my parents had some State benefit for being health care workers, but hey were working shifts of 5 consecutive days / 12 hours a shift, with two children at home.
That's not how medical profession works anymore, shifts are 8 hours maximum in 24 hours and workers have to rest at least 12 hours before going to work again. That means a night shift every 2 days maximum.
> What if I become sick and I can’t provide for my family? What will be of my child in such a toxic environment?
That's the same environment your kids are living in though, I'd say that passing onto them the idea that you have to provide for your family or you literally risk to die at such young age is the most profound damage social networks have produced to younger generations.
In my country that would not happen, health care is provided for everybody, especially those who can't afford it, but younger generations that grew up on social networks feels that they are in your same situation: if they don't succeed in life they'll be screwed forever.
But since we leave in the post-truth neo-speak era, they also believe that there are opportunities to become rich everywhere, and the only way to *not* become rich is to get a job. Job is for losers with no talent, passion, vision and/or self respect.
Of course it's not their fault, it's what the modern pied pipers (the so called influencer) are teaching them, unfiltered, there's literally no way to shield them from that crap.
Yes, they are. At least in the UK, an average salary is often not enough to rent an ex-council flat, a place where the poor used to reside. To afford a flat comparable to the one where I used to live as a child (that we could afford with the salary of a primary school teacher), I’d have to earn 6 times the average salary.
Yes, I can take flights, which if you are a frequent flyer take 5% of your life. But for a large majority of people my age, the rest of their life is spent in an accommodation that is more expensive and objectively worse than the one their parents could afford.
> Yes, they are. At least in the UK, an average salary is often not enough to rent an ex-council flat, a place where the poor used to reside.
IMO that means that people have more money, or the prices wouldn't go up in places once reserved to the poor.
Also, IMO, data says that salaries are going up, not down. I think much of the effect is due minimum wages and the fact that prices of accommodation got more expensive is because market knows people are earning at least a certain amount of money.
Also, houses of 2022 are very different from houses of the 50s.
You wouldn't put your worst enemy to live where poor people lived no more than 50 years ago.
So we spend more on housing because the life style "I work 16 hours a day and come home only to sleep" has radically changed into "I spent a lot of my time at home, even for leisure" (streaming, gaming, etc.)
The new figures, revealed by the LibDems, showed that in 1950, the average full-time weekly wage was worth £7.08 (equivalent to £499 in today's money) while the basic weekly state pension was £1.36 (£91.65). Last year the average wage had climbed to £549.80, but the pension was just £87.30
> But for a large majority of people my age, the rest of their life is spent in an accommodation that is more expensive and objectively worse than the one their parents could afford.
My parents bought a house paying 19% of interest rates.
> IMO that means that people have more money, or the prices wouldn't go up in places once reserved to the poor.
Whatever, on an average salary you can’t afford to live in a council flat that 30 years ago was meant for the poor. It means that you are poorer.
> Also, IMO, data says that salaries are going up, not down. I think much of the effect is due minimum wages and the fact that prices of accommodation got more expensive is because market knows people are earning at least a certain amount of money.
Data says that real salaries in the UK are still below 2007.
> Also, houses of 2022 are very different from houses of the 50s.
You wouldn't put your worst enemy to live where poor people lived no more than 50 years ago.
Council flats haven’t been replaced by luxury apartments, they are the same shitholes they were 40 years ago, but now you can’t afford to live in there with an average salary.
> So we spend more on housing because the life style "I work 16 hours a day and come home only to sleep" has radically changed into "I spent a lot of my time at home, even for leisure" (streaming, gaming, etc.)
We spend more on housing because we stopped building houses and prices went up. One doesn’t spend an entire salary on rent because they like Netflix.
> My parents bought a house paying 19% of interest rates.
> I'm paying less than 1%
I’d gladly pay 19% interest if my flat cost a third and inflation was 15%.
I am sorry but the idea that 'bad old days had great mental health is a meme.
Do we have any evidence? Was anyone even counting who is depressed and who isn't? What about other mental issues and traumas? They didnt exactly have loads of psycologists avaliable.
Did you not read what I wrote or are you trying to troll?
Anyway, I'll rephrase it, so that it may become clearer to you: my father didn't survive all his traumas because he's stronger than current generations, but because he was not constantly surrounded by misleading messages of rapid success and luxurious lifestyle, something that you should absolutely try to obtain or you're a loser, he was too busy trying to get out the horrors of a war and start his life.
In a way being detached from what's happening in the rest of the World, except the usual news reporting and the usual political propaganda, sheltered him from the fear of failure.
My father started being a bit depressed when he retired, because he felt he had no purpose anymore.
Kids today feel they have no purpose too soon in their lives.
> Do we have any evidence? Was anyone even counting who is depressed and who isn't?
Yeah, we do have them.
Just look for them.
I was volunteering with Red Cross when Rwandan genocide happened, I helped kids with parts of the skull cut out with a machete, they were not depressed, they were scared and traumatized, but not depressed. They were actually happy to be alive and have other kids to play with in a new country, with the perspective of a new life.
Same happened after the first war in Yugoslavia.
> What about other mental issues and traumas?
trauma doesn't automatically lead to depression.
Kids of today are not traumatized, they are pressured into success by the world surrounding them, which is almost entirely social networks.
> They didnt exactly have loads of psycologists avaliable.
In my country psychologic support is free and universal since after the WW2.
And even before then, but you know, Mussolini was in power, so it didn't really matter.
Basaglia, the great reformer of our psychiatric system, was born in 1924.
Psychology was born in 19th century, Jung was already practicing in 1900, if only there weren't two World wars in 30 years...
As an aside, watering down what constitutes trauma and then assuming everyone's actions are the result of trauma seems like a path toward denying people their agency which is an implied goal of a lot of people these days.
> You have to keep in ming that there is huge stigma around going to a psycologust for help, esp. for people of older generation.
that stigma still exists.
the difference is that if it is necessary (for example psychiatric disorders) in my country they will treat you for free, even if it takes years or have to take drugs for your entire life.
> they aren't politicized, don't care about house prices, and don't know what "inflation" even means.
Those things are heavily affecting teenagers mental health even if they don't give a flying about them. Poverty, uncertainty, and anxiety in the family home have serious and lasting, even generational consequences.
The "I'm alright Jack"-ness of that statement is making me actually angry. You think forbidding the social media of 20yo's from your teenagers is making a difference? You put "suffered" in quotes? Gross.
>What they do know is what TikTok is, and what it means to be excluded from a Whatsapp group, and to spend hours each day wondering how they should reply to a perceived slight on some Discord channel.
>I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat..
If exclusion is what you believe is causing them to be unhappy then forcing them to be excluded seems like an almost sadistic (though likely just misguided) response. I definitely hated when my parents did things like that.
> Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all.
Except from the very privileged, I'm pretty sure they are at least exposed to adults discussing those subjects, or at least from medias. If the volume of concerning subject is large, they will internalize it and build up some anxiety, and that will impact mental health.
recessions - see parents with less disposable income so teenages get less things
global pandemic - saw a couple of years of curfew at a time when teenages thrive outside and conditioned them towards a more online life and exposed and engaging more with the news of the day
rising inflation - again multiple impacts, less pocketmoney is depressing at any age
housing - quality of home, shareing bed space with siblings are never helpful for anybody
education getting more expensive by the day - fear of the future as teens, exams and beyond start to become more and more in focus and the prospects of life are also taking hold, can be a bummer, more so with the cultural changes of 2 years pandemic.
But many factors and to pin them upon a singular aspect is hard, also geographic and more so financial backgrounds play a factor that needs to be eliminated to see a more common root cause.
But hey, social media since Elon brought twitter a seen a resurgance in news about it, so more and more social media focus aspects will pop up and been a lot of ongoing debate and concerns on rollover for a while now as is.
As an anicdote how things have changed, a friend in his mid 40's was at some event and found some marbels so was playing a game with another friend for nostagia and some teens came up asking why you throwing stones about - as they had never seen marbles, let alone played it. Yet for decades and decades prior, everybody would instantly recognise marbles. Times change, not saying people who grow up playing marbles less prone to mental health. You find everybody has some aspect and there own coping ways.
Perhaps it may well be a case that we are looking into things like mental health more in a more detailed way and then looking at patterns of our times. After all, earthquakes have increased but equally the sensors in play to measure them have also increased so you have to balance out the more you see and compare to seeing less with less in the past very varefully as easy to see patterns that may not be there and come to conclusions.
After all, TikTok has been around less than any teenager era, let alone generatioins to get a clear picture.
But then, isn't social media for many mental health issues across generations, with it's echo chamber avenues and bombardment of all you care or dislike, it can be a dangerous rabbit hole for an angry or angst mind of any age.
But your approach to block it, safest and smartest way, like keys to the house - you need to have trust built before you let them loose and until then, block. Worse case they will educate themselves in how to get around the block.
Reflecting on the state of the world always leaves me thinking of this[0]:
30 March 1973
Dear Mr. Nadeau:
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
Do you by any chance use social media? Is it possible that your bleak assessment of the state of the world has been influenced by it, and the hopelessness you are promoting is acquired from your media environment, and is part of a socially contagious spiral of anxiety & depression that you are passing on to others through this particular social medium?
Doctors don’t generally say to patients “yes, your life really is terrible and you are right to be anxious and/or depressed”. The nature of the illness lies in our response to the reality of the world.
In my view you could come up with a list of bad things similar to yours for any age in history. This is not a uniquely bad time to be alive. (I’d argue there has never been a better time, but that’s a separate matter). What seems to have changed is our coping mechanisms.
I don't use social media, never did, nor watch TV - and i have the same outlook - because that's what's happening. And i had the same outlook when i was a teen too.
Increased divide between rich and poor, lack of middle class in my country, our pension/retirement system has been a joke for 10s of years and we were joking in middle school about it(!). Politicians actively working against country's best interests to line their own pockets is a norm - and that applies to every party so even elections are a joke.
Add high inflation to that, as a teen with limited budget you tend to notice price rises of snacks and fast food.
USA was hailed as a the promised land here when i was a teen, disillusionment with it is also a contributing factor.
I grew up in Germany, so I was told stories of my grandfather, who lived through an entire world war, his home, home town, home country being entirely destroyed, being denied the return to his home since it was annexed and now behind the iron curtain, civilians he knew being murdered, pieces of butter being the best currency available, the nonexistence of any infrastructure such as roads, the very definition of political extremism in positions of total power, no outlook for any education at all, basically the entire continent in ruins.
Yet, he and many others lived.
I'm not trying to downplay the problems of today's youth (I'm not even 30 myself and will have to deal with lots of them by myself). But I think humanity has proven that it will find its way.
After the initial shock of the first couple of years, post-war Germany seems to have been a pretty comfortable place for a young person willing to conform to pretty strict social standards and put in some (by the standards of that time) moderately hard work. It tends to be that way after great disruptions, like after the plague, after the 30-years war, etc. When power structures that consolidate wealth have been thoroughly disrupted it usually takes a while to get back to a point where most people are excluded from most opportunities. Hence, for most people, opportunities tend to abound after great crises.
Most western democracies are not post-disruption societies; they're more like the opposite. Today's young people don't face the effects of a recent upheaval, they face the effects of decades of peace and comfort. History would seem to indicate that that, too, is a dangerous place to be in.
> Yet, he and many others lived.
> But I think humanity has proven that it will find its way.
So? People will live in the craziest conditions. Humanity's way has historically lead through an awful lot of unnecessary suffering. Good luck inspiring anyone with that sort of outlook, in times of peace and crazy prosperity no less.
Democracy and rule of law aren't ends in themselves, freedom is far from a natural equilibrium state. There's a social contract that says we do these things, you get peace, a good life, a chance at success and wealth, and a decent amount of participation. Right now, western nations across the board are hollowing out that contract crazy fast. The rising popularity of anti-freedom, anti-democracy, anti-rule of law politicians may be a foreshadowing of things to come if we keep this up.
The difference is the overall trajectory and the volume of information available.
During WWII and the Cold War, other than the present or looming threat of war, things were generally improving. Also, without the internet, people did not really care about far away events.
On the other hand, many of the challenges of today have been known for deacades(plural). A good portion of the anxiety is caused by watching in real-time slow-motion the unfolding of the global selfinflicted trainwreck and observing that all countermeasures are ineffective.
The end of the Cold War set the premises for humanity to have a bright future, yet humanity seems to prefer self-destruction.
Compared to then, humanity now is in a crisis of hopelessness.
I disagree. Within the cold war, the immediate threat was a nuclear war so devastating it would completely wipe out humanity's habitat, and most of humanity as well. The fear of that was known since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Most people nowadays do not carry that fear. There's much more reason for hope today: Most of the problems, as you said, seem solvable, they've been known for decades. It's unlikely for Europe or the US to get nuclear bombed in the near future. This is a privilege my parents did not have. Yet, they hoped, hoped no nuclear war would break out. I fail to see why people today shouldn't be able to find hope.
The same threats still exist today. We've even had multiple cases of fearmongering. On a smaller scale. How some countries would test their weapons on others. North Korea not too long ago. Heck, European countries are revisiting their military budgets in light of Russia invading Ukraine.
What changed is people can tell the world has become too competitive on a financial, emotional and social level. That's quite different from the cold war where the land was rife with opportunities as long as you held hope things wouldn't blow up tomorrow.
On the other hand it does feel like all these events feel like situations that need constant inputs of "energy" to be sustainable - war relies on firepower, a repressive regime requires efforts to keep the populace content enough to not revolt (or enough firepower to quash revolution attempts), so given enough time the system would return to a more stable equilibrium.
The situation today feels like we're already in an equilibrium and there's no single obvious problem to solve to make things better.
Largely agree with your analysis but you are missing one key aspect - disintegration of family and community/social support structure such as church or local youth clubs etc. Whether what you are saying as part of your analysis is the cause of this disintegration or effect I don’t know. As a society if anything we can do to better mental health, it is strengthening family and social circle and community support system.
One might argue that social media makes that easier. After all it is far easier to connect with your loved ones in a matter of a click now but here is the key. I don’t think virtual engagements can ever compare to or replace the activation of neural pathways that happens from physical presence.
It's much easier to take apart a system than put it together. Hell even nietzsche talked about these problems coming up, as a result of losing religious institutions that maintain societies cohesiveness. He said God is dead, and we killed him. He asked what great festivals will we have to invent to make ourselves worthy of such a great task? Well we didn't invent any festivals or institutions to replace the church. People just aren't interested in that. So there is no secular Sunday service where you meet and socialize with your community every week
Anecdotally, I'm part of a tightly knit religious community and these problems are much less common. Even the nerdy awkward kids all have friends, why does it matter that they're awkward when they're still good people? But I rarely saw that sort of thinking in public school. It was as much a free for all as adult society and there were kids I saw go without friends from middle school to high school graduation because no one wanted to stomach their being awkward.
But often when I bring this up and rather than help the kids, people would usually try to convince me that my religion doesn't have any value. There's no interest in actually making things better, just taking things apart
Agreed a whole lot. Social media is the new whipping boy, but no one is willing to confront that much of what it shows us is a genuine & real reflection, is just connecting us more accurately to the real state of things.
I think there's an incredible resillience especially in youth to not get bogged down in or at least to tangle with & find peace with the sad scary backdrop of the world. When they have elememts of hope, when they have positive role models, when they see successful adults having ok lives. And frankly that's a challenge, period; there's just little community, few role models left. Big employers are better quality of life but it's deeply depersonalizing, being so deeply embedded somewhere odd deep deep inside an org chart, with only modest chances of getting to work hard for a long time & then at best retire. The new work world is opaque, dis-real.
Reality is already very well built, well estaished, and there's little available space or reward for trying stuff out & finding ourselves. We see less making life happen.
A lot of this difficulty is because of so many of these sad scary hopeless background factors. But rather than try to tackle endless symptoms as problems, i keep feeling like there's rootstriking we could be doing by trying to develop & support a more youthfully active world, by directly trying to support & enable people interested in taking chances in getting things started. In building the world. Not just working in it. Some real signs of positive life, creating role models of people who have real hands in shapimg their lives, have established good locus of controls: this is just wild spouting hypothesis, but I think that would make such a difference. Some signs of reality within reach.
No, social media is NOT 'connecting us more accurately to the real state of things'.
Most people are getting drip fed curated content to 'influence' them, which has a very different agenda to accuracy regarding real things.
Also most people are not selecting real things, they are selecting entertainment.
If you had just said connecting to real things, agreed that sometimes it is, plus a lot of false things, plus heaps of fantasy/entertainment. But when you said its connecting us more accurately to the real state of things, well thats just false.
Accuracy in echo chambers that create information bubbles as socmed systems do is simply impossible, then the fact these systems are used to influence not inform makes them produce highly distorted minds.
How is social media a "real reflection" of the "state of things" ?
Doesn't social media amplify and overexaggerate lot of things ?
We're always talking about how people are living double/fake life on Social media and most users, when the see such things develop a FOMO.
This is what happened to me at 14: the first time I've ever had an Internet connection at home. I am now 27 and it's really a downward spiral. I'm starting to think that the only solution, at least for me, would using Internet only for 10 minutes a day and only to download offline all the things I would like to read.
First step is to quit all social networks, and to remain off them for good. It's disorienting at first, and it certainly feels like withdrawal, but then it gets better, and quickly. In my case I'm at the point where I open up the computer and hardly know what to do on it, and pretty much only read HN. You can do it too. Save your spirit.
Most kids here get phones around 9/10 when they start walking to and from school alone, so before they really start using social media so it isn't a sudden one day they are using it, next day they aren't thing. Also children are changing for other reasons hitting puberty, generally growing older etc, and there is other stuff going on in their lives - cause and effect can be hard to pinpoint. There are also grey areas - is messaging your friends social media? Watching videos on YouTube?
> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world
With respect, I truly mean no insult when I say this is a naive and ignorant position.
By every measure, the world is generally better than it has ever been. Far better than any decade in the past you could care to name. Despite media doom-and-glooming, there is every reason to expect that teens will inherit an overall materially better world than their parents, local minima notwithstanding.
Climate change drastically changes that equation. Not only will life expectancy go down, but life itself will probably become harder for many people in many places - droughts, heat waves, floodings, hunger and famine, mass migration, etc.
Except, people have been saying exactly this with the same unshakable confidence, literally since the beginning of recorded history. In the 70s, it was said that we would have experienced all of those things by 2000, and yet, life continued to get dramatically better for everyone, particularly for the poorest.
So, no. Life will continue to get better despite global warming. Or, not doing so is an extraordinarily claim for which there is no real evidence.
They rang the alarm bells because they saw the trend and tried to curb it. They knew things would get bad, not neccesarily at an exact date. We are only now experiencing the contributions to the atmosphere made at the dawn of the last century. This delayed effect is worrying to say the least.
They're not talking specifically about climate change. Doomsayers have always existed, warranted or not. Previously, it seemed inevitable that the cold war would end in a massive nuclear exchange and yet here we are. That was a very real threat, just like climate change, but it was avoided. We also have AI/Singularity doomsayers right now and, previously, Bird flu, SARS, Ebola, etc. and where the doom actually came, humanity has survived just fine.
Through all of that, everything has gotten better.
Speaking as a former doomsayer, people like my former self who are committed to the "everything is terrible" outlook really dislike hearing that it's not true. For me, I was committed because my life sucked, and it was much easier to point at objective, outer reasons than to do the hard work of digging in and digging myself out. I was pretty smugly insufferable. I still am, just, from a different perspective.
No, in the 1970s they were ringing alarm bells about global cooling, not global warming. If you read newspaper archival articles from that period you'll see that they sound exactly like articles written last week, except with the word warming inverted to cooling. Scientists back then, or at least the ones being interviewed by journalists, were communicating an absolute certainty that an ice age was coming and the world needed to prepare. There was scientific consensus, etc.
This whole thing has long since been memory holed, but it happened. Here's Spock in 1979 with a whole documentary about about how politicians are ignoring the scientist's warnings:
"What scientists are telling us now, is that the threat of an ice age is not as remote as they once thought. During the lifetime of our grandchildren, arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of our desert into a polar desert".
They also had plans for how to stop it. They wanted to, amongst other things, cover the arctic in black dust to make it absorb more heat.
IMHO one of the major reasons teenagers suffer mentally is because they are way too sensitive to social pressures to never question claims about future destruction of the world. They're told the world is ending and that anyone who claims otherwise is an unspeakably evil conservative who must not be listened to under any circumstances. But it's not ending, even decades after global cooling scientists still don't really understand the climate at all and the people who claim otherwise aren't evil or bad. They're actually the level headed ones. Teenagers should listen to them a lot more - they'd realize there's a lot to live for.
> Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
It's the opposite I'm afraid. You're the one spreading misinformation, though it's not really your fault. The idea journalists simply made up the whole thing is what modern scientists like to say, but it's not true. The reason the media "speculated" about a new ice age is because scientists were telling them it was going to happen. Do you really believe US TV would make up an entire episode about non-existent scientific beliefs?
Maybe you do. Then please explain how the following can be squared with Wikipedia's explanation. Scientists believed global cooling so much they held international conferences to debate it and even told the US President to prepare America for the new ice age:
"Dear Mr President, aware of your deep concern with the future of the world, we feel obliged to inform you on the results of a scientific conference held here recently. The conference dealt with the past and future changes of climate and was attended for 42 top American and European investigators ... the main conclusion is that a global deterioration of climate, by an order of magnitude larger than any hithero experienced by mankind, is a very real possibility and may indeed be due very soon. The cooling has a natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. This is a surprising result based largely on studies of recent deep sea sediment.
...
With the efficient help of the world leaders, the research could be effectively organized and could possibly find answers to this menace ... it seems reasonable to prepare the agriculture and industry for possible alternatives and to form reserves.
With best regards, George L Kukla, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory & R. K. Matthew, Chairman, Department of Geological Sciences (Brown University)"
July 1970, New York Times: "The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages. The projects, which involve nuclear submarines, earth satellites, aircraft and numerous manned and unmanned stations on the drifting ice, are being pressed with special urgency in view of recent discoveries of important resources in the Soviet and the American Arctic."
Again, do you believe that these reports are false, that these large-scale investigations never happened? That this was all made up by the press even as the poor scientists were saying the opposite? There are many more documents like these. They make it very clear that back then global cooling was treated in exactly the same way global warming is today. Scientists were quite clear about what they believed back then.
I wasn't alive then, so can't judge on that. I can however see the obvious changes that are happening, and the trends. Nobody serious is saying the planet will become uninhabitable, but swathes of it will. Wildfires, heat domes, massive floods are events that are getting more frequent. Texas's "once in a hundred years" winter that now has occured twice in 10 years; the massive floods in China and Germany; the heat and now cold waves that have hit Europe in the past few years. Burying your head in the sand won't make all that go away.
Have you actually read the IPCC report, or only read what the media says about it?
There’s a huge difference. The IPCC, the consensus of scientists says that the rate of growth in the world will slow. That’s it. And that’s turned into an “earth will become a fireball” narrative by the media.
Therefore the actual scientific consensus is the world will get better more slowly, not that it will get worse.
Stop listening to the media who make money off your fear.
Nonsense. The scientific consensus does not simply say that one thing or another will happen. There is a number of possible scenarios each of which is assigned some likelihood according to modelling(informed by empirical data). No serious scientist is saying "X will happen and that's it". That's an inherently unscientific statement.
There’s no plausible scenario where climate change drives global GDP growth negative over the next 50 year. None.
Yea uncontrolled climate change will make life worse than had it not happened. But no it will not outweigh the cumulative beneficial effects of baseline economic growth.
Your can't know that, there's too many variables. Let's assume a terrible scenario with massive heatwaves across the Middle East and Central and Southern Asia (like the ones that have already happened, including recently, in Iraq and and India) that get too frequent and unbearable. Add in food supply problems due to droughts, fertilizer shortages, etc. Now you have millions of migrants going to Europe , or at least North. No one can reliably predict how such a scenario plays out, migrant crisis are unpredictable.
The worst plausible forecast is that climate change will impair global GDP by 25% relative to baseline by 2200 years.
Even assuming anemic 1% GDP per capita growth rates, the average world citizen will still nearly twice as wealthy as today even given worse case climate scenarios.
I agree that the quality of life is currently better than it has even been. Though the future is looming because of climate change. Last year, a heat dome destroyed a tow in Canada, yet we are just at the beginning of the consequences. This year, we are seeing intense droughts in India as well as on the west coast. Scientists predicted that it would happen and it does, but this is just the start.
We should be all on-board to prevent it and lower our fossil fuel consumption quickly to limit consequences. If you live in a rich country, just talk about energy sobriety around you and see how people react...
> Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity.
Sadly, even after the IPCC alarms, I have yet to see governments properly act. Young people know that, and they understand that their quality of life could be at its maximum at the moment, before decreasing due to climate change.
Can't buy a house, can't expect work with reasonable pay in most places, will probably be impacted severely by climate change, food prices are quickly becoming extremely high. The future is shit.
The percent of household budgets spent on food has been steadily falling for 50 years. It’s very recently ticked up slightly, but this is a tiny blip on an otherwise very long running trend.
Median real wages are the highest they’ve ever been in history.
Climate change may lower the rate of economic growth but there’s no scenario where GDP growth goes negative because of climate change. Even given the worse effects of climate change, the people of the future will be significantly materially wealthier than people today.
Housing is a major issue, fueled by terrible NIMBY policies that have artificially restricted supply. But there are still many
metros, with relatively cheap housing.
> Median real wages are the highest they’ve ever been in history.
Now I know you are joking, those have been falling at least since 2008 and they weren't doing so hot before that either. If we're talking about boomer childhoods, sure. Life was great then. Now, not so much (at least, not in that way - medicine is definitely better).
> Housing is a major issue, fueled by terrible NIMBY policies that have artificially restricted supply. But there are still many metros, with relatively cheap housing.
This might be a US thing. Where I live housing is an issue because there quite simply are not enough houses being built that anyone normal can afford. For the ultra-rich, the country is a playground.
If the mental health crisis is exacerbated by other stressors, how does that explain the following? 1) The crisis started suddenly in 2009, 2) It affects girls far more, and 3) It is occurring in many countries.
Haidt brings up those points in the testimony to rule out other factors and prove that social media is specifically to blame.
My understanding is that young men are successful at killing themselves far more than young women, but young women attempt to kill themselves at higher rates than young men.
Compared with suicide statistics, suicide attempts are much harder to measure (and also sort of misleading). They classify 'serious suicide attempts' (SSA) as where there is serious intent of death (SSA is the real suicide attempt, everything else is suicidal behavior or a gesture). Where suicide attempts are reported, men are more likely to commit SSA's. Not all suicide attempts are reported... and there very well may be a difference between the proportion of reported male attempts versus female attempts. Likewise the classification of the attempt is often self-reported, again the accuracy could vary according to gender. We don't know, but I would guess men are less likely to report, and less likely to commit a 'gesture'.
Mental health as well is a moderately subjective matter, and there's no doubt that the self-reported aspect of mental health problems has been highly influenced by cultural and societal changes, like how the public perception of mental illness has changed over time. Likewise I'm sure men and women think differently about this, and I'm sure the societal expectations of men/women impact it as well. When we talk about mental health getting worse over time, or impacting women more, this is inherently imprecise.
But suicide is suicide:
From 1981 to 2017 the male suicide rate per 100,000 in my country (the UK) has gone from 19.5 to 17.2. The female suicide rate has gone from 10.6 to 5.4. Mostly good news: the rate has gone down.
But the gap between men and women has increased, men have gone from roughly twice as likely to kill themselves to about three times as likely as women.
It's sad that even now concern about mental health only seems to get weight when phrased in a way that makes it sound like it's impacting women more, when one of the more concrete, key statistics clearly indicates it could be the other way around (and getting worse). This observation may very well be related to the disparity at this point.
1 & 3) seems to be more indicative of the fact that there was a global economic crisis at the end of 2008. I'm not following these points from the paper.
2) seems to point the finger at social media more heavily though I think, but I'm not entirely sure what to make of that but this point is convincing to me.
The financial crisis of 2008 (2007-2009?) was not that significant in large parts of the world. I was living in Finland, and many of my friends were graduating and finding jobs around that time. From our point of view, the crisis was something that happened mostly in the news and had little effect on the real world.
The depression in the early 1990s was another story. It may have hit Finland worse than the Great Depression in the 1930s.
And, I'd argue, when we saw social media and big tech start to lean towards ML/algorithm driven techniques for content curation.
At college my social feeds where friends and clubs I picked, by university 3-4 years later, Facebook et. al was feeding me a lot more other stuff intermixed with friends posts.
I'm not denying that those issues all contribute to the problem.
However, teenagers had a terrible, rotten time during WWII - bombs on cites, constant threat of military service, parents and elder brothers killed in war, one's country being invaded, etc. yet on the whole most never suffered these mental health issues. The difference is striking
Somehow, they had stamina and resilience that today's teenagers don't have. Many of today's problems I believe go back to over-protection and mollycoddling of kids when they are very young. In the War years a kid was an independent agent by the time he or she was six.
I think WWII could actually be quite a fun time to be alive for young people on the home front in the UK (and maybe N America). They had much more social freedom, often worked in groups with other young people, and had a sense of purpose, unity and camaraderie. The future was uncertain, but their own role was much clearer. And rationing even meant that people were getting fed properly.
The modern world is brilliant at creating a constant sense of insecurity. That is often artificial but feels real. Your place is society and in the group is always insecure and shifting. Maybe kids are mollycoddled, but you have to wonder why people are driven to do that. Why do the richest most stable countries feels so insecure?
" Why do the richest most stable countries feels so insecure?"
This is the question I keep asking myself. There seems to any number of answers but I'm not sure we've any definitive ones as yet. If we had then we ought to be able to do something about it. Perhaps the uncertainty of not knowing is the cause.
I think it’s partially unresolved cognitive dissonance between rhetoric and reality - “you can do / be anything you want” (which is true in theory, but not so much in practice).
The “happiest” societies - the Nordics - are rated that way because they start out with low expectations.
Happiness is a measure of the delta between expectation and reality. When that delta is negative, mental health crises ensue.
"I think it’s partially unresolved cognitive dissonance between rhetoric and reality..."
I'm almost certain you're right, cognitive dissonance is a key disrupting factor in many of our lives. Not only is there so much more information for people to process these days but much of it conflicted in ways that doesn't allow one to come to definitive conclusions.
As you say, 'happiness is a measure of the delta between expectation and reality' and in this regard we've seen better outcomes in societies where expectations are low.
I remain pessimistic about us being able to resolve this in the modern world as everything around us conspires to make one's expectations as high as possible. Essentially, our whole economic system is geared to making us believe that the more stuff and junk we accumulate the happier we'll be.
I see no easy or practical way of breaking this circular problem. Year by year, advertising and commercialism gets more intense and the problem only gets worse - moreover, technologies such as the internet have only made matters worse.
Promoting these high expectations is now of itself a huge part of the economy that if undone would alone cause hardships. One only has to look at Google and Amazon to realize that.
I'm not speaking for 7952 but I'd say it's rather commonplace in most if not all anglophone countries. I'm in Australia and there's a sense of insecurity here but it's not as pronounced as in the US. Having worked in the US as well as Europe including Germany and Austria (living in Vienna) my observation backs up your comment (albeit that info is a bit dated now).
I could offer reasons as to why but they'd only be educated guesses. It's a big problem so some definitive data would be very helpful/useful.
> I'm not denying that those issues all contribute to the problem.
> However, teenagers had a terrible, rotten time during WWII - bombs on cites, constant threat of military service, parents and elder brothers killed in war, one's country being invaded, etc. yet on the whole most never suffered these mental health issues. The difference is striking
> Somehow, they had stamina and resilience that today's teenagers don't have. Many of today's problems I believe go back to over-protection and mollycoddling of kids when they are very young. In the War years a kid was an independent agent by the time he or she was six.
There is a small problem. A survivor bias. You are only counting people that survived WW2. There were plenty of people that didn't survived, that didn't have stamina to do it, that were mentally ill(by itself was a reason for forced euthanasia). People that couldn't deal with the situation, couldn't do anything and just died, one way or another. And yes people committed suicides during WW2. Now we have something called suicide by cops. Just think how much easier it was when you were explicitly hunted.vOr people that outright killed themselves. In the end you only count bullet holes on planes that did return, not ones that failed to do so.
I don't deny any of that either. These matters are complex and I cannot reasonably argue them here without discussing other factors in detail such as changes in life expectancy over the past century, the more fatalistic approach to life pre-war (big families meant survival insurance, pre-penicillin times meant many more [expected] deaths in childhood, harder times financially, etc. etc. The whole social milieu was different.
Let me say just this: when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s what I said above wasn't quite 'dead' yet as my childhood was pretty much similar to that—and it was often damn hard times back then (moreover, from where I came from it was so for many of the kids my age, I was no exception). Several weeks ago I gave an account of my own childhood on the HN story Old Enough: the Japanese TV show that abandons toddlers on public transport and there's no doubt that by age six I was an independent agent— that is, walking miles to school across busy roads by myself at that age and so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30951723#30953588. We had to be more resilient just to survive—and we were.
The fact is I'm old enough to have witnessed these changes firsthand. Leaving aside the reasons (which, no doubt, will be argued about for years to come), there is no doubt that mental health issues among the young have increased substantially in recent decades.
Edit: Incidentally, during my teenage years I cannot ever recall any mention of childhood or teenage suicide. No doubt it happened, but even the concept thereof would have been anathema to us kids back then.
>I don't deny any of that either. These matters are complex and I cannot reasonably argue them here without discussing other factors in detail such as changes in life expectancy over the past century, the more fatalistic approach to life pre-war (big families meant survival insurance, pre-penicillin times meant many more [expected] deaths in childhood, harder times financially, etc. etc. The whole social milieu was different.
My grandmas two sisters died before they even reached 16, but I don't know if it was before or after war. Some respiratory system infection. It what just happened to people. Especially if you were poor and lived in rural area.
>Let me say just this: when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s what I said above wasn't quite 'dead' yet as my childhood was pretty much similar to that—and it was often damn hard times back then (moreover, from where I came from it was so for many of the kids my age, I was no exception). Several weeks ago I gave an account of my own childhood on the HN story Old Enough: the Japanese TV show that abandons toddlers on public transport and there's no doubt that by age six I was an independent agent— that is, walking miles to school across busy roads by myself at that age and so on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30951723#30953588. We had to be more resilient just to survive—and we were.
When I was in pre-school I had to go by myself to it, but it was a rural area. Forests, farmlands and so. But my friends from city, have similar experience(but with less forests and farmlands, but with more cars, streets and public transport). No one was taking kids to school by car, because parents had to go to work early while kids had to start school at 8am. We survived it. But I was, afraid of shadows kind of child. Sometimes on my way I had panic attacks, but I was alone and either I could go back home(not an option) or continue on my way to school. So I went to school every day.
>The fact is I'm old enough to have witnessed these changes firsthand. Leaving aside the reasons (which, no doubt, will be argued about for years to come), there is no doubt that mental health issues among the young have increased substantially in recent decades.
>Edit: Incidentally, during my teenage years I cannot ever recall any mention of childhood or teenage suicide. No doubt it happened, but even the concept thereof would have been anathema to us kids back then.
If you weren't part of family or right circle of friends you just didn't learn about stuff like that. There were negative consequences of other people knowing if someone committed suicide, was mentally ill, was gay. My grandfather committed suicide, but I only learned about it in my thirties and someone accidentally mentioned it. I was part of family and still didn't know about it. Back then Catholic church had problems with burying suicide victims on consecrated cemetery.
What I'm also afraid of, is possibility that with all the chemicals that finds its way into drinking water, we might poison ourselfs and our children literally out of our minds. I should learn more it, but I'm afraid it might be too late to do anything about it.
Indeed but I think again information does have a role to play here. Back then everyone around you was going through the same shit and you learned to deal with it.
Now you have social media giving a constant reminder that you're not good enough and that you need to achieve more.
Conversely I do agree that there is a bit of a "learned helplessness" that I've noticed is a bit more prevalent in the younger generations, and I can't work out if that's a symptom or a cause.
"I do agree that there is a bit of a "learned helplessness""
It's why I keep coming back to developing resilience in kids at an early age. Challenge them early on and they'll cope better later. As I keep repeating at every opportunity, I cannot overstate the extent to which this has changed for the worse since I was a kid.
Teenagers back then had more to look forward to. You work for some local company for three decades, then you retire, picking up a house somewhere in the process and are able to put your kids in college. Family members die, but who cares? Sure, it'll traumatize you, but it doesn't ruin your future. Not like that hasn't been happening consistently over the past few years with a pandemic.
Nowadays, what's anyone got to look forward to? Earlier today my favorite record label announced they were getting purchased by a bigger label, and a few months ago, my favorite way to purchase music got bought by a massive conglomerate that supports concentration camps in China. I am going to die without having seen upward economic mobility (in many ways being significantly poorer than my working-class parent). I avoided going to university since I didn't reasonably have a way to afford it, and was denied advancement in classes despite having test scores that indicated I could have performed well above where I was when I was in schooling.
If that's enough to bother me, a person who doesn't use any of these social platforms, what do you think it would do to a child of schooling age? They have nothing to look forward to. Their futures suck. Things kind of just suck. We have surrendered all control of society to a handful of parasitic corporations. People may not be dying of polio, but there's no longer hope to balance out the suffering. There's nothing to look forward to. You're going to die in the same spot as who came before you, if not worse.
I think we blame the social media too much and don't blame the fact that society is just miserable these days for any person not born into wealth.
People who were teens during WW2 would not have known these things. In their era people more often than not died before retirement. Many people had no pension. Most people did not go to college so they would only dream that someday they or their kids would. With their parents having lived through the Great Depression neither housing nor food were guaranteed. The time you’re thinking of is well past the war during the late 50s and 60s and even they had to deal with the threat of nuclear war and actual wars like Korea and Vietnam and yet they didn’t lose hope.
"well past the war during the late 50s and 60s and even they had to deal with the threat of nuclear war and actual wars like Korea and Vietnam and yet they didn’t lose hope."
Right, I remember that period well (see my comment below).
Social media can be blamed in the sense of giving people too much choice / competition and such, but yes, the key problem is people trying to tackle this from an angle which seeks to invalidate people's feelings rather than look if things are heading into the wrong direction.
Yes, war sucks. Famine sucks. All of that sucks and can make people just as hopeless. The premise is the same as the one now: people don't feel in power of their own future, incapable of getting what they want. A large crowd will immediately retaliate "but your demands are too high!" Really, most people's desires would've been considered pretty normal a few decades ago. Their parents and grandparents had an active role instilling those desires into them.
Here's a mental exercise for people. Imagine the following guarantees: A partner who won't leave you as long as you keep your stuff together and will actively support you (and expects the same in return, obviously). A home where you could raise a kid, maybe two, each with a separate, small bed room, a separate kitchen and a living + dining room combo. An average career (average salary, nothing too glorious). Life up to 75 and a retirement by age 60. You can fill in the specifics however you want. Most people in their 20s would be just fine having such a life.
The above used to be pretty easily attainable as long as you put in some effort before. Now, the above feels unattainable to a large degree of young adults. Even the ones who did exactly what their parents told them to, are noticeably ahead of their peers in terms of academics and career, and still struggle to get what their parents were able to at the bottom of the ladder, let alone what their gen X / boomer equivalent had. Teenagers are learning these things through both the news and the internet, and want none of it.
"Teenagers are learning these things through both the news and the internet, and want none of it."
I agree with what you're saying, I just wonder why kids of my generation had more resilience. It's not as if we weren't under constant stress for we were so.
I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as if it were yesterday and wondering if I'd even exist the next day let alone be going to school. I also remember the constant threats of nuclear war. Week after week, month after month, our letterbox would get stuffed with pamphlets forecasting nuclear armageddon, they were usually printed in black and red with images of nuclear bombs exploding on the front.
There was a time in the early to mid 1960s when there seemed to be no future. If that weren't enough, by the time we were 15 or 16 or so we started to worry about the draft and the Vietnam War—that's before we had even left school. It's damn horrible when one's marble pops up in the draft, I can attest to that.
Multiple major recessions —> 2008 was biggest since 1929. Dunno about multiple
a global pandemic —> this happened and is still happening
rising inflation —> objectively true. Though I suspect the oncoming recession will quash it as in 2008
housing and education getting more expensive by the day —> huge house and education price increases in past decade, far outstripping inflation
prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation —> student loan debt more than doubled in last decade
climate that will be unlivable in a few decades —> debateable but CO2 is rising fast and we are already logging effects. Will accelerate within 30 years without geoengineering or carbon zero + sequestering
political extremism becoming the norm —> It definitely increased on both sides
and massive government gridlock that has made fixing any of this impossible —> Age old complaint, but filibusters did increase
Which do you think are just products of the media?
I’m more optimistic than OP but I don’t think the list is wrong
I lived my teen years in a collapsing post-communist economy, with hyperinflation (the kind that can add 4 zeros to prices in a span of a few years), massive unemployment and deep real-wage reduction. My mother struggled with a minimum wage that translated to about 80 dollars and two children, well bellow the absolute poverty line, and my father was mostly absent. In my high school and first year at the university, there were frequent days were I had almost nothing to eat at home and most days I had no cash at all, not even to buy a bread roll or pay for some copies of lecture material - so I copied them by hand. Wore the same clothes for years, passed down from my elder brother.
To put it in perspective, the political polarization around me was leading people to violence orders of magnitude larger than the events of January 6, with multiple governments toppled by angry crowds, inter-ethnic violence, workplace harassments of dissenters. Don't even start me on the state of the environment.
Yet, when I look back, my teen memories are not about poverty, hunger or political turbulence. That was just the way things were, we adapted. I had my ragtag crew in which I was accepted. We just didn't care about politics or the environment all that much.
The most vivid good or bad memories that I hold all have to do with social interaction, acceptance or rejection and public humiliation. We certainly didn't exhibit, as a generation, the signs of a mental disease epidemic, the fist time I heard about a suicide in my age cohort was of a fellow student in the later years at one of most competitive universities in the country.
Don't get me wrong, this economic enviroment devastated adults, and we had some of the highest levels of suicide and alcoholism in the world. But it just didn't affect us teens specifically, because we had no earlier reference to how things were supposed to be.
I think a lot of the problem is that folks who are actually in the situation do end up dealing with it better because they mostly don't have time to think about it.
The folks we're talking about are mostly on the precipice of something terrible happening, but they're still mostly secure enough to not be directly affected, but they definitely feel like it's coming right for em.
Maybe you would have felt the same if you were just a few years younger at the time? i dunno.
That's dangerous. I too live in a post-soc country, and most of my friends have immigrated. Why adapt and cope with hostile environments when you can have a better life?
In the worst case, you gulp down the sad facts of life and still reproduce. And I don't understand how poor people in poor countries can raise kids knowing they are critically underperforming parents.
> political extremism becoming the norm —> It definitely increased on both sides
Recent generations have seen multiple political assassinations and bombings. When was the last time you saw a fire hose and dogs used to clear protestors?
Tribalism is on the rise, extremism and violence are not.
But I don't think this is the kind of extremism they meant. There is a worrying trend, especially in the US, to try and block whatever the other side is doing, just because it's the other side that's doing it. People retreat into their filter bubbles and have increasingly less contact to real people with differing opinions. The divide between urban and rural opinions is steadily growing.
The testimony is citing a rise in self-harm and mood disorders in people aged 11-15 between 2009 and 2015. There was not yet a pandemic or inflation and houses were actually reasonably affordable for a while after the market crash. There actually was a recession in 1991 when I was 11, yet somehow I have no memory of being aware of that or ever thinking about it. This is the bigger point about media culpability. If 11 year-olds are really concerned about these things now, why is that? Seemingly, it might have something to do with the 24/7 algorithmic doom scroll feeds they're consuming that didn't exist in 1991. Typically, the starting point for when cooperation broke down and political polarization started dovetailing in the US are the Bork confirmation hearing and Newt Gingrich becoming speaker of the House, both of which happened when I was about these ages, yet again, I was not aware of it back then. The world has always had major issues, but these just were not things that concerned very many 11 year-olds until pretty recently.
These absurd scaremongering predictions do more harm for the climate change movement than good. If you’re over 30 you’ve already lived through this threats twice and it’s beginning to get tiresome. These exaggerated doomsday predictions just give ammunition to deniers because you never set them far enough in the future it’s always “just 20 more years guys…”
> Which do you think are just products of the media?
A lot of them.
The '08 recession happened when most teenagers were in elementary school. The economy has thoroughly recovered the last several years leading up to COVID.
Mountains of debt after graduating, is only an issue if you plan to go to college. A lot more teenagers are realizing the scam and predation that a university education is unless you've got a serious shot trying to be a doctor or a lawyer. Trades will perform better on average than most non professional fields.
Climate becoming unlivable (for Americans, important caveat). Estimates for climate refugees are ~200 million over the next century even in pessimistic cases, and few of those would be among Americans. The bulk are concentrated in arid or equatorial countries. Which, to be clear, is a massive injustice since those countries are bearing the biggest brunt of climate change while other countries reaped most of the rewards of fossil fuels. But the idea large swaths if the American population is living somewhere that will become unlivable in the next few decades is misinformation.
Now that's moving the goalposts from the notion that Americans should be worried that their own home will become inhospitable, and that it will happen to some other region. Remember, this document is about American teens.
And regardless, no, that shouldn't be cause for dread either. Those 200 million estimated refugees are spread out both geographically across the globe and across a century time-wise. There's 45 million immigrants living in the US currently. Even if half come to the US, it's hardly an apocalyptic levels of immigration.
Did the refugees cause the politics, or were they used by politicians seeking a convenient non-voting Other they could demonise relatively safely?
I recognise my still-limited grasp of the German langue prevents me looking too closely at the politics of Germany, but I never had an impression since moving here that even a million caused significant real issues.
Does that make it any less true though? It causes people to change how they act. Political activism among youth seems to be quite high. Perhaps for the better.
> Political activism among youth seems to be quite high. Perhaps for the better.
Or sometimes for the worse. I can see how engagement in politics or disengagement from politics could both negatively impact mental health. Personally, I found it very difficult to “be on Facebook” and watch friends and family politicize. I can see how political engagement can be a coping mechanism but I can also see how it can be a source of psychological toxicity.
Modern politics is the epitome of toxic, getting angry about things you have almost no control over whatsoever. Imagine spending so much of your life and mental energy trying to change the unchangeable.
All internet-powered depression. I am not saying the issues you list aren't real, but the need to doomscroll through these issues on the daily is not necessary.
Ukraine was that for me. Put me in a huge helpless funk and I could not stop reading or thinking about it. Then I realized I had to stop checking in everyday. It may sound heartless, and of course I am still aware that the war is still going on and people are still dying, but I really believe focusing on things I can actually control in my life is one what to feel empowered and to improve my mood. Focusing on all of the various global tragedies that I can do nothing about is the fast track to depression.
Average debt upon graduation is approx. $31K, less than the cost of a mid-grade car.
I would not call that 'a mountain', and unlike a car which will rapidly depreciate in a very short amount of time, getting a decent college degree will pay dividends throughout your life in increased earnings power.
According to govt estimates, the average lifetime earnings difference between someone with just a high-school diploma, and someone with a college degree is - on average $550,000.
A $550,000 improvement in lifetime earnings in exchange for $31K in debt, seems like one of the best investments you can make.
> and unlike a car which will rapidly depreciate in a very short amount of time
If you think a car rapidly depreciates, try reselling your degree. You might be in for a shock.
Winner: The car.
> getting a decent college degree will pay dividends throughout your life in increased earnings power.
The data says otherwise. Wages have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary schooling. You can't both have increased earning power and stagnant earning power.
The earning power of not being limited to a physically close job that a car affords did show some upward wage movement, however. There was clear wage growth seen during the rise of the automobile.
Winner: The car.
> According to govt estimates, the average lifetime earnings difference between someone with just a high-school diploma, and someone with a college degree is - on average $550,000.
Ouch. The opportunity cost of a four year degree is, on average, more than a million dollars. That's a nasty haircut.
And that's ignoring that your methodology is flawed. We know that different people are different. Of course the person with down syndrome, who just scraped by in high school and struggles in the workplace for the same reason, is going to have lower earning potential than the person who breezed through their studies at Stanford. These people are not comparable.
Which is why you actually want to compare people over time. Using a time vector maintains the spectrum of people from high functioning to low functioning. Over time, as more and more have attained degrees, incomes have held stagnant. There has actually been no economic benefit gained.
The same reason you would sell your car: To try and recoup the cost that you sunk into it, to repurpose and hopefully find productive use for the capital. The trouble you will run into with the degree, with it quickly depreciating to having no remaining value as soon as you drive it off the lot, is that nobody will want to buy it from you. The car will retain at least some value with its much longer depreciation cycle and ultimately scrap value.
You sell your degree by selling your time for a higher rate, because it is generally more useful than the time that the less-educated would be selling.
While the data shows that wages stagnated through the rise of post-secondary schooling, proving that time has not been sold at a higher rate, there is some underlying merit to your theory...
Cars being the prime example. Wages were not stagnant through the rise of the automobile. People were able to sell their time at a higher rate by being able to travel further to where the higher paying work was found. Wage gains only started to taper off once car ownership reached critical mass, providing no additional market advantage.
So, yes, you are quite right that most people buy a car because it is the vehicle that gets to higher paying work, justifying the high cost of ownership. However, that is separate to our discussion about recouping the cost when you sell it. Both a degree and a car depreciate, but the degree dramatically faster.
At the same time, if college is able to improve your situation, you have already chosen poorly. Given that the typical college grad is well into their 20s, often older and almost never younger, that is incredibly late in life to be just starting to think about improving one's situation. Smart money has it figured out long before that time. The time value of money does not favour those who delay.
I think as an adult, I can surf social media, chuckle at the bizarre opinions, recognize when someone is lashing out and see the teenage angst for what it is.
But I also know social media is not representative of the population. Maybe 1-2% of people make up 90%+ of the content.
It’s also a place where lonely and depressed people can go and feel heard and commiserate.
Teenagers don’t have the life experience to know that and have their own life direction and purpose to keep them occupied.
Teenage years are a struggle for everyone, so I can only imagine how hard they must be when a social media echo chamber reinforces the futility of it all.
It has literally been the best economic and social time for people over the last 70 years. People live longer, we have far more wealth, we haven't had a global conflict in forever, etc.
So much of what we fill kids' heads with today is crap. There's no reason to be freaking out about the climate. Politics have always been divisive and "extreme" but there's a lot of examples of way more chaotic things in the not so distant past. Europe was in non-stop war with each other for hundreds of years until 1945 for example. The USA is no where near a civil war.
They are inheriting a great world but an imperfect world. Every generation has. Every generation has had problems to solve.
People with attitudes like yours who are misanthropic and depressed and may need help that are the problem. If you're miserable, find a way not to be. Stop trying to share it with everyone else.
I don’t think these are the factors directly affecting teens. The thing that does directly affect them is the media both social and legacy telling them these things over and over. Consider that many people grew up during the Cold War when we were constantly 10 minutes away from nuclear armageddon. The difference is that we now have 24 hour news and are saturated with messaging on social media. The other weird twist is the idea that we are all “powerless to do anything” that’s not true in general and especially not for young people with their entire lives ahead of them. If you have time and motivation you can change the world. The biggest challenge is blocking out all the noise telling you it’s hopeless.
Completely agree. Also, there's the fact that we tell children to "act like adults", like it meant being civilized, educated, and kind to each other; but it's not hard to see that some significant segment of adults are rage-spouting, ear-covering person-children when it comes to discourse.
Maybe we need to train ourselves and the next generation on how maintain civility in engagement-driven platforms that reward incendiary interactions.
That may be the best long-term solution... but I'm not sure what can be done when some people with opposing views can't argue in good faith right now.
When you're 14, World War I begins and ends when you're 18 with 22 million dead.
Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, appears, killing 50 million people. And you're alive and 20 years old.
When you're 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing inflation, unemployment and famine.
When you're 33 years old the nazis come to power.
When you're 39, World War II begins and ends when you're 45 years old with a 60 million dead. In the Holocaust 6 million Jews die.
When you're 52, the Korean War begins.
When you're 64, the Vietnam War begins and ends when you're 75.
A child born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, but they have survived several wars and catastrophes.
Just posted something quite similar to this. Something I would really add here is what those numbers mean in terms of global %, or scaled to modern times. The WW2 death toll is also understated, and closer to 80 million.
But that really hits home when you start to consider that in 1939 the world population was around 2.3 billion. So those 80 million deaths would be 275 million scaled to current population, primarily among the youth and those in the prime of their lives.
The thing that's exceptional in contemporary times is not how bad things are, but rather how unimaginably good things were during the bubble of time most of us grew up in. And we seemingly took that extreme outlier in the history of humanity for granted.
Times are certainly tough at different points in history, but they are extremely mentally and emotionally taxing right now and we keep hitting new peaks. We continue to accelerate the destruction of the earth and yet nothing is being done about it. When the everyday person is obsessed with EV cars instead of composting and planting native plants in their yard instead of wastelands of homogeneous lawns and committing genocide against insects and other animals in their yard, it becomes extremely demoralizing.
People don't do anything useful about anything now, and I think that is the most depressing of all. There's rabble about stuff on social media, politicians don't do anything but move the U.S. more towards and oligarchy, and corporations keep selling us stuff to consume, which consumers then lap up.
The Internet is the single most divisive technology ever created by humanity, and it does nothing but distance us from one another. There's never been greater threats to humanity than the Internet and its woes and the already arrived environmental and climate crisis.
That's not even considering the deep financial stress people are under these days. Even just 30 years ago, my parents bought a lot and built a house for $100,000. That barely covers tuition at most universities, and a similar sized house now costs around $1,000,000 just to buy. Just as recent as the late 90s and early 2000s, gas was under a dollar. We're sitting at $4.50 now. People can't afford the number of kids people used to have and must delay even having one or two kids well into their 30s, often due to financial constraints. Minimum wage has barely doubled since my teenage years, and yet everything is exponentially more expensive. Then there is the onslaught of several other socioeconomic factors.
People, aside from the wealthy, are getting slammed from literally every direction, and there is no concerted effort to improve any of it. It's not hard to understand why people are depressed more than ever.
Massive issue here is that I did not seen anyone say "grand-grandparents had it easy". Especially not, I have not seen anyone in places affected with above say that. What I have seen is American 20-40 years old saying boomers had it easier. Boomers were not affected by any of the above, they were born after WWII.
If you was born in 1900, you would be 122 years old now.
And here, you assume everyone was affected by all of those ... which is unlikely. For overwhelming majority of people, multiple of these are happening in distant places and don't affect them all that much.
A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents today, and if they have living grandparents they were probably reluctant to speak to the child during the years both could understand the conversation.
Also I don't think those dates quite line up. A better estimate is the range of 20 to 33 (ish) years for most families (I personally would like to hope some start later but kind of doubt this offhand...)
Between 1900 and 2020 that's anywhere from 6 to about 3 different generations, with different windows of experience overlap.
> A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents toda
Average age of the parents at birth in 1980 was around 26-27 years, life expectancy at birth for 1953 is around 74 (men) and 77 (women); even using expectancy at birth instead of life expectancy at 26-27, an average-age parent of a child born in 1980 would be expected, on average, to live into about the late 2020s. And that just gets later for people born later in the 1980s.
> A child born in the 80s is lucky to still have living parents today
Wut?!
Born in 1966 here, still have living parents. Ditto for my wife. Where do you live that parents are lucky to make it past their sixties? And where grandparents shun their grandkiddies? Such bizarre claims!
Grandparents who went through wars dont talk much about ugly details of those with their small grandchildren. Instead, they try to protect kids from those. If they talk about those, they wait till kids are adult and even then they talk about it only if it is relevant to something.
In addition, generations that went through wars seem to generally not to talk about it much with others. That seems fairly universal - ex-solders tend to feel that non-soldiers dont understand their experience. They have hard time to put experience into words that non-soldiers do understand.
> Born in 1966 here, still have living parents.
That is cool. My dad is death and I am younger. Not everyone lives till 80.
I think you're probably just projecting your own anxieties onto teens. It's been a while since I've been in touch with my teenage side, but what I remember people being stressed about was school work, family issues, bad dating experiences, bullying and all around bad social experiences, etc. The people who actually paid attention to politics were usually smart and well-adjusted.
As a side note, your list seems highly exaggerated. I understand climate change is serious, but where is anyone saying it will be unlivable within decades?
> Climate change is causing distress, anger and other negative emotions in children and young people worldwide, a survey of thousands of 16- to 25-year-olds has found.
> The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.
You’re describing basically any period of time since the turn of the century. Maybe before too. You’re also describing problems that adults worry about, not teenagers.
It’s a fallacy to think that we’re living in “extraordinary” times relative to the past.
Wars, pandemics, economic cycles, political instability, etc are not new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.
For teenagers in the 60s it was perfectly plausible that their entire school, neighborhood, town, city could be engulfed in a mushroom cloud at any moment, for example.
Consider the following social problem: Society demands a minimum standard of living. Whether that minimum standard of living is forced upon you against your will or whether you agree to it, the problem is that you must be "productive enough" to earn the minimum standard of living yourself. That minimum standard of living appears to grow faster than the opportunities/abilities to meet the minimum standard of living.
In fact, the whole housing problem can be described as forcing a high standard of living upon people through zoning (single family buildings only for example) and it often is against the will of newcomers. The standard of living may be considered desirable but it may not be sustainable for everyone.
The same applies to college. It is better if you go, but it shouldn't hurt if you don't. Somehow it hurts a lot and you are worse off than before even though your actual productivity is the same.
I don't know. Maybe we should call it the productivity paradox (the Solow paradox is poorly named because it isn't even a paradox), because the problem here is that an increase in productivity does not necessarily lead to more wealth for everyone, in fact, it can actually lead to concentration of wealth and therefore be a net reduction of wealth for a big portion of the population.
One of the reasons why the "economy must grow" (every year) is that we concentrate all the unemployment at the bottom of society and all the jobs at the top of society, leading to inequality and eventually unrest. If this misallocation were to be stopped then the productivity paradox would be resolved.
"Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it."
Terrible compared to what? Rebuilding after a world war? Subsistence farming? How did those previous generations manage to maintain their mental health? The difference is that these days people spend their time looking at lies on social media, then measure the world's shortcomings in comparison to those lies.
> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it.
I don't mean to come across as snarky, but there is a lot to unpack in this statement. First, you inherit something that your parents or guardians own, and the world is definitely not owned by them. Second, why feel powerless if they are actually going to inherit something? They can always fix it after they take control. Again, I am not being mean, but just showing how you can think of this from a different angle.
Now let's circle back to the issue of social media. Kids who are tuned in to social media are going to constantly hear exaggerated claims of gloom and doom, and that would numb their senses. This prevents them from focusing on the present and all the things that you build for yourself are in the present.
The point is -- no matter how you frame it, the information overload is taking its toll on everybody who is exposed, not just teens.
That stuff has no effect on the future lives of these teens. It's not as if they were ever going to see those obscure Amazon insects anyway. We don't have dodo's anymore but we're happy.
I'd say they falsely fear that it will cause them great harm. I know a teen who was genuinely afraid of climate change as if she would drown in the rising sea or something like that. I think there's a lot of exaggerated apocalyptic fearmongering harming them.
Climate change already has a marked effect on the present lives of these teens (larger and more numerous forest fires, draughts, hurricanes and heatwaves).
I would also like to point out that your insinuation that mostly "obscure Amazon insects" face extinction is false and misleading.
Even by your contrived standard of "would you see them?" the extinctions will be remarkable. The world's coral reefs are visited and seen by almost 70 million tourists each year. Over half the reefs are already dead, and 90% of all reefs are estimated to be lost in less than 30 years. Of course the ecological disaster of losing the reefs will be worse than the lost sights. This is just a single example.
> Teens are aware that they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it.
Maybe this is the actual problem. Teens are being told the world is terrible by pessimists when there truly hasn’t been a better time to be alive.
The world is amazing and beautiful. Of course there are atrocities, there always are, but the developed world is living a pretty amazing life. Even the poor relatively speaking.
Teens only thing they are going to inherit a terrible world because adults (and media) tell them the world is terrible. Stop the nonsense negativity and give the youth confidence to solve some of the harder problems humans face.
If someone lives a sad life and projects that on to the youth then that person is the problem. Kids are incredibly impressionable and impressing them with your knowledge about atrocities in the world does no good for their psychie
I really doubt that, in my subjective experience the average person doesn't care about any of those issues enough to be depressive about them and certainly not enough to commit suicide over climate change or political extremism. Gen Z kids aren't nearly as "political" as the millennials working in media want them to be. The average teenager doesn't care about affording a house or the political climate, I think you (and a lot of others) are projecting a lot of your own fears onto them. It's also worth noting that the US is not the whole world, there are European countries which deal with the same mental health crisis in teenagers despite being a safe haven even in the worst climate change scenarios and have a quite stable political situation.
Consider the early 20th century. Some ostensibly irrelevant political figure was assassinated which rapidly spiraled into the "war to end all wars" in which about 20 million people were killed, in a world population of 1.7 billion - so more than 1% of people. In relatively short order this led to the Great Depression in which over 10 years the global economy collapsed leading to mass suicide, starvation, and disorder.
And we were just warming up. After that it turns out that the war to end all wars was just the pregame show. An eccentric vegetarian artist with a knack for riling up crowds decided to declare a literal genocidal war on the world, and for some time it looked very much like he was going to win. It only ended after another 80 million deaths (about 3% of the world population this time), the deployment of nuclear weapons, and countless war crimes.
And then? Decades of people got to live in the great times where every day there was a real and legitimate concern of imminent nuclear war (which did nearly blast off multiple times) to the point that nuclear drills were a part of the classroom, and people building their own nuclear doomsday bunkers was not only not eccentric but just plain ole pragmatism.
The point of this is not just to emphasize that the past was unimaginably and exponentially worse than the present in every imaginable way, but rather that there was no widespread mental health collapse. And there was no "shielding" kids from anything, when the world was literally burning in front of their eyes. So clearly something has changed, and it's not just that things have just gotten bad or that people are now uniquely aware of that. I have my own hypothesis, but this post is already too long. I'll conclude with a song which this post reminded me of:
> The point of this is not just to emphasize that the past was unimaginably and exponentially worse than the present in every imaginable way, but rather that there was no widespread mental health collapse.
I think there might have been, it just took different forms. For one thing, alcoholism and wife abuse (beating) was absolutely rampant in those times. These are not signs of mentally healthy individuals...
History tends to repeat itself and there have been many, many situations much worse than what we have experienced due to poor hygiene, health, inequality in wealth and so on. Kids working in factories from young ages just to make a couple of pennies for a loaf of bread, then being beaten at home and school.
It almost feels like people are completely unaware of various pandemics that wiped out millions, trial by fire and witch hunts and so on. Better yet, the economy has never been better compared to many previous years in the last century and more.
The only major difference has been the advent of social media.
But is this econony better for everyone, or just for some?
In my city apartmenrs bought en masse by headgefunds, and developers trying to sell 7m2 cages as "microapartments" as most people are unable to buy a normal one.
So perspective may be different, because housing market is booming, but most people won't buy an apartment.
Teens are worried about inflation? I think these comments just show how out of touch people are with kids
It reminds me of that Marilyn Manson quote;
>Michael Moore : If you were to talk directly to the kids at Columbine or the people in that community, what would you say to them if they were here right now?
>Marilyn Manson : I wouldn't say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say, and that's what no one did.
The same adults that resonated with, once again grow up and don't listen to the kids
I don’t know, I see girls obsessing over their image, grown women obsessing over their image, selfies taken everywhere all the time just to show one’s face…
selfies taken everywhere all the time just to show one’s face…
Ironically, most selfies don't (accurately) show one's face. Digitally "enhancing" photos is the norm now, so much so that most selfies have become caricatures to me.
The world is pretty awesome. Imagine the technology our ancestors could never dream of that is now in our hands everyday.
The reason you think of the terrible place is because you've been brainwashed to think so. Social media and the news constantly tells you only bad things.
But if you actually step outside, you'll realize the world is an amazing place.
Who cares about recessions, inflation and political whatever when they are teenagers? That's all just meaningless boring bullshit old farts in the TVs mumble, isn't it how do you perceive these subjects when you are a teenager?
You are talking about millenias and not teen. Most of us where 20 when 2008 happend and then the eurocrises…. Jobs ate getting worse paid in releation to inflation … and and and and … wait till teens are late 20s then they are fucked
As others have noted, this isn't unique to the current times. And as someone who only recently finished being a teenager, I think the issue is primarily social media, especially for girls. The reason is because social media is communication and socialization. They are vital things for almost all teenagers because human beings are social creatures, and at this stage of life particularly, independence is developing, you are learning to become more of an individual and so on. In previous times you might get together after school at a park or whatever because you didn't have a phone, but these days everything is done on social media.
You are judged before you meet someone by your social media page. You can't know everything about a person before meeting them, or really without being a good friend of theirs, so social media becomes a proxy for this, and not a particularly good one because you put what you want on it and thus teenagers try to game it in various ways (for example only posting holiday pics to show how glamorous your life is).
It becomes a race towards the bottom in so many ways and in particular for girls, because so much value is placed on physical appearance (either by others or by the girls themselves) and how 'cool' are you and thus it makes you constantly compare and judge yourself with others. It is no surprise that teenage mental health is plummeting when a lot of time is spent on social media, it constitutes a large part of the status game, and there is no reasonable alternative. This is why I think it's a sole factor because I can imagine you would have the same problem even if you took away other economic/political/environmental problems.
Not to say those also don't have an effect, because they obviously do, but unlike those other things, every teenager wants friends, everyone wants a social life, it's not something only half of them know and the other half don't know much about because they read it on the news or learnt about it from school, it's something that affects every single one of them every single day. You cannot escape from it.
Surprisingly despite being a guy I don't know many guys with mental health issues, maybe they don't want to talk about it to other guys, maybe I am not close enough with them, but most girls I know do have mental health issues, and every single one of them (n~=50), literally without exception, has self esteem and body image issues. And it worries me, a lot, because how can we have it that 50% of the population suffers like this every day for years on end and nothing changes? What will the end result be?
Americans really live in their own big bubble don't they - how can there be such ignorance of the rest of the planet.
Terrible world? Are you kidding me? Try being born literally anywhere else at literally any other time in the world. The rest of the world isn't fucking Sweden.
Count your blessings. There are literally billions who would give up their first born for the "terrible world" you just described. Kids in the congo aren't having meltdowns pretending they have tourettes like spoiled American kids of the self-esteem experiment.
The view they'll inherit a terrible world is exactly the problem and it's completely false.
The problem with social media is that it's a powerful tool of propaganda for views like yours. The hidden goal of this propaganda is of course just to gain political support and steal even more money from the people with increased taxes.
- The climate won't be un-livable in a few decades.
- Major recessions did impact work prospects but people in developed nations still had food on the table. Nothing too terrible. You can thank government intervention (see below) for fiddling with the market.
- The pandemic was concerning only because of government propaganda and because of how governments treated it (see below).
- Nobody force kids to graduate with debt.
- Political extremism is again a function of propaganda.
In general for any government related problem there is a solution - moving abroad and going where you're treated best.
There will always be countries in a different stage where things are cheaper and easier to fix compared to the Western world - and on that I agree with you, current governments and politicians make it impossible to fix the situation and we're doomed to increase spending and inequality until society collapse.
Sure, there are problems, but nothing you can escape from.
The main concern for the future I have is if China - or their socialist ideology which is seeping in the west at an alarming rate - end up owning the world and turn everyone into slaves of the Galactic Empire.
This is just wrong. Teenagers don't know or care about recessions or inflation as it doesn't affect them. Nor do they know about the cost of housing and education. Teenagers don't care much about the government either.
Social media blows up the fear about climate change (it definitely will not be "unlivable") and political extremisism.
Being misinformed about things you can do nothing to change isn't good for mental health, regardless of your age, and that's exactly what social media does.
When I was a teenager and 2008 housing crisis happened I cared quite a lot about it. Sure it never affected me personally or anyone around us, but I spent a lot of time watching documentaries and reading articles around it and got upset and cynical about the world/regulatory authorities. It wasn't social media, but ease to pirate movies and looking for documentaries recommendations online that led me to it.
This notion that "it doesn't directly affect teens so they don't care" is a painfully naive narrative. If anything teens have A LOT of time and energy and little clue what to do with it. So many naturally find something to care/obsess over, with or without social media. (although it is probably amplified by it)
I was also a teenager in 2008, as were many other people I know. If they weren't affected by it directly, most didn't even care. At the time I remember looking at the stock index dropping with some amusement and went on with my life.
If you weren't affected you were lucky enough that your parents were in a stable situation and have been able to wither the storm. But I'm sure there were (and still are) kids who aren't so lucky that were affected directly by their parents not being able to afford housing, food or heating.
> Teenagers don't know or care about recessions or inflation as it doesn't affect them. Nor do they know about the cost of housing and education.
Teenagers are affected by recessions, inflations, housing costs and education. Their parents cant afford things, argue about money, they have to move, loose house, learn they have to take more debt for college or plain cant afford them.
I mean, yes, if your parents are rich, then teenager has zero idea about the above. But, everyone else, poor teenagers, lower and middle class teenagers are affected. know.
Yeah, we will probably survive for the next 50 years at least. But climate events will be making life a lot harder. Droughts, floods, forest fires and tornados will be wrecking havoc in many places. Even if you don't live in one of those places, you'll be feeling the effects through shortages (as we're currently experiencing a very small taste of in Europe), refugees and political instability.
I don't really disagree with you, but I don't think it's a good idea to be dismissive in any form about the consequences of climate change, as people are built in such a way that we grasp onto such messages as an excuse not to take action. We should be focusing on this.
> Yeah, we will probably survive for the next 50 years at least.
I feel like you are fundamentally misinformed here. It has never been the case that IPCC predicted "end of the world" in terms of climate predictions, even in the worst case. And in fact things have been improving since the worst predictions. We are currently headed to a 3 degrees C temperature increase. Which will cause global hardship on a massive level, but it's not anywhere near what's needed to wipe out even civilization let alone all/most humans.
> Even if you don't live in one of those places, you'll be feeling the effects through shortages (as we're currently experiencing a very small taste of in Europe), refugees and political instability.
The shortages in Europe are largely self-inflicted by poor vetting of business partners and "perfect is the enemy of better" behavior and have basically no relation to climate change.
>We are currently headed to a 3 degrees C temperature increase. Which will cause global hardship on a massive level, but it's not anywhere near what's needed to wipe out even civilization let alone all/most humans.
No but with that also comes a bigger variance in extremes. Which brings more things like the current ridiculous heatwave and crop issues in india and pakistan which have what...1.5 billion people? Things like this should absolutely shock people. Much much smaller things like 9/11 have caused shocked and awe.
> I feel like you are fundamentally misinformed here. It has never been the case that IPCC predicted "end of the world"
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. What's needed to end civilization isn't quite clear though. It may not be much.
> The shortages in Europe are largely self-inflicted
I only referred to these (currently mild) shortages to paint a picture of what I think we're likely to see a lot more of. I agree that climate change is only a minor factor in these particular shortages.
> Teenagers don't know or care about recessions or inflation as it doesn't affect them.
The hell it doesn’t! Did you even put a moment’s thought into that claim? Parents losing a job, or a house, or not being able to afford new clothes, or FFS the other hundreds of impacts recessions and inflation have on a family affect teenagers. Talk about misinformed, lordy lor’
Nothing to do with being misinformed, everything to do with starting life on easy mode as a privileged white free from socioeconomic pressures and - yes, what a foreign concept - a life of prolonged existential, primal fear around gaining and maintaining shelter and sustenance.
Of course any information media is an amplifier for actual events.
But I think you are minimising what has become a dangerous (although
admittedly very complex/nuanced) force in society today - which is the
general over-reach of digital technologies.
It's not just about the content of social media. This is the tobacco
moment for tech in general.
When your entire world becomes a 6 inch view-port that you're
inseparable from it's tantamount to a kind of mental and physical
servitude. Electronically tagged convicted criminals suffer less.
Physiological harm to eyes, neck, and posture from hunching over, is
visible in young people in their 20s. Diminished attention span and
poor interpersonal skills is absolutely obvious now. I am seeing
devastating mental health issues in the children of friends, kids who
have everything to live for and love life, are isolated, glum, and
neurotic.
When I started researching Digital Vegan [1], late in the game after
2018, my main focus was privacy and the effects of surveillance on
adults. In many ways I wanted to assure myself that I was not a total
crank who was growing old prematurely and shouting at clouds.
As I read more into this area [2] I went through feelings most of us
will remember from the start of the pandemic... as anecdotal snippets
started to form into coherent narratives and hard evidence, and
finally the sinking unavoidable realisation that something BIG is
happening. Surveillance capitalism is just one symptom.
The rapid growth of decent science around these issues has been
dizzying.
From Haigt; "I believe I can be most helpful to this committee by
first summarizing the academic literature on the changes that have
occurred in teen mental health since 2012"
This is key! Most of us are entrenched in to-and-fro arguments about
what we think are mere opinions and anecdotes. Things have moved past
that.
As technologists, instead of defending an illusion we identify with
like the guys from Exxon who just got news of the first climate report
in the 1960s, let's start talking in good faith about how we can fix
things - through sustainable, durable open hardware, software freedom,
civic cybersecurity and protections from government and
corporations, reducing use, educating young people away from social
media and towards a healthy, limited use of tech.
Came here to say this... Social media is not the cause.. It's the light that illuminates(and sometimes exaggerates/highlights) the terrible ills of the current modern world problems we live in.
This is such a terrible take. The "ills" of the modern world aren't that bad in terms of actually affecting your day to day. I guarantee unplugging and just going outside would make 99% of teens much much happier.
> they are going to inherit a pretty terrible world, and are powerless to do anything about it
You yourself show a big problem with social media: feelings and takes which are not based in reality at all. Of course if you think the world is TERRIBLE and in EVERYTHING is FALLING APART you're not going to have a good time, regardless of whether that's actually the case or not.
I find this denial concerning, it reminds me of Steven Pinker's "the world is actually getting better look poverty is going down" (also, we redefined poverty to be anything below $1.90 per day).
We've already seen summers get singing hot. I live in a place where AC was very rare, because you'd only really need it for a week at max per year. That has gone up to several months (and yet new construction still wouldn't install at least wall units, so I'm also stuck with my amazing single hose unit)
I am in also in a position where I have an income considered good, but my prospects of ever owning a place to live are near nil. Because all housing now exists solely as a speculative asset.
And my pension will, as estimated right now, barely cover the "living minimum" that is provided by social support anyhow. To significantly escape that, you'd have to make about 70k EUR a year at age 20 and then keep getting raises for 47 years. Good luck with that. So I am just paying in for boomers that ruined the climate and bought up all the housing and other generational wealth to have a nice end of life.
Ofc it is plummeting. We are letting them install apps that have people behind them with the sole job of making them more addictive. We are handing them drugs, multiple variants if I may say so. I had to fight with my daughter for TikTok and whatnot, she is only allowed with YouTube due to school/tutorials/classes etc and I still find myself pretty often having to snap her out of shorts and other bs with an algorithm behind it designed to keep you on and ...consuming.
These are modern drugs my friends and we are not doing anything about it. Our kids are being milked of their time, attention, imagination, focus and money. The majority of them can't even cross the streets properly any more. They don't even look if the drivers saw them, they all have a phone in hand.
It's not a problem that can be solved at an individual level.
Physical drugs are relatively easy to not get into because for the most part, the majority of society doesn't use them and their users are still mostly marginalized. If your current social group are drug addicts it's possible to find a new, healthier group.
Digital drugs on the other hand are something that nearly everyone uses and thus you have to use them if you want to effectively fit in and participate in society. Not consuming these drugs just makes you an outcast especially in a ruthless environment such as school.
The solution is regulation to make digital-drug-dealing illegal. Kill this whole "attention economy" with fire and make such a disgusting business model impossible to operate and the problem will self-resolve.
> Digital drugs on the other hand are something that nearly everyone uses and thus you have to use them if you want to effectively fit in and participate in society. Not consuming these drugs just makes you an outcast especially in a ruthless environment such as school.
Perhaps this idea is the problem then? Having some mental requirement to fit in I would qualify as a mental illness. What did the parents, or others in their life, do to them to require confirmation from others to the point it literally defines their life?
Now that’s not entirely true either. You need some companionship to maintain mental health, but you certainly don’t need more than a few, and you certainly don’t need the admiration of even a small fraction of the people on social media. So I maintain, this persisten desire to be liked or accepted by many should be addressed as a mental illness.
I didn't mean that people go to social media to be liked/accepted by many. I said that social media made huge efforts (and succeeded) at becoming humanity's primary communications tool so that you are forced to use it (and thus be exposed to its dark patterns and toxicity) even if you originally had no desire to use it for vanity purposes.
You’re supporting this being a mental health issue still. Nobody is forcing you to use social media. There are plenty of other methods to communicate with others, and if you focus on have a few strong relationships you have absolutely no need. This is starting to read like Stockholm syndrome.
What are your thoughts on that Chinese law? I’m fascinated to see the effects - positive or negative.
I’m torn on it, because it seems incredibly illiberal and suffocating, and I would have despised it as a teen, but it’s the only legislation of its type I’ve seen anywhere in the world. I genuinely believe it’s well intentioned.
I'm not arguing about censoring anything. Just add regulation to make "engagement"-funded business models unprofitable, which will kill the underlying motivation to make social media addictive.
Why are you contributing content to what you consider a disgusting business model? (You do understand that Hacker News is many thousands of times more potent an attention predator than any of the Big Tech ad platforms, right?)
HN does not derive its profits from "growth and engagement". Unlike most social media, HN actually discourages spam and prioritizes fewer but more thoughtful posts/replies.
To be very cynical, HN isn’t a nonprofit we all donate to either: it’s the wholly funded pet project of an organization who teaches growth and engagement (and in fact from what I hear is quite strict with its companies on expected monthly growth rate)
That HN is a thoughtful garden unconcerned with the ugliness of ads and growth targets is also unsurprising to me, in the same way that a lot of open source and other charitable giving comes from companies who are already comfortably profitable.
I don’t see how this comment could add value to the discussion. Are you suggesting that we cannot discuss social media and technology addiction on those platforms?
Enthusiasm for HN while bemoaning other less addictive social platforms suggests the complaint is more about content or business model or something like that, than attention / engagement / addiction per se.
>They don't even look if the drivers saw them, they all have a phone in hand.
And the driver's do too! It's insane. I live in a moderately-sized city (~1m people) and I've learned to keep my phone in my pocket or not bring it at all, and to definitely take out headphones when I cross the street. I've still been almost hit, many many times, and I'm not even jaywalking. I literally wait for the white walking person to show before I step off the curb.
How the heck is your daughter not on the mode of YouTube where it doesn't switch to whatever is recommended next and how come she isn't taught not to watch shorts? I don't have kids and I don't want kids but like is it really hard to completely enforce some sort of a online media literacy?
To enforce restrictions is indeed very hard. I know because I do it, using a whitelisting proxy. It's possible (even uncircumventably for mobile devices, using a managed device and an always-on wireguard vpn) but it is far from trivial to do and I am in a vanishingly tiny minority in doing it.
To enforce literacy is of course easy. Talk to them, teach them.
To enforce that a child actually follows your advice not to watch thing X when they have the physical ability to watch thing X, including when you aren't looking? Basically impossible. Kids aren't computers. They don't necessarily do what you tell them to do.
I mean, I have massive difficulty getting myself not to waste my life on the internet, this very comment being evidence of the fact.
Well said. I've been using a combination of OS, Service, and hardware tools to slowing restrict and guide my children online. It's incredibly difficult and tedious.
The average non-tech parent has no hope in this regard.
IMO If you dont have kids, you do not have the knowledge to comment on how to raise them.
No matter how many kids or families you have known or seen, having your own is a completely different world.
This is just wrong. You can both not have kids and still know how to raise them. Either by reading materials, watching others, watching siblings or watching nieces and nephews. People should really stop invalidating others opinions because they don’t check the appropriate boxes (or box in this case). Why is it easy for some parents and impossible for others? Something, somewhere, went wrong.
It's really not that simple, kids are not computers. The age old parental meme of repeating yourself 1000 times before your kids "gets" it is accurate.
> I had to fight with my daughter for TikTok and whatnot, she is only allowed with YouTube due to school/tutorials/classes etc
this is very bad, the problem is not tiktok, she finds an escape thanks to tiktok, don't remove that from her
talk to her, talk to her teacher if she doesn't have problems at school with other kids
> Our kids are being milked of their time, attention, imagination, focus and money. The majority of them can't even cross the streets properly any more. They don't even look if the drivers saw them, they all have a phone in hand.
that's an education problem, it is your fault, not theirs or some apps
>that's an education problem, it is your fault, not theirs or some apps
Honestly, do you think parents are able to effectively counter literal billion-dollar companies that pour resources into making sure their apps are engaging (read: addictive)? How?
We've taken a hard-line stance with our kids and have explained/educated them on every aspect of social media, attention, and addictive programs. And we're still losing the fight. I genuinely think people massively underestimate how addictive many apps are, especially to developing minds that are constantly seeking novelty.
> Honestly, do you think parents are able to effectively counter literal billion-dollar companies that pour resources into making sure their apps are engaging (read: addictive)? How?
not by trying to put the fault on them or dodging the issue by finding excuses
if you ban tiktok today, tomorrow will appear a new one, embrace them for what they are, social communication mediums, and educate your kids with the problems and how they can avoid them, and to contact you in case they face them
the reason they are finding an escape through them and not thought you is because you are hostile to the way they communicate with their friends, and if you add the pandemic to the bags, it is easy to understand why they are using it more often
trying to push an agenda, and using "teen mental health" as an excuse is disgusting
student loan, much deadlier, and nobody gives a shit
facebook? deadlier from 7 to 77, and nobody gives a shit, but tiktok? all of a sudden, it's the evil ;)
because you can't spread your propaganda? politic or commercial? how sad! teens and young adult too busy spreading positivity on tiktok, we must fight!
I didn't say anything about tiktok? I'm very confused by your comment.
It's full of strawman arguments around tiktok, which I am not talking about exclusively. And an ad hominem about my parenting.
There isn't really anything in this to counter what I said, which was that parents are vastly under-resourced and under-prepared compared to the companies putting these apps into the world.
If parents all parents are “ vastly under-resourced and under-prepared” then how come this is not a universal problem?
How come someone can’t point fault at the parents without the parents getting super defensive? All parents must be perfect (none are) and clearly are experts at raising kids right? Do you think, at least in some cases, it is inattentive parents?
But as per the report, it’s rising therefor by definition not a universal problem. This is also just the US perspective, no other countries. So what data do you have that shows this is universal?
> not by trying to put the fault on them or dodging the issue by finding excuses
The issue is being taken care of don't worry, no excuses, straight from the root.
> the reason they are finding an escape through them and not thought you is because you are hostile to the way they communicate with their friends
I am not. She has whatsapp, youtube, meets, games and a healthy digital presence with her friends and colleagues. I just weed out crap that she is not prepared for, the addictive one.
I do not find here prepared, at 10 years of age, to deal with crap like likes, followers, reactions, views or other meaningless measurements that put thousands into mental hospitals.
> I am not. She has whatsapp, youtube, meets, games and a healthy digital presence with her friends and colleagues. I just weed out crap that she is not prepared for, the addictive one.
you contradict yourself, youtube has shorts wich is just like tiktok.. on top of likes/dislikes/comments/subscribers/channels/private messages/google profile etc wow, scary btw!.. on top of mature content!! "shh..must fight tiktok!!"
so the problem is US apps vs Chinese app?
> I do not find here prepared, at 10 years of age, to deal with crap like likes, followers, reactions, views or other meaningless measurements that put thousands into mental hospitals.
> To sign up for TikTok, you must first pass through an age gate to get you into the right TikTok experience. In the US, if you’re under 13 years old, you’ll be placed into our TikTok for Younger Users experience which has additional privacy and safety protections designed specifically for this audience. If we learn that a person under the age of 13 is using or posting content on TikTok without using TikTok for Younger Users, they will be removed.
> TikTok can be downloaded from the App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon Appstore, and other official application platforms. We’ve given the app a 12+ rating specifically so caregivers can access the device-level Apple and Android controls built into your family’s devices. If you don’t want your teen to download our app, you can prevent them from doing so using the parental controls available via these stores.
if she addicted, she probably started to consume tiktok prior to her 10'th year, parental issue here
you should have set up screen time so she don't spent all her time on her phone
the best way to create problems btw, is to cut addictions overnight
> facebook? deadlier from 7 to 77, and nobody gives a shit, but tiktok? all of a sudden, it's the evil ;)
I don't think that's true at all. Facebook and tiktok are bad for you in their own ways and I'd be willing to bet that many of the people who rail against TikTok's detrimental effects railed and continue to rail against Facebook.
I'm happily willing to show you a multitude of heroin/cocaine/meth/[insert other drug here] which were very well educated, schooled and taken care of - stop putting education that high. Addiction is not an escape. There are many forms an "escape" can take and TikTok is not one that I'm willing to accept because it creates addiction, one that is intelligently designed to eat her free time WHOLE so no, I will not take your advice on it. She can "escape" with a bike, with friends outside, with her dogs, with her drawings, dressing, swimming, snowboarding or many other healthy things she was taught to.
I completely agree with it being an education problem and like... I treat my YouTube watching or online media watching in a way where I would make fun of myself if I allowed myself to be controlled by the thing so I don't allow myself to put myself in situations where I would mock myself if that makes any remote sense. I think it's silly to not be in control of the things that I feed myself digitally or otherwise. It is a state to be mocked. I don't want to call myself "some dumb nerd" so I don't allow myself to be called that by acting dumb. It sounds really maybe abusive but it might be a way to get under the skin of your child if you don't warn them about these things in a soft kind manner but in a way like "you wanna look like a dork with no control? You know while your friends do this stuff but like they don't have control. Don't you want control? Isn't that why you are watching this stuff? Because you have anxiety and you don't have control over things? So , why don't you take control and not watch the things that all of these devices and services serve you and go do something a whole lot better with your time?"
And what's your next move once you explained that and still find them "escaping" for hours in these meaningless apps? Do you have children? How many being teenagers?
Can you explain in a "soft kind manner" to an addict that they should just quit? You can fight it pro-actively or re-actively. I prefer the former as, at least, prevents the addiction from even forming.
Please identify a smoker in your close circle and explain in a "soft manner" to them how that thing causes cancer, lowers life expectancy, increases heart rate and all the jazz that we are sure of - scary stuff. Report back if they quit.
I cannot be in total control and I do NOT want that but, at least, I'm not putting cigarettes on the table myself because that's what this is.
So preamble: I agree mostly about the distinction you make between escapism and addiction. & I am a smoker. And I thank God I am not responsible for raising a child in today's world; kudos to you and all parents.
> Can you explain in a "soft kind manner" to an addict that they should just quit? You can fight it pro-actively or re-actively. I prefer the former as, at least, prevents the addiction from even forming.
This book is pretty much that: Allen Carr's Easy Way to Quit Smoking Without Willpower.
This book was recommended by a family member who read it and immediately quit after she finished it and based on hearsay apparently many people have the same experience. Its apparent magical effectiveness is anecdotal but something to consider. Obviously you are not a smoker, but why not grab a copy from public library and analyze its approach.
Parent of a teen, one anecdote to add. You see what all your friends are doing all the time. Every gathering or event that you where not a part of you see, sometimes in real time.
People hate being excluded, and this greatly amplifies this feeling.
I'm certain I missed out on a ton of cool stuff as a kid, but at least I didn't have to see it.
There's a difference between hearing about a social event that you missed after the fact and seeing it going on live without you in real time.
High school was hard enough for me when the web was just barely coming out of its primordial state of "some nerdy stuff for dweebs".
I also can't imagine the magnitude and speed of social and interpersonal relationships that happens as a result of social media and just instant communication. Trying to navigate that as a teen is just something I can't comprehend, before one learns how to truly be equanimous as an adult who has a separate identity from how they are perceived by others.
Similar, but different. I don't let my child use social media at all, and limited to 30 mins screen time total a day. She's excluded in that all her friends use TikTok, and she can't.
Maybe it's for the best.
My parents used to say 'if all your friends jumped off a bridge...', and I hated it, so I haven't used that one yet. I'm trying to rely on actual merits instead of follower cliches.
I don't understand such strict screen time limits. As adults everything will be on a screen. Might as well start getting good at it.
My kids are <10 and they have youtube limits, but they can play heaps of interactive games where they learn about resource management, team play, how systems work, how to solve problems and how to think.
I will even let them back on the computer in the evening after dinner if they want to do programming or level editing in Roblox, or make music in garage band, or something else creative.
We have different parenting styles, and that's OK. I hope your children turn out wonderfully.
I want for my child to have a bigger playground, so to speak. Reading books, playing with kids outside, bothering our neighbors constantly to pet and play with their dogs, making dandelion necklaces, etc. When she's on her phone she just zombies out, and it's like watching a device suck the soul from such a warm and extroverted person.
Things will change with time, but for now, I want her to appreciate and enjoy being a kid. The time for 8 hour screen days can wait.
Yes! Last year when I was pulling all the Ivy from my yard we demolished the back fence and the neighborhood kids were always in our backyard. The sound of the trampoline springs was like alarm. "Come out and play!"
Perhaps one differences is my kids don't have phones at all. No social media. My kids screens are tools for creativity and interactivity. PC's. There is not much zombie face.
Update: Oh also, its very social. After the home schooling in the lockdown, the kids have all their school friends in discord and google chat. There is lots of chatting and laughing and the occasional augment. (which is all part of learning)
You cant play with other kids outside when you are isolated from other kids or when they organize outside play on platform you are not allowed to use. And when all other kids have X and you dont have X, the experience of playing together is experience of not really belonging among them.
>And when all other kids have X and you dont have X, the experience of playing together is experience of not really belonging among them.
On the other hand, it's probably a good skill to form to learn how to adapt when others have something you do not. Other people having access to more resources is something that you deal with your entire life.
I agree with you on something: too many discussions mention 'screen time' as if anything done on a screen was perfectly equivalent. I really feel that playing a videogame/coding/doomscrolling/watching ads/reading/... are all very different activities with different consequences.
There’s a huge difference between video games as well. I wanted to show my nieces what I was playing as a kid, so I bought them aladdin and lion king pack on a Nintendo Switch that I bought for them, but they just want to play Mario Kart, which I think is boring, as it contains so many random elements, that they don’t really have to put in the effort to go through the levels.
I agree that there is a difference between video games.
However, I do not agree with your example. Elements of randomness don't mean a (video) game is trash, and I personally think Mario Kart requires effort to be good at. :)
Indeed. As someone in their 20s one of my regrets, genuinely, is that when I was younger I didn't just spend more time playing video games rather than doomscrolling...
"As adults everything will be on a screen. Might as well start getting good at it."
With all kindness, this is a bit defeatist. True, chances are they'll spend most of their lives sitting in front of a screen. That's no excuse to skip exercising and neglect physical form. Likewise, they need to develop healthy screen habits, which is stay as far away as humanly possible from screens, or else be devoured by them.
Rather than dive into screen vs. no screen - let me ask: what games are they interacting with? I'm at the very least curious to have a look.
I think the screen vs. no screen debate misses another important point: what am I doing while they're watching something or interacting with a screen? Kids certainly need their own play time and autonomy. But what I don't like about screen time for my kids is the easy excuse it gives me to not pay attention to them.
So, no judgement on the screen vs. no screen from me. That 30 minutes from the TV can my time to zone out too. But it can also be, instead, 30 minutes during which I teach them something/play with them/etc. rather than let the screen take over.
I'm 17, and I've grown up with a smart phone in my hand.
I wish my parents reduced the extent to which I was exposed to recommendation algorithms at a young age.
Recently, I've become aware of how much of the time I spend on social media is not necessarily time I want to be spending there. The problem with recommendation algorithms is that they always recommend you continue watching and scrolling. When I was young, I used to read 500 page books like they were nothing, but as I've spent more time on short form entertainment, the harder it has become for me to engage in long form content like books. I still do fine in school, and I've been generally successful, but I feel like if I can't sit in silence for 30 minutes, I'm not really in control of myself. Any time I have a period of boredom or free time, it's easy to fill it with entertainment, rather than thinking on my own.
I've been trying to break these habits (or, honestly, addictions) recently, but it's really hard after years of conditioning.
I don't think modern recommendation media is completely negative, but it is built on getting people addicted, and I can see why you don't want that for your children.
I’ll tell you that’s how my parents were about some stuff. Excluding me from stuff my peers were doing because they thought they knew best. They were mostly wrong and I don’t really talk to them today. Better hope you’re right.
Sorry to hear that. I think all parenting is just hoping you know best and doing best for the child. I have no rebuttal because maybe I have it all wrong.
On the other hand, my parents didn’t let me watch TV or play video games and I’m thankful for it. I didn’t talk to them for a few years, but today I’ve accepted many of their flaws and can better focus on what they can bring to my life. As a parent myself, I’m not too sure about the best course of action, but I sure believe I want to introduce my kids progressively to activities that require a lot of knowledge about themselves not to be harmful.
Agreed. I used to be so jealous of the kids that could do whatever they want but now I'm very happy my parents did that they did. I would say, at least in terms of metrics that are important to me, I've ended up in a better place than a lot of them. Now I'm sure some of them have other values and prefer their life but I am happy so I have to thank my parents
Analogous to the whole nerd thing being made fun of until being a nerd itself became a culture. Hopefully social media goes the way of the cigarettes ... harmful, profitable and still used but not cool anymore.
Can I ask how old your child is? By the time I was a teenager, I needed greater than 30 minutes of screen time just to complete assignments. One high school class alone was over and an hour and a half on the computer.
She is 10. Yes, that many 10 year old are on TikTok, sadly.
I should have been more clear and said 'phone time', literally, because it's a Google Family Link phone limit. She's allowed to use a chromebook to do homework when needed, which honestly isn't often at this age. Honestly, computers don't seem to interest her much, yet.
exactly. the equation has changed. people who dont fit in are now even more fucked. everyone is obligated to play this high stakes game that nobody asked for and that wasnt filtered through any kind of intelligent societal deliberation. nobody seems to be worried that kids make the rules in public schools, they bully each other viciously and kids who graduate from the system cant point to the country of portugal on a map. its full blown insanity.
But most of them become very skilled in navigating the social media landscape, which is what actually matters to them.
And the people that don't fit in will usually put more energy in other ways to express themselves and have a much higher chance of becoming Truly Interesting People, if they make it through that pressure cooker.
It's tough and I'm glad I'm not a part of it, but it's not the end of all cohesion in society that some make it out to be.
That's kind of the issue. A lot of them are committing suicide. Many more end up permanently scarred. Mental health issues are no joke. The author, Haidt, will himself recommend the concept of anti-fragility. Which is essentially toughening kids through gradual and manageable amounts of adversity. Yet even he sees no value in social media for this process. In other words, social media is not a net good for kids. They don't end up more well-adjusted as human beings.
Dealing with school bullies and other unpleasantness is a useful skill for adult life.
Dealing with the social media rat race is merely a "skill" to become a good little consumer to generate more "engagement" for the social media companies later in life.
they will be skilled at something although im not sure it will be anything to do with socializing. and saying that outcasts will just be more likely to blossom because of it is just speculation.
at a certain point in history man began to eat plants and adopt a sedentary agricultural lifestyle. there were many people who were made sick by eating plants and very little meat or fat. very, very sick. there are still echos of it in the population today. was it a positive thing for all the skills of the past to be thrown away and a large chunk of people to be sacrificed because they werent compatible with the new way? sometimes a societal shift eliminates an entire class of people. youre wrong because you try to paint it like its zero sum for all classes of people. in reality, if it is zero sum its only because what we lose in sacrifice we gain in progress. can you believe this has been going on for ten thousand years and still it doesnt really have a name?
Or seeing it presented in ways that make it seem much cooler: Lots of events I've been to look way more amazing in pictures people post then they actually were being there. :)
As someone who lives near a beach, I cannot tell you how true this is.
I used to fish a lot, and would constantly see younger people, usually but not always women, come near me (because I'm away from the crowds) and setup a tripod and spend 20 or so minutes taking different selfies, then leaving.
I can 100% guarantee you the vast majority of those were going on instagram, writing a long story about how a day at the beach is good for your soul, etc...when in reality they just drove to the beach, took a few photos, then went home.
Teens are being told the world is terrible by pessimists when there truly hasn’t been a better time to be alive. How do you expect them to feel? This is amplified on social media and shown with "proof" from all corners of the world.
We've evolved from a place where hearing about bad news from the tribe was an advantage. It allowed us to adjust our life to take into account risks _seen_ by other folks in the tribe. On a world scale that is broken, but our brains haven't adjust yet. If you're in the US is little value in knowing there was a shark attack in New Zealand, or a mass shooting in London.
The world is amazing and beautiful. Of course there are atrocities, there always are, but the developed world is living a pretty amazing life. Even the poor relatively speaking.
If someone is living a sad, scared life and projects that on to the youth then that person is the problem (again, social media makes this incredibly easy). Kids are unbelievably impressionable and impressing them with your knowledge about random atrocities in the world does no good for their psyche.
this ignores the harsh realities for life as a young person in the west.
Sure, they are not scrounging for food nor is there widespread famine but politics is increasingly polarised. There is a climate problem looming and the youngest will deal with it, western citizens or otherwise.
Economies are tanking, job markets are topsy turvy not to mention the real estate problem in a lot of western countries.
These problems, while not as dire as the problems faced by those in the developing world, are still problems. You cannot hand-wave this away by comparing one's lot in life to that of a person with no limbs. That is unfairly reductive.
The challenge, as you point out, is how to deal with this information and that is where i feel modern society has failed.
There is the matter of proportionality. There are challenges and problems, some worse than prior generations and some better.
Putting the comparison aside. It is not healthy or helpful to teach children that they are doomed, the situation is hopeless, and their their future is destined to be miserable.
I wouldn't tell my child "your life will suck, and you would be better off dead" every morning when they wake up. Pessimists preach this, and children believe it.
They are seeing it every day on blast from every source of media. It's not just kids. Its young adults choosing not to get married or have kids. The reality is grim.
Progress is relative. Even if the young generation isn't that bad compared to the 1700s, it's bad compared to what it could directly be related to, which is the previous generation and the era of good and plenty and western hegemony.
I'm not claiming that people tell their children this verbatim. I agree that this is what they are effectively being blasted by from media sources and this is very detrimental.
I also think that the pessimism is vastly overstated. Constant comparison is a recipe for disappointment just as much as if you compared your life to a celebrity on social media. There are still vast sources for happiness and life satisfaction that are untappd
On an individual level, yes, I agree. But this is against human nature - which is to compare. It requires strong mindfulness to overcome and this is not available to the general population.
This isn't "they have a BMW and I have a Corolla." The basic things are further and further out of reach.
Again, if you say to someone "well at least you aren't a slave" they'll scoff at you. We've progressed to a certain point and are on the verge of regressing if we haven't already.
>The basic things are further and further out of reach.
I assume you are talking specifically about middle class American issues in the last couple decades. Even so, this is really really hard to separate reality from imagination, and avoid the biases of looking at the negatives and ignoring the positives. You really have to take a deep dive on specific topics.
I often hear people talk about home ownership as a prime example. Home ownership is indeed lower today than it was 10-15 years ago, but people ignore the fact that tons of people that bought houses when it was easier were foreclosed on and lost them! Home ownership is higher across all ages than they were any time before the 70s and within a few percent of where they have been since. [1][2] At the same time, the country has urbanized, moving to cities where it is much harder to own a home[3].
People also have a major bias due to social mobility. For people who's parents owned a house and they don't, it seems like everything is falling out of reach. They don't have the perspective of the equal number of people who are in the opposite situation, where they are homeowners and their parents weren't.
It is really really hard to make an apples to apples comparison of "quality of life" across generations.
For example, you can look back just 10-20 years and see significant progress in civil rights, homicide rates, and social services. Medicaid didn't even exist before 65' and has undergone a number of large expansions since. It is easy to forget little things like 2+ million boomers were forcibly drafted to go fight in a foreign war.
How do you weigh that against a completely different metric like the homeownership for people in their 20s. I make this not to say that things are easier or harder, but to say that the entire process of general comparison is impossible, because people experience only one life and the grass is always greener on the other side.
I do think that when you look at the specific topics in detail, things are not nearly as bad as the pessimists proclaim.
I think the single biggest factor working against the happiness of younger generations is a lack of community, in person social interactions, and relatedly mental health. This is where the numbers are very clearly showing a huge difference for younger people.
I'm not so sure your data supports your conclusion. On homeownership, you argue more are moving to cities - but that supporting article doesn't address ownership, it just says "moved to." Not "purchased property." The first article pretty much disproves your point - young adults are delaying home purchasing, and only catch up 5 years later. Which is consistent: young people can't afford the same thing until much later. The homeownership rate is inconclusive as well. It pretty much supports the huge drop in owners living in their property the last decade. This DESPITE extremely low interest rates. The 80s it makes sense because of high interest rates - in a period of low interest rates, homeownership should have exploded. it didn't.
Now as interest rates rise and houses are still overpriced, the difficulties will multiply.
> People also have a major bias from due to social mobility. For people who's parents owned a house and they don't, it seems like everything is falling out of reach. They don't have the perspective of the equal number of people who are in the opposite situation, where they are homeowners and their parents weren't.
Social mobility is key - but social mobility has significantly slowed down. There is a stark divide with millennials - the college educated have done just about the same as boomers, but the non-college educated have done worse.
> For example, you can look back just 10-20 years and see significant progress in civil rights, homicide rates, and social services. Medicaid didn't even exist before 65' and has undergone a number of large expansions since. It is easy to forget little things like 2+ million boomers were forcibly drafted to go fight in a foreign war.
You can go back and forth with qualitative comparisons. Boomers didn't have a global pandemic or a recession that matched 2008. Inflation now is matching the 80s, so that argument goes out. Iraq and Afghanistan exist, and the largest attack on US soil was committed. Oh, the cold war? Yea Russia is still threatening nuclear war and we have the largest war in Europe since World War 2.
In any case, the numbers that matter prove the point: generations are not doing better than their predecessors for the first time in a long time. Millennials are slower to homeownership, slower to marriage, have to get more educated to compete, etc. These are all quantitative.
The pissing contest doesn't matter much if people are storming the capitol. People are unhappy, for good reason. Telling them they're just alarmist is just sticking your head in the sand. There's a reason fascist politics are back and socialism is gaining ground - people are struggling, more of them are, and more are becoming desperate.
I relied on the ownership charts for my ownership claims and the urbanization chart for the urbanization claims. For total ownership we are talking about a 1% difference from 10 years ago and 4% down from the all time US peak which was a historic bubble.
For 20-25 home ownership we are talking about a 5% change from bubble peak and maybe a 2% change from the average the last few decades.
It does suck being on the downward trend, and this is quantitatively lower than the peak rates. It qualitatively sucks that low interest rates didn't help. I personally think this is because homes weren't built in urban areas where more of the population resides due to zoning.
At the end of the day, we are still talking about a couple of percent difference so far. I share the concern that things could keep going and get worse
To put it in perspective; children in the west use phones with lithium mined by children in poor countries, and wear make up with mica mined by children in poor countries. Not saying that makes their problems invalid, but gratitude has been scientifically proven to increase happiness and we do have some things to be grateful for. Unfortunately telling people to me grateful is for some reason seen as annoying to most. I'm no Christian but that was one big positive of Christianity-- the focus on gratitude and skills to help one ensure stress and unhappiness
Of course there are challenges and problems. There always will be. The important thing is to teach the youth and give them confidence that they can solve these problems instead "hand-wave" them away in a negative way as pessimists tend to do.
There will always be trials and tribulations. The ones that solve those are the ones that truly believe they can. The more blind optimism we instill in folks the more confidence they will have to try and tackle the seemingly impossible (they never are) problems.
Dude, you blogged about being super thrilled about your garage door opener. Don't let the rest of us drag you down, but also don't presume to have figured the exact mental attitude that leads to successful outcomes. Not everything is peachy keen.
Man that was a good day! No one is dragging me down, nor am I saying everything is peachy keen. I do however think it's important how we present ourselves, and our problems to the youth both IRL and on social media.
"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth."
Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it. Sorry it can't just all be sunshine and roses like you prefer, but women in this country are about to lose a fundamental human right, so maybe "looking on the bright side" is not the appropriate disposition for these times.
Sure it is. It mostly always is. Of course we have more work to do for women, POCs, whatever the other oppressed groups are out there, but ignoring and brushing off the progress made in the last century is sad. We've made great strides and will continue to.
Climate change, increased Cost of living, etc. - Do you really need data for this? About the abortion thing, just visit the page of a random media outlet. It will be among the first 10 articles.
These are problems, yes. But how did they "wreck the world". It is these kind of outlandish takes that are pervasive on social media and give no context or relativism to the current problems of the world.
Of course we have problems. There will always be problems. Instead focus on giving the younger generation confidence that they can solve the problems by being optimistic about these things. I'm not saying to ignore these things. But instead recognize how good we actually have it, and how powerful and creative we are in solving insanely hard problems.
Thank you. A lot of people I know act like the problems of today are somehow astronomically worse than they have ever been, unsolvable, completely new, and in-addition-to all previous generation's problems ("nothing has improved in a hundred years!").
An acquaintance of mine told me over drinks, after complaining a lot about the current world and in all seriousness, that "I don't think there has ever been a worse time to be alive." I've heard similar sentiments, less drastically put, from quite a few people in person and all over social media. He wouldn't even backtrack after I started pushing him to seriously describe why life is somehow worse now than it has ever been.
It's infuriating, like seriously, you'd rather be born a random person 100 years ago instead of today? I can't even imagine someone wanting to be born a random person 50 years ago vs today (unless by random you mean "random middle class white heterosexual man in a western country" in which case, maybe your odds were better 50 years ago).
You'd have to be completely ignorant of almost all human history AND brainwashed by social media to come to this conclusion. Unfortunately I think this describes way too many people.
The phrase "wreck the world" is obviously referencing climate change and environmental degradation. The danger of carbon emissions was well understood in the 1980's, yet we still have a large portion of the population who believe it is some elaborate conspiracy instead of an urgent crisis. Guess what generation most of those people belong to.
I don't think anyone would choose to live during World War 2 or the great depression. The idea that all generations are the same and there problems are the same is just a worthless platitude. Never before in history has humanity had the knowledge or capability of ending itself like it does now. That can't be ignored.
>> Boomers wrecked the world and young people know they need to fix it.
This is the exact kind of BS the parent comment is referring too. The world is full of problems but it’s never been better for most people in most ways.
Your comment represents the same worthless platitude.
It doesn't make sense to say "yea your life is significantly worse than your parents, but hey at least you aren't a slave building the pyramids at Giza."
The fact is it's relative. People are, in general, worse off than their parents were in the west at this point in time. That matters.
Being slightly economically less well off (although still doing exceedingly well and having lots of opportunity) is not the same thing as “boomers wrecked the world”. There are people in very tough situations and as a society we need to help them more but the vast majority of young people (and I say this as one who isn’t doing exceedingly well) need to grow up, cheer up, and start taking more responsibility for things. My parents may have been able to buy a house, but there is much much more about their younger lives that I am glad I don’t have to deal with.
Younger people will be the ones enduring a transformation of our economy as they attempt to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.
Also, not sure what "grow up" means in this context. Quietly endure injustices and environmental catastrophe instead of speaking out and taking action?
I sincerely hope you don't actually believe this. Reductionist statements like this which attempt to blame an entire generation for a world that few if any of them had any control over.
"Boomers" tried to scrape together a life and provide for a family within the rules of the world where they lived. They elected people to solve the problems that they knew about at the time, just like every other generation.
"Boomers" is just shorthand for the older generation who treated the environment like a toilet, pillaged the welfare state, jailed anyone who wanted to get high in their free time and made hating/mocking LGBTQ people a national pastime (to name a few examples).
I'd say #notallboomers but it's implied unless you're being willfully obtuse.
“Boomers” I suppose are responsible for passing the clean air and clean water act which had the effect of essentially ending pollution as we know it in the US.
They also essentially created the welfare state…
They were and are pretty bad on effective drug policy.
LGB discourse went off the rails when progressives added all the other letters. To be fair, it’s not just boomers who are deeply concerned with the political religion of queerness.
You forgot a couple letters, each of which represents actual human beings who have historically been denied fundamental rights and have been subject to violence, including state violence.
Also, your understanding of the origin of the welfare state is way off the mark. Sometimes, the best thing a person can do is spend a little time studying basic history.
Wait are we not still treating the environment like a toilet? Do people younger than boomers not create mountains of plastic trash that will be here hundreds of years after their bones turn to dust? Do they not use phones with lithium mined by child slaves, and wear make up with mica mined by child slaves? Do they monitor how much has and electricity they are using? I'm not a boomer but I know enough to know the younger generations are not ready to sacrifice present comfort for future generations
and young people know they need to fix it - by misrepresenting and blowing every issue out of proportion and throwing names around so when actual problems arise most people have little more than a deep sense of tired antipathy towards others.
I think a lot of us in other generations are part of the same trends
I used to laugh at fidget spinners and everything gen z, then I tried formal education again, taking a class for a semester and oh my god the first couple sessions were really difficult! It immediately clicked with me that we - at least I - am not exempt from deteriorated concentration. I’m acclimated to the creative and less-structured demands of getting things done on time, and being rewarded for that. But pretending to pay attention for hours and not do anything because its noticeable and rude and punishable? That was very different. A couple weeks into the class I was fine and patient. But the first few sessions were fidget inducing.
I don't think a lot of us know. We aren't in the same environment.
I think everyone's concentration is deteriorating, but kids don't have the benefit of having experienced life without social media. From the very beginning they've been immersed in this, making their problems that much worse
That is a difference, I think a large portion of the adult population hasn't considered introspection on themselves and are subject to the same trends. I was able to recognize it because I had read about modern children's behavior in classroom, and I was able to recalibrate because I was familiar with what my level of concentration should be and had been. But that's not a consolation if everyone, perhaps including the teacher I responded to, would find themselves "infected" the same way if they were told to be the student in the classroom. I bet a more holistic solution would be found if people recognized they are distracted too, instead of only looking at the easier target: kids forced to be in that setting.
>I - am not exempt from deteriorated concentration
It's a muscle. Anyone who hasn't done school for a while will have to rebuild that muscle. It was like that before social media, just gotta relearn how to learn.
Programming is similar. If you do nothing but CRUD for a while (for whatever reason), when you gotta do the hard stuff where you have to keep a bunch of structure in your head at the same time, you're probably gonna struggle with it. After a few weeks, you'll be in better shape.
Same with reading complex documents, writing, math, etc.
Social media is bad. What is even worse is that smartphones allow people to use it anywhere, whenever they feel bored. The impact isn't massive just on mental health, but also on general productivity and people's social lives. It's just way too addicting.
I work in tech and constantly feel like moving into a forest without internet connection for these reasons.
> The impact isn't massive just on mental health, but also on general productivity and people's social lives. It's just way too addicting.
My main app of choice is YouTube and it's just astonishing how much amazing educational content there is on the app.
MIT OpenCourseware, 3Blue1Brown, PBS Eons, SmarterEveryDay, ... and I could go on and on....
DESPITE THIS, their recommendations and the YouTube search has gotten so unbelievably terrible over the past few years that it's just becoming unusable.
Their recommendations have nothing to do with the channels I'm subscribed to, instead it's so much goddamn crap with click-bait titles/thumbnails (because one of the biggest factors for the YouTube Rec. Algorithm is thumbnail click-through-rate).
For YouTube search, if you search for "schlieffen plan", then sure the first 3-4 recommendations will be based on what you searched. BUT after that, the fucking recommendations have nothing to do with your search query... instead it'll just be completely random stuff that the YouTube algorithm thinks you might click on.
It's gotten completely unusable with YouTube shorts now because they're trying to shove that shit down the throat of their users (99% of the YouTube shorts are complete fucking garbage).
It's really a shame because there's so much amazing content that's been uploaded to the YouTube platform, but the idiots in charge of the company are completely ruining the app... especially over the past few years.
I remember reading part of a study a few years ago that noted that youtube was the only social media (in the study) that didn't negatively affect mental health. In fact it had a slight positive impact.
To be fair youtube is not really social media in traditional sense. It's more of a content delivery platform. It's not a place where you go to watch pixtures from your friends holiday or political hot takes but more traditional entertainment.
It's funny how closely early YouTube resembles TikTok in the 'average people singing, dancing, vlogging, being funny in front of the webcam' type of video that's entirely missing from modern YouTube (the webcam having been seamlessly replaced by the front-facing phone camera).
Even the median length was similar, around 30 seconds, and the video responses feature for replying to one video with another certainly looks familiar. We can look back at exactly how it was in the Wayback Machine: here's a random snapshot of the 'Most Recent' page from 2006.[1] Remember the stereotypical TikTok feed full of dancing girls?
We can't get the past internet back, of course, but this realization really made me see TikTok in a different way. (though YouTube's propensity for recommending decade-old videos ought to be noted with regard to this--a social media site willing to show you some of its oldest content, that's rare!)
Yeah definitely agreed. I was talking about "The impact isn't massive just on mental health, but also on general productivity and people's social lives. It's just way too addicting" so moreso general productivity as opposed to mental health. That's why I highlighted that part in my comment.
Good luck for getting all documentation that you need offline. I was trying to work from hotels with crappy internet, but at this point it’s just impossible. No software creator cares about offline experience anymore.
It would be highly amusing if we had an economic crash caused by people being too busy on Facebook to bother doing any real productivity for the economy. Let's make third-rate dystopian Sci-Fi a reality.
Man. Those charts are dire. I'm not entirely sure how much social media is to blame, but it certainly can't be helping. It's certainly pretty telling that most people when asked seem to innately know that social media is bad for them.
However, I find the proposal here kinda lame:
- Mandate academic access and fund research
- Ban young children from social media or create a "suitable environment for them"
We all basically know it's bad, but we are going to spend a ton of time figuring out specifically why. Which makes the "suitable environment" kinda self-defeating - we don't know what a suitable environment is! And banning teens from doing something popular... I'm not even sure how seriously to take this suggestion.
So we know something is bad (probably for all ages), but no one really wants to stop doing it. (Someone will probably comment about business interests, but come on, HN doesn't make money and we are all still here). So I'm really not sure what the end game is. What does fixing/ending social media actually look like?
Personally I think it looks like going back to when your online and offline identities were totally separate. Inhabiting the internet under your real name is living in two different worlds with two different rulesets and pretending the same identity is well-suited to both.
100% of your online identity was under your control in my day. You were exactly who you chose to be. Not anymore. Now if you're ugly, fat, gay, a minority in real life you're the same online. The internet is not an escape anymore. That's why it's making more kids kill themselves now than it was twenty years ago.
Are there any studies showing using 4chan, tumblr, or reddit has better mental health outcomes than non-anonymous social networks? I'm skeptical from my own experience.
I grew up on 4chan, it’s nice to be a total flaming fuckface every now and then. Even on this website I throwaway accounts after a while.
Anonymity is an escape from the drudgery of this pseudo “real life” created by social media. You associate your real anything and you will pay the price.
Whether it be a photo or video, saying something that someone somewhere might find offensive—you end with all hurt and pain with nothing to gain.
Living on Twitter and Twitch et al for a while now, my thinking has become that there's only one way to derive well-being from these platforms: humor.
The best way to engage with these platforms is to not take shit on them seriously and have fun (whether that's being a total flaming fuckface or otherwise). If some subset of the population can't handle that, that's their problem, and they should get off the platform; otherwise, everyone's well-being collapses down to some lame common denominator, and no one's happy.
A thing that sucks is that the platforms themselves are inherently at odds with their users' well-being. Not taking things seriously? That's low-engagement. Humor? That's bound to upset some advertiser, somewhere. No sex, no jokes, only solemn outrage with no bad words plz.
That's true, also considering how many people believe or pretend to believe in conspiracy theories as absurd as reptile people and looking at violent protests that have been happening in the last years. So at least the negative effects have become most apparent in adults actually
My current girlfriend was kind enough to take a chance on me, despite having only a single photo on a rarely-used Facebook account. While it worked out, her next guesses were "I'm being catfished" and "Dude's definitely a serial killer".
I fully get how having a smaller online footprint makes tracking down a date harder.
> "...despite having only a single photo on a rarely-used Facebook account. While it worked out, her next guesses were "I'm being catfished" and "Dude's definitely a serial killer"
Well, I had that too with a girl, no clue if I'm being catfished. But the worst part (I think) is that I'm being very sarcastic on social media, mostly car stuff and I.T. and nothing else.
Haidt and Lukianoff offer a much clearer and stronger case for how social media and other influences are harming youth in their book "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure".
In my mind they intellectually coddle users by providing an echo chamber where they can spout their ideas to a group chosen specifically of people who will agree with them.
In the past most, especially school aged children and college age adults, needed to carefully craft your acquaintance group and police them through concerted effort, sometimes over years, to get a self-selected group who would challenge you so little. Now all the work is done for you using data you’ve been submitting for review literally the entire time you use the internet.
The real tragedy for me is how many kids and adults go online out of curiosity on a subject and end up on twitter, or facebook, or YouTube. The curiosity gets replaced with seeking those dopamine hits from endlessly scrolling.
Edit: dont forget youtube.
Imagine you have a history of buying into hysterics (or “enjoys controversial science”) and are curious about astronomy, or politics. Log on to youtube or facebook to find communities where people are discussing these topics and you’re directed to flat earth, and qanon, pol pot fans, among others.
These established groups are full of people who will tell you whatever you were on about is dead on, any time someone comes in and shares evidence to the contrary can be banned so you don't need to think about it anymore, dogpiled on so that their responses become less and less informative, accused of brigading. All this gives you a good out if you'd like to avoid being challenged and just straight pulling in those dopamine hits.
Again you can do this in real life but it takes work to keep and maintain an echo chamber in the real world. On social media you’re effectively automating away the problem.
The coddling argument is imho just weak. It is "the kids these days have it too easy" argument to devalue their positions without really arguing with them.
>And banning teens from doing something popular... I'm not even sure how seriously to take this suggestion.
This is such a strange thing to me. I understand that kids want to fit in, but really are parents supposed to always make sure they fit in even when trends are actively harmful? Kids haven't always even had so many peers-- 300 years ago you'd spend most of your time with relatives much older than you learning life skills. Was that really so terrible for them? If kids must fit in, then parents are basically screwed because many children and adults overuse social media. I just find it so strange that limiting kids activities is just seen as not worth even trying.
Is it really social media itself that's the major contributing factor?
Or is it really that people are using social media as a distribution channel to propagate negative, defeatist beliefs en mass in response to the natural challenges teens face when growing up?
I think it is the latter. One has but to open TikTok to quickly come across a video instilling negative beliefs about the opposite sex with tons of commenters asserting the validity of those beliefs. Confirmation bias at scale.
You can scarcely have a nuanced conversation online without some idiot misinterpreting what you said and rousing a mob to hound you for your narrative violation. Combined with the viral nature of negativity, this is an iron cage that is difficult for an inexperienced, impressionable teen mind to escape.
Parents need to be more proactive and should keep up with the firehose of negative beliefs teens are being fed through these distribution channels and attempt to have a conversation with them. At the very least, this should teach teens the valuable skill of challenging ideas and being critical of what others are putting out there.
The ones who view the medium as the devil are misguided at best. Their temporary efforts to stop it is a bandaid over the real problem of who teens are being influenced by.
I have a somewhat similar question. Don't get me wrong, I don't think moving more of teen social life onto the internet and less in the physical world is going to lead to happiness, so I agree on principle. But this obsession with social media in particular as the cause of all ills seems overblown.
I am a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt, and think he's done a great job in explaining some of the cultural shifts going on, and the changing of morality/psychology in our society.
But I feel like he is overselling social media's impact. He even mentions in his testimony, that the correlation between social media use and mental illness may be around r=0.10 . That is a fairly weak correlation. I also have not seen a study (note that this doesn't mean one doesn't exist) that has done a good job of controlling for the selection effects involved with the data, to attempt to understand if there is any causality involved and what direction it would go. My hypothesis is that those with mental illness would be more likely to use social media more in the first place.
Social media feels like a bit of a bogeyman in our society. There are 100% issues with it, and I don't necessarily think it's net-positive for humanity, but it's only one part of the ever-changing environment we as humans are now finding ourselves in. Blaming social media won't solve our issues, I feel like they run much deeper. Some of the deeper issues are around meaning, identity, belonging, status, decreasing tolerance for discomfort/inconvenience, increasing detachment from physical reality, etc. Our amorphous culture is guiding us down this path and it's really hard for us to grasp...
I think there are powerful second order or related effects here. There is both what screens and social media replace, and what they enable.
This is the most risk adverse, most monitored, and most policed generation of Americans.
I think this results in less freedom to experiment, explore, grow, and find happiness.
In about 25 years we have gone from teens behavior being largely untraceable, to them being reachable by cellphones, to the majority of their behavior and communication being recorded and available for later scrutiny.
These are all great points. And my take on seeing these debates about the effects of social media is that too many people tend to fall on one or the other side of a false dichotomy: social media is the root of all evil, or social media is being used as a scapegoat and the effects are grossly over-exaggerated. My opinion is that social media is a contributing factor to much larger problems in our current tech driven society. It shouldn't be blamed for everything, nor casually dismissed in these important discussions.
My other related hobby horse is parenting. I have seen so many people who literally mentality handicapped their children by giving them tablets instead of raising them so that they can watch TV or surf the web themselves.
American parents watch an average of 4 hours of TV per day.
Alternatively, I have friends who don't have tvs or tablets in their house and the developmental differences are night and day.
Not to mention the other obvious contributors to poor mental health (war, isolation, health, economic, etc.) that surround us that are being:
1. Ignored due to increased ability to distract one's self
2. Being constantly amplified via social media
In differing conditions, social media may not pose as much harm as it does today. I sure hope they factor this into account when legislating anything.
I think you're completely right, and I think social media is still the contributing factor. Not the concept of social media in itself. But the way current implementations work, they are incentivised to be addictive, to increase the amount of ads viewed, and to provide more data to be sold for a profit(see Campbell's Law for the relevant sociology work here. If all you're maximizing is "engagement", you'll have lots of it, at the cost of everything else). Therefore, the things you describe are emergent effects of a platform whose custodians have incentives fundamentally misaligned with the well-being of the platform's users.
> I think it is the latter. One has but to open TikTok to quickly come across a video instilling negative beliefs about the opposite sex with tons of commenters asserting the validity of those beliefs. Confirmation bias at scale.
I don’t have a study for this but I don’t believe this. More likely than now you have to be consuming such content to get such content. If you go to TikTok for positive vibes and actively search it out , that’s what you will get.
I can buy this, but it might practically be a distinction without a difference. If social media is an amplifier, we have to be careful what we're amplifying. Most people have no regular practice for the cultivation of wholesome solace. The result seems unsurprising.
The way to control what is being amplified is to control what people are producing. You can try to do this by modulating what is allowed to be produced or you can modulate this on the demand side. The latter is more robust but harder to legislate. It can be done via greater public awareness though. We have multiple case studies for this sort of thing.
My sister, now 27, was diagnosed with psychosis about 10 years ago. Her real social life was plummeting and i couldn’t notice it since i was living away. But apprently she was obsessed with social media, particularly twitter back then. At one point, she came to our parents saying thay “people put cameras at home and they are watching her”. So, she totally lost it. Immediately diagnosed and started using heavy medication. She totally lost touch with real life and human interaction. She still wouldn’t talk for hours if you sit in the same room. Still obsessed with social media. She has 20k followers on instagram (not sure how much of it is real though). And if you look at her instagram profile, it
‘S totaly a different person. Fancy dresses, fancy restaurants, bars etc. but in real life, she’s a total loser with no single friend. Doctor says it’s only medication that can help. I don’t believe it. I believe she has to also get therapy sessions. But my family doesn’t believe it. They are old , too tired to deal with this. Probably they also need therapy. And i do as well. But living abroad, with my wife and little daughter, i can’t really influence these decisions. So all i do is being sad. A teenager’s life was totally ruined because of this. Maybe it’s not entirely social media’s fault but i’m sure it plays a big role.
Just a little advice, if you see your kid or sibling being isolated, untidy and spend more and more time on social media, please try to stop it before it gets out of control.
Just my 2 cents.
My entirely anecdotal impression as a high school teacher is that media (in general, often but not always “social” media) is doing an exceptional job of sucking up teenagers’ every waking moment that is not actively demanded to be focused on something else. It’s pleasure without joy. Ennui without boredom.
Their social skills (and social interest) appear markedly reduced even compared to even five years ago. So many of them struggle to articulate any kind of positive vision for themselves/their lives unless they have lucked into a passion or have family that pushes.
They’re still teens. Funny and moody and confused, but their heads really are in their smartphones all the time.
As a parent of a 10 and 7yo your insight here is absolutely golden.
I worry a lot about my kids getting sucked into that world. Right now we're keeping them well away from social media, and very little and restricted screen time.
Your comment gives me confidence that this is the right approach, but I'm not sure yet how to navigate it as they enter their teenage years and all their friends have phones.
We are leaning them into non-digital pastimes and IRL relationships, which they fortunately enjoy. I hope this momentum can carry them through what I see as the danger years of teenage and early adulthood.
If I could go back and change one thing about my teenagers' educations it would be to homeschool them during the middle school years. They go from ~30 interpersonal relationships in elementary school to upwards of ~150 to ~210 in middle school at a time when they, or their classmates, are beginning adolescence.
I'm curious: how do the "weird ones" do? The outsiders, contrarians, the ones who don't quite fit in and who might even take pleasure in not caring about social media?
> I'm curious: how do the "weird ones" do? The outsiders, contrarians,
the ones who don't quite fit in and who might even take pleasure in
not caring about social media?
Anecdotally, really really well! based on Haidt's watershed of 2009
I'm seeing what's in the pipeline at bachelors and masters level
education 10-12 years on. Most of my L6 and L7 are young adults aged
around 20-25. They've either had about a decade of exposure to
smartphones and social media, or for some reason they have opted out.
There is a very significant difference in their abilities and
attitudes. I can almost see it in their eyes in the first tutorial.
Motivation is higher.
Punctuality and commitment are massively better (they turn up to
tutorials and don't email me at the last minute with an excuse)
Concentration and listening is better, They are not constantly
twitching and looking to their phone.
Emotional range of affect (ability for seriousness and good humour) is
higher.
Positive interpersonal skills are better. This isn't an
introvert-extrovert thing, it's about focus, openness, body language,
eye contact, thoughtfulness of speech, vocabulary. It's just a
different experience to meet people who are phone-free.
Even ability to use technology is improved. Counterintuitive
maybe. But they seem better at searching, referencing and organising
information.
I pretty much breathe a sigh of joy when I see a student has a dumb
phone or tells me they "don't do smartphone and social media". I know
there's going to be more to work with, and the outcomes are going to
be interesting.
The irony is of course, that these "weird ones" would have been us
geeks 30 years ago. The same group you'd expect to have a more intense
relation to authentic knowledge, curiosity and better academic
outcomes.
Things have flipped so that technology overuse is now normative, and
the "geeky" thing to do is be moderate, circumspect and sceptical.
>Things have flipped so that technology overuse is now normative, and the "geeky" thing to do is be moderate, circumspect and sceptical.
Hearing this, even anecdotally, makes me sigh with relief. What is your impression of their lives? Do they hang out with each other, or with normies, in RL, or just spend a lot of time alone?
No. So that's why it's not a "movement" AFAICS, not unless I'm missing
something emerging in youth culture.
As a "weird kid" in the 80s I was delighted to find a Computer Club
and discover there were others. But this is something different. You
can't really rally around things you all don't do.
Thinking about it now though, I didn't see "geekiness" as an
_identity_ at the time. It's like that got imposed ex-post-facto in
the late 90s.
Seems a few are outdoors-sporty, things like long distance walking,
canoeing, mountain biking and stuff. Maybe a bit "health geeky". One
guy is really into astronomy and going up mountains to get better
telescope views. But this is pure anecdote. I don't really have an
archetype in mind. It's like "really into life, but minus the
techno-bullshit and control freakery". One person described it as
"slow living", but I haven't got a handle on that yet. There's
definitely an anti-corporate element too I'd say.
> spend a lot of time alone?
My guess is that they value their time and attention, and just don't
see constant connectivity and "convenience" as that much of a big
deal. They're also individualistic and confident, as in not embarrassed
to be without a phone, or be the one who does things differently, like
holding up a line for an extra 10 seconds by paying cash (and then
being the only one who tips the waitress).
I definitely see myself as part of that, whatever it is - but being a
50 something computer guy who spends WAY too much time at the
keyboard, it's slightly contradictory.
Come to think of it, a better angle is "last of the normies" in a
world gone mad. I think there's a way to celebrate being relatively
tech-free as a kind of traditional normality.
Social media isn't just popular kids posting photos on Instagram anymore; it encompasses the entire spectrum of young people now. In my experience with my younger sisters' friends (17-22), the ones that don't fit in with the normal, popular crowd, just bury themselves in a different type of social media.
Twitter and TikTok are still pretty big for the "weird girls". Witch culture, far-left politics, nerdy fandoms, and outsider music all have pretty big communities online, a lot of which are made up of teenage girls or queer-adjacent kids.
The "weird boys" mostly end up on reddit and Discord, as expected. I remember spending time with their group at one point and asking one of the kids what he was doing on his phone all night, he said he was arguing with another reddit mod on Discord about rules for their new sub. This was at a campfire.
The comic book store or DIY concert hall don't exist as watering holes for nerdy Gen-Z. I think there's something profoundly sad about that.
It's been four years since I graduated high school, but my experience was that even if you were not on a given social media platform, at least one of your friends definitely was. It is very hard to ignore or stop caring about.
Niche forums still exist, even if waning. The instant message service Discord offers something of the intimacy and organization forums have in a different format. There's more or less the same chances to meet and bond.
And as a parent I just feel powerless to stop it. A battle just to get modest parental controls on my teen's phone. Serious mental health issues that blow up into full blown crisis explosion when we try to put our foot down about doing homework or some other task. And they're nearing the age at which it starts to be downright creepy to have controls on their personal devices, but they need it more than ever.
And in school kids "using their phones" for work in class, but really, just using their phones. So I can't even lock it down during class time. Sigh.
Luckily the second child (pre-teen boy) shows no interest in phones or social media. Just video games. All. Day. Long.
My kids are younger but I'm having issues with them and YouTube. I have YouTube completely blocked on their personal device, but I can't do anything about their school issued Chromebook. In the end I have to completely block the school laptops from the internet at home, otherwise they go from a video about reptiles quickly into toy unboxing, fail video reactions, etc. In the end I have to continuously block and unblock websites and devices so they can do their homework. It's maddening, especially since there is so much educational material on YouTube. It's a losing battle.
My son is still young, so enforcing boundaries is much easier (easier as in successful, the emotional disregulation is still there of course).
It’s not easy. Do your best. Try to actively support broadening their experiences with (hopefully) the outcome that they expand their interests. I think the needed thing here is not necessarily teetotaling, but finding something better to do than consuming media all the time.
Well, yes, this is the fundamental problem and why so many of us are really screwed in the post-COVID era: because something better to do was really hard to find, and one of the survival mechanisms for parents was to just let screentime run rampant.
Insert Socrates quote here. What adults think they understand about current trends in teenage culture were laughably wrong when I was a teenager, and there's no reason to think the trend has changed.
Usually I'd agree, and happily ignore this new moral panic the way I've ignored all the others that, as predicted, eventually fizzled out into irrelevance.
It's possible that this time it's different. We mark the adoption of movable type as a watershed in Western civilization, in the sense that it changed how people relate to their churches and their governments as well as how they experienced science, art, and culture. The Internet is a far bigger deal than movable type was. Anyone who says they know exactly what its effects will be on teenagers or on any other demographic or institution is blowing smoke.
I'd normally agree, but in this case I think a lot of us in the older generations are realising we're also being affected. I certainly am, it's not just the teenagers.
And this was exactly what the older generation was saying when I was a teenager. There's always a special pleading as to why this time for this issue it's definitely different.
You're implying that this all makes it automatically wrong, but social changes are a real thing, some positive, some negative. The Socrates quote is cute but only goes so far.
In this case, in my life I have concrete examples of the jealously and FOMO invoked by social media (in this case, old school Instagram) from what people are doing literally on the other side of the world. That's a significant change and was much more difficult and far less in real-time in the past. It's not great for my mental health.
My point is that it’s not all kids. I’m also not Socrates shaking my fist at kids being slovenly and disrespectful; I like teenagers and enjoy their passions and interests. I actually enjoy their stupid little dances and social media silliness.
That said, the issue is the all encompassing nature of it. Always on. Less time interacting with peers. Less time in extended thought. Less time even with their own thoughts.
I’ve taught high schoolers in the countryside, the city and the fancy suburbs both pre and post smartphone. The transition feels rapid and noticeable.
How do you differentiate what you are saying versus what people have always said about reading comic books all day, or playing video games all day, watching tv, listening to certain music, spending all your time on the internet, etc?
Life is boring as fuck. It really is. It takes a lot to keep a human captivated.
Life is what you make of it. Personally, since I've become an adult, I couldn't tell you the last time I remember experiencing boredom. And I have deliberately disconnected myself as much as I can. My phone is always on silent mode, and I've turned off notifications for every app except text messaging and calling. I deleted my last social media account a few years ago, and I try to the best of my ability to use my computer and my phone for things that are not mind-numbing, e.g. I don't play mobile games, I don't mindlessly watch youtube videos, etc. I limit my consumption.
Even if you spent the entire day sitting in front of a blank wall, there are literally endless things you could think about and explore. You could think about the things in your immediate environment, how they work, how they came to be, how you could improve on them. You could run any number of thought experiments like if we made contact with an alien civilization how would we come to understand each other? You could think about your goals in life and steps to achieving them, explore why you are experiencing problems with certain people and how to resolve them, or just reminisce and be grateful for things you have.
>Even if you spent the entire day sitting in front of a blank wall, there are literally endless things you could think about and explore. You could think about the things in your immediate environment, how they work, how they came to be, how you could improve on them. You could run any number of thought experiments like if we made contact with an alien civilization how would we come to understand each other?
I spent 9 days in the hospital a few years ago, mostly unable to move. The boredom was absolutely crippling. I consider myself a fairly scintillating person who enjoys time by himself, but I couldn't go more than a couple hours staring out my window without needing the warm sedation of daytime TV. There are only so many alien civilization thought experiments one can run without needing some external stimuli!
But - I would also argue that boredom is not a negative state of mind. Boredom motivates us to think, to dream, to change, to move our bodies, to be creative, to seek connection, to free associate, to let our minds rest, to..., to..., to…
Perhaps, our minds aren’t built to be captivated all day (though the root of the word does feel appropriate to the conversation).
Except in this case, I'm pretty sure the smartphone+social media combo is also screwing up the older generations.
Does anyone not have friends or family members who became angrier, darker, or otherwise seem to have lost touch with reality since becoming extremely online?
> Their social skills (and social interest) appear markedly reduced even compared to even five years ago. So many of them struggle to articulate any kind of positive vision for themselves/their lives unless they have lucked into a passion or have family that pushes.
Yikes. How is a lack of positive vision indicative of poor social skills? You can be quite articulate and good at socializing but still suicidal.
Have you ever considered that maybe young people are disillusioned with their surroundings and the people who are older than them? After all - you come on here and complain that they’re socially inept, negative, and mostly unworthy of any attention. Maybe they’re just reflecting back what you feel about them.
>How is a lack of positive vision indicative of poor social skills?
They never said it was. IF they were drawing any connection, it is the opposite direction. Poor social skills and lack of community can lead to feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and depression.
>Have you ever considered that maybe young people are disillusioned with their surroundings and the people who are older than them? After all - you come on here and complain that they’re socially inept, negative, and mostly unworthy of any attention. Maybe they’re just reflecting back what you feel about them.
This is a valid consideration. It is possible that there is a generational divide at play where youth are seen as having nothing valued by older generations in terms of interests and social interactions. This could be a perception, or it could be a reality.
In my life, there are certainly people that I do not share an interests with and do not enjoy their company.
I didn’t intend to link social skills and positive visions. Lazy writing before falling asleep.
As for the accusation, I certainly hope not. I am absolutely one of those type that kills them with kindness and excitement. And, to be clear, I didn’t call them socially inept - I called their social skills are reduced compared to students in the recent past/socially disinterested.
And, I absolutely didn’t call them unworthy of any attention; that’s absurd.
What bothers me most and even on HN, where you usaully get intelligent discourse, the alarmist pessimism. Everything is falling apart! Just another form of self-indulgence. There must be something compelling about pretending the apocolypse is tomorrow.
Yes, there are problems in our social, political, ecomonic systems. They need to be recognized and addressed. Democracy makes that process slow and difficult. But the pessimism to me is one of the biggest dangers.
Almost every thread on HN is filled with such weird pessimism. Or such obviously false observations. The famous dropbox criticism is only scratching the surface. Its so predictable you know what the top complaints will be before you even open the page.
There could be a post about some crazy new performance optimization coming to firefox and the top comment will be a link to a 15 year old bug where the right click menu padding for the flags page isn't consistent when viewed on BSD. Concluding the browser is abandonware due to this.
Well, the doom-scrolling is a feature not a bug of social media. If you think the world is ending tomorrow, don't you want to be there to watch it all end?
The general (Anglo?) public has adopted this eschatological aesthetic. The mood here doesn’t seem that different that in other forums. Whether the pessimism is warranted, I can’t say
Consider also that reality today may have unique intractable problems: plastic pollution, acidic oceans, mercury contamination, temperatures nearing unsurvivable in places, etc.
I don't discount the effects of pollution and consider climate change to be a very important problem to recognize that said, more humans are thriving (as in not starving to death or dying at young age) today than in any time in history.
More humans existing today isn't a sign of stability or sustainability though. Would horses have thought the same in the early 1900s, just before their population rapidly declined?
Yes, you're talking about despair. We get constantly feed a steady stream of doom and gloom from old media and have been for decades. I assume social media is just more of the same. I try to catch myself and try to be optimistic, but if I consume a lot of it, it's overwhelming.
I definitely have been limiting my intake of news over the past several years. Election cycles are the worst for doom and gloom, but they all sell it, all the time.
Everything in this country, in this life, is a competition. One big zero-sum game.
It starts in high school. Social status, academics, athletics, and now social media followers and likes.
I am very glad that when I was in high school, social media wasn't really a thing yet. I could leave it all at school. Just go home and read, play video games or go outside. Most of my mistakes were limited to the memories of those people who witnessed them first hand.
Kids today are under near constant competition with each other and it takes a toll.
At some point, I hope, without some massive existential crisis serving as the impetuous we can collectively come to the understanding that our technology has vastly outpaced our morality. I hope that the prevailing social norm becomes cooperation over competition and the desire to lift others up instead of stepping on them for your own personal gain.
Not relationships, marriage, work, or community. Even business is rarely zero sum, or the economy wouldn't grow. Generally speaking, business is win-win deals.
> I don't understand how you could think any of this.
If life, community, industry, love, and community were a zero-sum game, a do-nothing loner would be at parity with a dynamic entrepreneur who has a family and a network of colleagues essential to achieving their shared goals.
Particularly in these times of politically weaponized philosophy, it is important to teach children values that are not nihilistic trash.
Exceedingly difficult goals are the most worthy because they require growth. That is to say, expect the world to be grossly unfair, and build strength, friendships, industry, community so that you can construct and defend the fairness you desire. There are an endless number of zero-sum thieves out there who never learned to thrive except by taking from their betters, and you win against them by being better.
Relationships are a huge competition in an atomic family type situation - children competing with spouses for time, spouse/kids competing with grandparents, family competing with friends... and god forbid if you have a family member with medical needs. When time was collective because of extended families, this stress got spread out and not as much noticeable but with the shrinked family unit, this is only going to get worse.
> Relationships are a huge competition in an atomic family type situation - children competing with spouses for time, spouse/kids competing with grandparents, family competing with friends... and god forbid if you have a family member with medical needs.
Wow, I have never experienced competition in that situation. There are scarce resources at times, but that doesn't mean they are distributed by competition. IME, usually people work together toward the greatest good for the family. They love each other and want each other to thrive, and would generally rather sacrifice themselves than see a loved one sacrifice for them. That good faith is never in question.
The question is not of good faith or the competition being overt or malicious type etc. Time is finite - if you are spending on one side, you can't be sending on the remaining sides. Usually the people in your life realize it and adjust for the priority/greater good and so yes, they will willingly sacrifice in that spirit. But the relationships themselves are emotionally competing - if you have, e.g., to choose between relocating for the future of your kids and your ailing parents, those duties are competing, even though the recipients themselves may not be - you will have to choose.
Your experience with relationships, work, and community are different than mine. There's some competition, of course, but relationships, romantic and platonic, IME mostly rely on factors that have little to do with third parties; their success depends on the two people involved - I find that's true even for romantic, monogamous relationships with 3 or more parties as options. Most of my time at work is not spent competing, but cooperating and helping each other.
Mostly, people seem to love to argue about nihilism to some philosophical extreme, but let's separate that from real life.
> Community? What else do you think teens are seeking out online?
Does that mean community is or is not competitive? HN is a community but isn't much competitive.
Competition for partners is a thing but still not zero sum. The number of people in relationships is not fixed. You can increase the sum by starting a relationship that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Satisfaction you get out of it is obviously not zero sum as well.
If this is how teens think, it is no wonder they are miserable. Happiness is not zero sum, it can be created. In fact, it must be created
We've made it in to a competition by creating false scarcities of necessities (mostly housing). If you want a home, you need to be better than your peers.
Status games are multiplayer, zero-sum, hierarchical, judged socially. Get grades, applause, titles now — emptiness later. Natural games are single player, positive-sum, internal, judged by nature/markets.
Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
I don't know what kind of sterile environment you'd have to live in to play mostly "natural games", and certainly any teenager in any social setting (school) is playing a multiplayer game. Hell almost all humans are playing multiplayer games. Fundamentally, we are social creatures, despite what high philosophy may say
you've edited your post a couple of times so this was a reply to your earlier edit about natural/status games
My friend kids were doing sports and dancing at very serious level. Before pandemic, then lockdown started and they were forced to stop. Now they do not want to invest time in something like that again!
It is easy to blaim "social media", but it is adults who create this toxic culture. Kids need stability and current "doom" culture does not help.
Figure 2 that shows the rates of major depression among boys and girls is shocking.
1 in 4 girls and 1 in 10 boys have been diagnosed with major depression.
I wonder what the distribution is of others who haven't been diagnosed or deal with depression to a lower degree.
Something that may be surprising to some people is that this trend isn't limited to boys and girls.
From data collected in 2019/2020, 30% of people aged 18-25 years in the USA have diagnosed mental health issues. This number is skewed heavily towards women too.
All of the data I've seen on the mental health crisis in the West seems to indicate that it hits women harder than men. I have yet to see an explanation for why, though.
Does anyone know of any articles that thoroughly cover this gender split in mental health and why this particular issue is more predominantly affecting women?
There are tons of proposed explanations. Starting with "during covid, boys were less isolated due to them socializing via computer games way more then girls". Continuing through "different body standards and societal expectations" (tho those did not changed in covid). In addition, some mental illnesses are simply genetically more prevalent in one gender then in the other.
Those are all speculations tho.
Historically, also issues like alcoholism, anorexia, drug use had different rates between genders. It is not unprecedented for one gender to be affected differently then the other.
anorexia could be viewed as part and parcel with the kind of body dysmorphia that is often displayed in weightlifters, not to mention anorexia is also seen at heightened rates among gays and mtf transgenders.
could it be that women are more likely to seek treatment for mental illness? also to the degree that mental illnesses are gender variant, some are more pro social and less subject to stigma than others.
I have some recent anecdata on the topic. When browsing Google Maps reviews to compare psychotherapists in my area, the overwhelming majority of the reviews are from women.
Edited to add: the note under graph says "These mental illness estimates are based on a predictive model and are not direct measures of diagnostic status."
8.36B if you want a direct comparison for major depression.
I still think that "Any Mental Illness in Past Year" is a lot more interesting because it includes other mental illnesses like anxiety.
I don’t think limiting information is the solution at least among older teens/young adults.
I think people have a right to know the world’s ugly, harsh facts and crazy opinions. Not knowing something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I think the solution is to remind them of all the good facts and reasonable opinions. Warn about particularly bad stuff like gore (and do block this content from children until they reach young adulthood). And most importantly, teach them how to better manage their thoughts and emotions (techniques from therapy), so they can learn about bad stuff without being hurt or biased from it.
Then again, this take is from my own ignorance and personality. Maybe I haven’t been exposed to the real ugly stuff, or maybe I’m better at not reacting to stuff emotionally than others. But the main issue with restricting harsh information is, not knowing something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I don't think the problem is necessarily knowing what kind of place the world is, but being constantly reminded by it. I believe social media would be harmful even if it was full of happy news, simply because it provides constant distraction which isn't natural for our brains.
Also, often young people compare their lives to unrealistic images portrayed through social media influencers, and get depressed when their life seems worse. So even "positive" content can be a source of depression.
We already see tobacco ads from the 50s as barbaric (e.g. take a smoke to relief the pain of pregnancy) so it's not inconceivable that we may one day see unregulated social media of today the same
News brings you the ugly but it doesn’t teach you how to cope. Actually
it does the exact opposite and tries to elicit emotional response. The news also covers the negative world events much more than the positive ones.
People need to learn that the news is biased and uses fallacies like the slippery slope to make harsh reality sound even harsh than it actually is.
Strongly disagree, when has society ever decided less access to information is ideal? Our descendants will create better platforms that can allow users to better filter for their emotional needs and they'll likely have better tools to understand their own emotions.
>Strongly disagree, when has society ever decided less access to information is ideal?
The trick social media companies use is convincing people that all they're doing is giving people access to "information". They are not; they're just creating addiction machines. It should be self evident that wikipedia or a minimalist blog with a comment box is in an entirely different solar system from facebook's algorithm that keeps track of how long you scroll and then shows you something you're likely to interact with right before you're supposed to close the app, manipulating your emotions to keep you "engaged" longer.
>Our descendants will create better platforms that can allow users to better filter for their emotional needs and they'll likely have better tools to understand their own emotions.
We already have them. My kids won't be able to access the internet until they figure out how to navigate the command line.
First, nice Neal Stephenson reference, second, you're right to challenge the notion that banning social media is equivalent to banning information. It's about time-scale. I figure my kids can and should read anything they want in book form. But they cannot and should not see anything they want from the internet. The time-scale of the internet is too short, the quality of information (particularly commentary) is very poor, the opportunity to "engage" is too distracting. I'm not convinced anyone is really able to handle the onslaught of the internet - I am certain that children are not.
Beautifully put. Time-scale is what we're kind of dancing around when we talk about information consumption. When I was in high school, it was easy to sit, alone, with my calculus text book and devour everything free of distractions. I can't imagine what it's like to try to learn something like that in today's environment, where your time is a zero-sum game of attention manipulation. Now, I'm not saying we should all become luddites or something, and make our kids start from scratch with technology ... but ... there is at least some wisdom in that perspective. I do wonder if my (and by the looks of it some others' here) recent hostility to technology is because I'm a millennial, so my experiences with it straddle the analog-to-digital transformation and I can actually remember how things used to be.
It does give you more access to information but also allows young impressionable brains to be influenced in a negative way by misguided "influencers".
The distribution channel isn't the main issue, it is that the role of a parent is more complicated than it ever was and parents are not keeping up.
In the past you had to ensure that your kid doesn't pick up negative influences from the kids around them. Today you need to be more proactive in ensuring that they don't pick up negative influences from the multitudes of misguided people unrestricted by geography who's half-formed views are propagated as long as they are interesting and make people feel good about themselves in the short term.
Society has nearly always decided that limiting access to information to children is ideal.
Most dont let young children have access to pornography and extremely violent content for example. Historically, this access has been limited both by parents and social groups.
I wouldn't want to rely on my toddlers cognitive tools to digest and defend against a high resolution video of someone being dismembered and beheaded alive.
I have an 11 and 9 year old. They don't have phones. They do have devices, mostly for Minecraft. They are restricted with parental controls and time limits. They do not have unrestrained internet access and YouTube is completely blocked.
As a parent I find myself frustrated at the filtering options and conflicted by my close-fistedness. They moan every day that they are the only one in their class that doesn't have a phone, can't be on TikTok, can't watch Squid Games, etc.
Parents are just throwing the entirety of the internet at their children and I'm left trying to explain to two kids why I don't think it's a good idea.
Am I wrong? Am I just creating an environment of anxiety?
God, being a kid in 2020 is different than it was in the 80s/90s
> Am I wrong? Am I just creating an environment of anxiety?
No. Parenting and schools have gone completely to hell. You're not wrong, everyone else is. I still can't believe schools started letting kids carry their cell phones with them to class all day. As early as elementary school. WTF.
For my part, I figure my kids can have an unrestricted cell phone (and so, unrestricted Internet) as soon as they can pay for the device and plan on their own. If they can hold down a job to cover the bill, they can probably handle it. Fuck giving 8-year-olds personal smartphones. Or even 12-year-olds. That's insane.
I completely agree but it seems like the rest of the world including my kids school makes this work hard. You are smart to keep the Youtube pandoras box from opening.
Conspiracy theory time: Social media is being blamed for a mental disorder epidemic in order to justify cracking down on the free flow of information.
On a more serious note:
> The patterns are nearly identical in the UK and Canada, and the trends are similar though not
identical in Australia and New Zealand. We do not yet see signs of similar epidemics in
continental Europe or in East Asia, although I have not yet found good data from those regions.
East Asia population are aggressive consumers of social media. If they are not getting depressed from it, then the Anglosaxon (which seems to be suffering from this crisis) should look elsewhere.
> The “eyewitness testimony” confirms the academic findings: social media is a culprit
> East Asia population are aggressive consumers of social media. If they are not getting depressed from it, then the Anglosaxon (which seems to be suffering from this crisis) should look elsewhere.
Only if you discount the rest of the sentence you quoted...
> ... although I have not yet found good data from those regions.
Lots of politically charged comments here, but I actually work with students on a daily basis. It’s not about politics, people.
Social media does play a role, but not in the way most would argue. All those saying it is an addiction are correct, but I would expand it to include most of the teen internet as well.
The thing is they don’t use technology like you do. They are CONSUMED by digital media if they don’t receive boundaries from home. Their lives are dominated by the virtual - memes, tiktok, news, Netflix, YouTube and they have been since an early age. They know this is not a healthy lifestyle and yet they cannot tear themselves away. Many are hopelessly addicted to the point of sacrificing sleep, food, and relationships to technology addiction.
Meanwhile, most teenagers are well aware of the problems they will inherit (climate, political divide, cost of living, etc) from the previous generations. I had to talk 7th graders off of a ledge this week after one student started a discussion about the latest IPCC report. However this alone isn’t the problem.
It is the vast DISJUNCTION between these two worlds that causes them stress. They have been raised by predatory technology into a world full of greed and a collapsing ecosystem. They are caught between virtual consumerist addiction and despair about reality on a daily basis.
>but I actually work with students on a daily basis.
I hate to be the one but what's your sample count? What does, "I actually work with students on a daily basis" mean? Are you a teacher in a high school? University? Do they intern/co-op at your company?
I attend a few schools for part-time things here and there, and I'm exposed to students aged 14-70 regularly. Politics are involved as a means of an identity, even if they realize that they are powerless to do anything.
The lack of critical thinking for any given saucy subject (most recently see Roe vs Wade) means that the opinions people hold are generally prepackaged from whatever sources they obtained them from and are internally congruent† - they know things here and there about a given subject, but externally nonsensical given the situation that the person is in and what they ought to focus their attention/time towards - they are, for lack of a better term, wasting their precious time away getting baited by professional media con people with attention grabbing headlines and memes.
† Best seen in person as a dialogue between two or more people where you're aware that their source material was written by one person in an essay (or a tweet roll) form, but has been changed to be a kind of a ping-ponged conversation where each person takes a turn to continue the over all narrative. (Better put: one big agreeable circle-jerk.)
Not surprising to me at all. I just have to look around me and it's super obvious that social media has ruined people's lives, especially teens who don't yet have the mental maturity to understand how their brains are being hijacked. As an adult you at least have the mental facilities to logically understand what's happening, and you are less exposed to peer pressure and not in need of acceptance from your tribe(s). But for teens there is literally not way out.
I'd happily take all the NFT scams if in turn we could shut down TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. They are the worst thing that has happened to humanity in the last decade.
I would say that the mobile phone manufacturers are, if anything, analogous to tobacconists. They do provide access to the noxious stuff, and one may argue it is their main source of income, but they also provide other non-harmful and even necessary products (depending on culture, in Spain for instance tobacconists would traditionally also sell postal stamps, bus tickets, etc.).
Is it social media? Or is it also the knowledge that they effectively have no future. Rent is going up and mortgage rates are going up faster. A shrinking portion of young adults can now afford housing. The economy is becoming so disfunctional there's almost no reason to bother participating. When children end up in that position their family will turn on them and they have nothing materially or socially.
> Or is it also the knowledge that they effectively have no future. Rent is going up and mortgage rates are going up faster. A shrinking portion of young adults can now afford housing. The economy is becoming so disfunctional there's almost no reason to bother participating. When children end up in that position their family will turn on them and they have nothing materially or socially.
As a side note, "problems occurring" do not mean "they effectively have no future".
Speaking as still a young person, these are problems the last generation has left us. But they're their problems; hold overs from the generations best known for their blood lead levels. We'll fix them and, with any luck, we'll be better ancestors to our children. I'd rather you not throw us over the boat yet.
> As a side note, "problems occurring" do not mean "they effectively have no future".
Yeah, but why should I solve them ?
Modern media and modern world has taught us that our existence is merely here to satisfy our own needs. Sure, humans' main objective is to prevail the existence of the human species. But why live ?
Why exist ? As a person with (recovering?) depression, I am not motivated enough to contribute to anything at all. Maybe making software is my thing. But what are we? endless Consumption machines ?
I apologize in advance for not sounding optimistic at all. I think that lackthereof religion has brought us to question our existence even more.
With a seemingly more-accessible we've made some things easy (survival, basic needs except mind) and others hard (purpose & happiness, setting expectations).
> We'll fix them and, with any luck, we'll be better ancestors to our children.
I think that the anxiety might come from the view that we might not fix those problems in time, because the amount of work needed to do so is that vast.
I assume you're talking about living in the USA. The economy is certainly more difficult than it was 50 years ago but there are still plenty of reasons to participate. Ask anyone (like myself) who immigrated here from a country where you don't have a shot to get a job or start a business unless you know someone.
> Rent is going up and mortgage rates are going up faster. A shrinking portion of young adults can now afford housing. The economy is becoming so disfunctional there's almost no reason to bother participating. When children end up in that position their family will turn on them and they have nothing materially or socially.
This sounds exactly like you are reading too much social media.
Swaths of the United States didn't start popping pills and drinking themselves to death over the past couple decades because they got bummed out by social media.
Well media (both social and traditional) bombarding kids with the message that everything is falling apart certainly won't help foster a generation with a positive, can-do outlook. As a parent I look for ways for kids to "look on the bright side" about life, even if I myself are concerned.
Yes, rent is expensive, but it’s more than possible to make your way in today’s world provided you don’t fall behind due to drugs or avoidable diseases.
The people for which success is out of reach do not browse HN.
The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. This is a precarious condition that leads to a lifetime of stress. Most people are living in extreme stress conditions.
I wouldn't call living paycheck to paycheck "making it." Most people aren't making it--by the numbers.
I know the type of person that posts these kinds of incredibly out of touch comments on here. You work at a corporation, or your skills are currently in high demmand. You are surrounded by people making good money. This insulates you, leading you to extrapolate the conditions you are living under over the WHOLE WORLD--today's world!
Let them eat cake?
In today's world it's: let them withdraw from their 401k if they fall on hard times.
It's ridiculous and frankly insulting and dismissive of the plight of many struggling people. It's the old aristocratic mentality: anyone that doesn't succeed is a fuck up. It's a method of projecting the failings of the system onto those it fails, used over and over throughout history.
I suspect with the political instability of this nation, we won't be having these types of arguments much longer. As the system fails, debates will become viciously partisan. There will be no more "if you try hard, you can succeed." Everything will be reduced to, "Submit to the will of the party, and you're good. Don't and you're a traitor deserving of elimination." This is what happens when people retreat behind slogans and refuse to address reality. Things break down, then things get out of control because we have failed to adapt. Then comes the age of horror where the system has to destructively seek a new equilibrium.
The people for which success is out of reach do not browse HN.
It depends how you define "success" of course, but by my criteria of "living with financial independence, real happiness, and the ability to choose what impact you have on the world" very few HN readers will ever be successful. We trade our happiness and satisfaction that comes from making a real impact on the world for a pile of cash to make tech people don't care about.
Right, but this is about teenagers, not people who browse HN. Not everyone can be a software developer or startup founder. Someone has to build and maintain all these buildings, roads, and farms.
A bit of a scape goat. I remember how teen magazines managed to totally disrupt the body self-image of my sister in the 90ies, which she still suffers from today.
We cannot distinguish effects of media meaningfully from our societies on a general scale. Certainly some “propaganda” effects may be observable via intervention. But the general mental health effects are hardly traceable
My family is kinda addicted, so addicted, we ended up not talking anymore because someone wanted a perfect shot off the eifel tower and it wasn't goid enough, even worse when there has to be made pictures of food and whatever.
I'm a foodie, I cook a lot. I enjoy food porn. Sometimes it inspires me to prepare something new or adopt a new technique. If the dish was prepared by a friend, their creation makes me happy just as if they had posted some sort of art or electronics project.
- For food, if you're eating somewhere else, it's showing that you're doing something in a restaurant.
- For food, showing that you're ready for a man. (That's what I've heard)
- Photos without obvious intentions (But they are "obvious") let me explain...
If I shoot a video in Tesla without showing the Taxi driver. Than I'm in Tesla and you (the viewer) aren't.
You will need to feel jealous about me. (It's about status)
My succinct explanation for this: “social media extends the school social environment into the home.”
Whilst I believe social media is bad for everyone’s health (the unethical manipulation of users by the social media companies), the reason it is so so terrible for teenagers is it removes any possibility of escape for the horrendous “Lord of the flies” that is high school.
If I hadn’t been able to escape that environment each evening, I very much doubt I would still be here. And I wasn’t suffering anywhere near as much as many people I knew.
High school is a terrible idea, and social media extends and amplifies the horrible behaviours it engenders.
This topic is something that's been generating a lot of hot takes recently. Personally I think the way to solve it is teaching people to be more mindful of their own emotions.
e.g. if seeing someone's artificial presentation of their life on social media makes someone feel bad, they should be aware of the causal link. The upcoming generation should know how to regulate their own social media diet.
There's so much nastiness on the internet, so many lies. I think that if the upcoming generation isn't aware of this then we're playing with fire as a society
Telling people "be more mindful of your emotions" is less than useless. Facebook etc. have many thousands of some incredibly intelligent people whose sole job is essentially to "hack" your emotions to keep you scrolling and scrolling.
It's like telling society at large "diet and exercise" to lose weight, but when so many places are incredibly un-walkable, and food scientists produce foods engineered to make you want more. Yes, "diet and exercise" does make sense individually, but obviously that strategy has failed miserably for society at large given we are fatter than ever.
It would be very difficult to teach a teenager to be mindful of their own emotions to the degree necessary that social media would have no effect on them upon exposure. Teenagers brains aren’t fully developed yet and cannot think critically, have limited empathy, and do not yet have solid senses of self.
I'll take the onus and point out there that there's a non-insignificant number of people on this board actively participating and making this even worse, and in some cases gloating about it. When these threads come up, they are either quiet about it, or they would find a way to shift the blame as a means of self-defense (either conscious or not).
Keep this in mind next time you read a thread about salaries and how so-and-so company is paying $600k+ TC for new grads and you're "leaving money on the table."
I have mixed feelings on social media for young people. When I was growing up it actually helped me immensely as it let me connect with like minded people and escape the local echo chamber (I don't mean to disparage my childhood community, but I definitely didn't fit in). I feel that I was able to develop emotional intelligence in a way that my schooling environment could not provide, so there are some upsides.
However, there was definitely a period of time where I would have benefited from using social media less and giving it less importance in my day. In some senses, it felt like a responsibility, whereas now I treat it like an elective leisure activity.
I believe that social media access should be introduced in late teens, when the ability to discern and self regulate what an 'elective leisure activity' is.
As an aside, I also think that critical thinking skills should be in the curriculum for at least 2 years before a kid gets a smart phone, but that's unfortunately up to the discretion of parents, regardless of competence.
I'm in my mid twenties, I grew up with social media evolving around me and quit it during the pandemic in 2020. I still use reddit every now and then but stopped commenting and reading comments besides on technical subreddits or gaming ones.
I detest social media, I think even though it may not be the root cause as others have pointed out it's definitely amplifying the underlying issues. I think I can sum up my detest for it in one simple statement, it's all fake.
I know people who will delete a post on instagram if it doesn't get enough "likes". I put likes in quotes because what do likes even mean? Likes are just people scrolling through their timeline and liking something from whoever their friends with. They are essentially meaningless, they add no value to your life and just feed an arbitrary algorithm that runs on a positive feedback loop. So why do people obsess over them to the point of deleting content if they do not receive the "correct" amount of likes.
Meanwhile the actual currency of social media is really just attention. Every single service is fighting for your attention. More eyes on the timeline means more eyes on ads. So they create the whole experience of the network around keeping you on it. Suddenly you don't see content you may be interested in, rather you start seeing content that will keep you hooked. Just one more post, one more tweet, one more tik tok. Suddenly you've spent an hour of your life doing nothing besides consuming mediocre content.
This comment is getting too long and ranty, and doesn't even touch on the way the companies will prime your emotional state to be more receptive to whatever ad they want to show you. Adults have problems with social media and addiction to it, there is absolutely no reason a child should be consuming these addictive apps. They are a net negative on society, any perceived "connection" they supposedly give is vapid and fleeting and quickly overwhelmed by the negatives they push down the timeline.
We could start by trying to take the magic out of how social media sites decide what to display. Content delivery algorithms can be very effective at imparting a lasting impact on users that carries away from the platform.
If content delivery algorithms were open sourced it could add a healthy check to the ecosystem.
More and more people are living as a lower class, relationships are fragile, internet and social media is more integrated into our lives causing shallow over socialization, short attention span and addiction for attention / likes / whatever, broken families / families with mental issues, unstable economy, owning being replaced with renting, loneliness, and increasing race against other people for financial and social survival, honestly it all looks pretty bleak, even more so for the people younger than me.
Also for some people the country waging war and spreading propaganda of surrounding countries nearby isn't helping things either.
As I wrote elsewhere: that's not new, at all. That was there in the 80s/early 90s as well, with the added continuous stress of the Cold War. What motivates you to reply like this, without any evidence? OTOH, you completely ignore section 2 of the paper.
In medicine we have a saying: on a scale of 10, death is an 8. It’s not clear to me that suicide is the worst case scenario. For example we have a really good family friend whose daughter has attempted suicide multiple times and has been in an inpatient psychiatric facility for over a year. She’s 13. Her first attempt was at age 11. The state of California is out of beds for this sort of thing so she’s several hundred miles away in another state. Do you think the SWEs, PMs, or executives at FaceBook, Instagram, Snap, or TikTok do volunteer work at these facilities? Do you even think they know where such facilities are?
I don’t think this is new. I’ve been reading “Four arguments for the elimination of television(1978)” by Jerry Mander and this same phenomenon was also realized with teenagers who watched excess television.
Similar big companies then invested millions in research saying their product or programming does not have an effect on teens, and then the government sees the dire truth to then sponsor an actual study to try and show the general public it’s not “that bad”. But the reality is that we all know it’s that bad and yet we allow it freely into our homes.
An extremely important read if this study alarms you.
Also it seems social media has huge effects on bullying too. As it doesn't anymore stop at home door, but continues through day and night. Previously at least outside school and getting there from there you could escape it. But now it is ever present and probably somehow worse if shared to multiple people on Internet.
And nothing is done to punish the bullies or remove them from the system. They are not locked up or shipped in some facility where they could not anymore cause harm and damage to others. So sad that adults allow them continue it without any proper repercussions.
The top comment purports to represent an unpopular opinion, but I'll offer one that's even less likely to appeal. Maybe kids would be less likely to over-engage with computers and what's behind them if they didn't see their parents doing exactly that. There are plenty of adults who can barely take their eyes off their phones even while driving. There are even more who work long hours with computers, but to anyone not looking directly at the screen a debugging session can be indistinguishable from a YouTube video binge. Sometimes there really isn't that much difference. All of the parents talking about how hard it is to enforce screen-time rules or limits should think very hard about what the time they spent typing those comments might look like to others.
Addendum: even when kids don't directly witness parents' social-media use, they often become aware of it in other ways. If every dinner-table or in-the-car conversation starts with "I saw this great post on Facebook" or "somebody on Hacker News said" they can figure out what's going on. When parents' beliefs or mood are obviously affected by online events, they see that too and it becomes normalized. Again, people should think carefully about the example - as well as the rules - that they set.
i want to share one of the saddest things i have read online recently.
not long ago, one would think that bullying would not follow kids to their houses. once they got home, they would be safe with their family. that's no longer the case with the advent of social media.
the story is that of a teenage girl who committed suicide due to constant bullying. it never stopped, even when she got home. and her family had no idea. she was, based on the photos and her brother's post, a very pretty and high achieving young person. that alone, he wrote, was the reason they targeted his sister.
after her suicide, a memorial page was set up by her family. anyone who knew her could add a message. huge mistake! the bullies flooded the page with cruel and insensitive messages. like "good riddance" and how "the world was better without her". remember, the bullies were her schoolmates, not strangers...
the story saddened and upset me.
i couldn't imagine what the poor family were going through. and i know that these bullies didn't realize the gravity of what they were doing. i don't have a solution to offer either. i just wanna share that young person's story. i am sure when the leaders of our social media platforms get in their meeting rooms, nobody is going to mention her.
i wanna share her story so people know it happened. and that it's still happening.
There seems to be a lot of room for controversy when the subject is something that is infeasible to measure due to required sample size, difficulty of recruiting human subjects, and multicollinearity of features.
Because of the above, the language of suggestion ("associated with" or "correlated with") dominates these studies.
The underlying problem is one of separation: the studies do not say that social media use causes "plummeting teen mental health," nor do they say that social media use alone affects teen mental health.
There are some interesting conclusions by the cited studies however:
> The 12-month prevalence of major depressive episodes (MDEs) increased from 8.7% in 2005 to 11.3% in 2014 in adolescents and from 8.8% to 9.6% in young adults (both P < .001). The increase was larger and statistically significant only in the age range of 12 to 20 years. [0]
> Rates of major depressive episode in the last year increased 52% 2005–2017 (from 8.7% to 13.2%) among adolescents aged 12 to 17 and 63% 2009–2017 (from 8.1% to 13.2%) among young adults 18–25. Serious psychological distress in the last month and suicide-related outcomes (suicidal ideation, plans, attempts, and deaths by suicide) in the last year also increased among young adults 18–25 from 2008–2017 (with a 71% increase in serious psychological distress), with less consistent and weaker increases among adults ages 26 and over. [1]
social media is replacing the traditional ways of communicating ideas (which have been tv, radio, newspapers, and school curriculum & textbooks)...but now the elites cannot really control social media, as much as they want to control social media and as much as they try to control social media...they cannot.....
and control of what goes into young minds is THE most important commodity for elites...shaping young minds is how the elites control the future ("Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it," Proverbs 22 6)
and the elites don't like losing that control...they want to set the future path for youth; they want to create the adults that youth will become....and so the elites are trying to restrict channels of communication into young minds that the elites cannot control...they are doing that by demonizing social media...
"The dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class" Karl Marx
The "elite" is very much descentralized and unconscious/semi-conscious.
There's absolutely zero risk for the power structures on current social media: ideology is 100% ok: banks are fine, scam and fraud is rampant, people are surely working (some of them have their main goal in life to progress in a carreer in a big company), people are surely studying (academia is the brain of the elite), people are still bragging against elites with near-zero effect and then when they get older finally bowing their heads and accepting "reality", religion is fine, harry potter is awesome etc etc.. Not to mention social media itself is owned by the elite and has some important functions - which are working perfectly fine.
Social media cannot be blamed. Parents are the only ones to blame.
I grew up while MTV had music videos playing. There were mascara wearing men talking about slitting their wrists and there were tough looking black men talking about killing people in the street. Some people imitated that. Some parents turned it off.
If you give your kid access to anything and everything the world has to offer, including every manner of degenerate and pedophile, you allow your daughters in their most vulnerable years to be taught all manner of unhealthy social proving mechanisms, you get unhealthy people. It really is that simple. There are brothels in the world too, you don't blame the brothel when a kid grows up in there.
Raise your kids and quit listening to people that tell you it's unethical to decide how to do that, and quit making excuses and blaming the world for jot doing it.
Helicopter parenting messes kids up in a whole different way that’s often even worse.
Kids are going to like things parents try to keep away from them. They like things that are cool with their peers. They like doing things parents tell them not to do. They’ll find ways to do things their peers are all doing even if you try to block them entirely.
Kids who were banned from those alleged MTV videos simply watched them at a friend’s house and had the smarts to not let their parents know.
Deciding how you're going to raise your kids is not helicopter parenting.
Going through the hoops and figuring out how to do the things your parents don't want you to do is a healthy part of growing up, any parent that doesn't take that into account and actually thinks they're going to stop their kid from becoming an adult is making a mistake.
The goals are to remove easy access to damaging material, and to make them do difficult, clever things to get around it, and to make them think you don't know so that they don't outwardly demonstrate exposure. This limits exposure to the worst of what is out there, teaches them agency and problem solving skills, and prevents them from heavily internalizing whatever they are exposed to.
Yes, when they reach a certain age when they start to want to do things on their own, they'll find ways to be exposed to what they want to be exposed to. There's nothing wrong with this.
I grew up similarly and I think I have to disagree. When we had all the influence from the Tv, we would still se people that were really far away from us.
Right now a teenager that is spending their summer vacation at home can be bombarded with photos of classmates "having the best time of their lives" through social media.
You're right that parents should be more present but even if you explain to a teenager that what they're seeing on instagram/tiktok is not the full reality, it still has an effect on them. I know because even I feel it sometimes.
Well the point is, the world isn't perfect and there will always be negative influences, and it is a parent's duty to limit those influences as much as possible. Before it was this, now it's that. It was bad kids in the neighborhood, then it was TV, then it was videogames, now it is social media, who knows what it will be in 20 years.
I wouldn't explain to a teenager about Instagram and tiktok, I'd DNS block them on all devices. They'll see it at their friends house or whatever, and then I can talk to them, and they'll get grouchy about wanting it just like they do about toys at the store. But at least I'll limit exposure to negative influences, which is my job.
Individual parenting styles and quality obviously have a huge part to play. But when there's a huge toxic elephant rampaging around the room, saying "avoid the elephant" is a less systemic fix that helps way fewer people than "just shoot the bloody elephant".
And no sadly I don't know what shooting the bloody elephant equates to in this metaphor :-(
Also - I'm not sure if you're a parent or what your experiences have been, but I am and my opinion is 100% that stopping my kids doing the stuff that all their peer group does will be far worse in terms of ending up ostracised and alone and probably bullied than the harms social media itself very likely does bring.
You can not install social media apps on kids phone, and restrict them in the browser (facebook has that feature). Dunno how to do the same on the PC though.
Not unfeasible. But non-sensical. You simply cannot offload raising of kids to technology. Besides, parental control tends to have a lot of false positives.
I wish these studies would stop working with the base assumption of “we know social media is bad, we just have to prove it”. I’m not saying this conclusion is wrong, but when you start with that biased view, you end up doing bad science. It’s not enough to prove correlation, you need to prove causation.
Kids who are depressed have more time on their hands, fewer friends, fewer activities, it’s almost a given that their social media consumption must be higher even if there is no effect.
But the studies never seem to spend much time considering this because they aren’t trying to figure out if social media is bad for mental health, they already decided this is the case and they are just gathering ammonitikn for their predefined conclusion.
1. life has gone better based on data - this means there is more opportunity to being successful. if you are still not successful then it becomes your problem. it is more like lost opportunity has more cost in today's world.
2. human mind scales input to output - emotional output range is fixed. if input is low, we become more sensitive, thereby retaining same emotional output range. in today's better society, people are becoming more sensitive due to this reason, so with higher sensitivity you react to more things (and random things like what you see on social media).
3. we disorderize more - once we label as (depressed/anxious....) it becomes a self-fulfulling profecy.
4. social media - having lot of random stuff - doesnt help to create stream of consciousness story. its rathere mix of random unconnected happenings.
When you're 14, World War I begins and ends when you're 18 with 22 million dead.
Soon after a global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, appears, killing 50 million people. And you're alive and 20 years old.
When you're 29 you survive the global economic crisis that started with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, causing inflation, unemployment and famine.
When you're 33 years old the nazis come to power.
When you're 39, World War II begins and ends when you're 45 years old with a 60 million dead. In the Holocaust 6 million Jews die.
When you're 52, the Korean War begins. When you're 64, the Vietnam War begins and ends when you're 75.
A child born in 1985 thinks his grandparents have no idea how difficult life is, but they have survived several wars and catastrophes.
My grandfather was born in the year 1900 (he had my mom in 1960). I was born in the 80s. I knew about all the wars and the Great Depression by the time I was 8. It was frequently talked about, particularly the Depression, among the elders in my family. And my brother and I were always fascinated with the big wars from a young age. At any rate, my great grandmother would save EVERYTHING. Nothing ever went to waste. No food, no item, was thrown away willy nilly. She had the same appliances for decades (they actually lasted). She would save up bottles and cans and actually turn them in for money. She raised 3 kids as a widow in the Depression. I never, ever got the impression that my grandparents or great-grandparents had it worse than me. I knew by the way they carried themselves. They grew up in a time of scarcity and the influence of that carried with them until death.
Pretty much. I remember my wife's great-grandfather talking about leaving the farm at 16 during the Great Depression, jumping on the roof of a train and looking for random work at every stop. Today, plenty of parents won't let their kids walk home alone at night at 16.
Of course the social media experts would say he "unfairly" benefited from the post-WW2 economy, plenty of jobs, a nice house but hell, I wouldn't trade places with him.
Note that most of the graphs show drastically worse mental health situations for girls vs boys. Which accords with my experience as a parent. It's just awful out there for young teen girls, and a horrible experience parenting one.
That said, I'd submit that what social media on the phone is for girls... video games are for boys. All encompassing, immersive, 24/7 focus stealer.
And Zuckerberg wants to make this markedly worse on both fronts.
We need a 'Butlerian Jihad' against this crap. And I say this as a person who came of Internet-age spending all my waking hours on MUDs & MOOs in the 90s. We need to resist the "metaverse" (the commercial weaponization of the "virtual") with all our strength.
Related book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. He argues that the incentives of social media companies are misaligned. Their profits come from advertisers, and that maximising their profit means maximising 'engagement' and screen time, which is detrimental to the users.
Regulation as proposed in OP is acknowledging the problem, but maybe fixing the underlying cause will involve changing the business model.
I think the rise of social media and poor mental health has a much simpler explanation and I think due to occams razor it works out:
1) social media incentivizes negative reactions and therefore promotes negativity
2) there is something bad happening all the time that you cannot do anything about
For example as an adult does it benefit my mood in any way to hear teenagers aren’t doing ok? Nope. I can’t even do anything about it because I don’t have influence over any teens. But it’s still heavily upvoted on the social media I visit. I imagine the same thing happens on tiktok and Instagram and the like, except teenagers have underdeveloped brains so it’s not like they can even critically think about their consumption.
Interesting report.
I think we should ban teenagers/children from having smart phones. Calling and texting aside, teenagers don't need phones.
As an education tool, laptops/desktops are invaluable for teenagers. I'm uncertain of the best way to manage these devices with teenagers. Perhaps limiting the internet connection to their devices might work - e.g. only for an hour when a parent is around. Perhaps parents do not provide enough protection.
Broadly encouraging positive behaviours and exercise, and giving teenagers good defenses against difficult issues (bullying, negative thoughts, loneliness) could all help.
Frequent phone notifications, social media aside, must have some negative impact on quality of life.
In the worst cases, I've worked with people who had notifications go off every 2-3 minutes. I can't help but assume this destroys their ability to focus and turns every mental task into a herculean effort as they must backtrack so frequently.
Every context switch makes them forget what we spoke about, or what we were working on. Notifications turn their phones into literal torture devices.
Disable as many notifications as humanly possible, and make it the highest priority to reduce how many times per day your phone interrupts you.
I've never been as afraid in a car as when my "crypto-bro" cousin picked me up to drive 3 hours and he basically had a scrolling wall of notifications and tried to 'absorb' as much as possible; news, crypto, memes, stocks, business, you name it... horrible 5 hours.
Instagram and Facebook are probably the biggest culprits, but YouTube is part of the problem as well. It disgusts me how many ads are in kids content on YouTube--and they usually aren't even relevant to kids. Why are you showing car insurance ads on a video for kids? Also, kids have a bigger hurdle to get over than any other generation--housing and college costs keep rising and there's never been more competition in every other aspect of life. Our society has created a toxic winner takes all environment that leads many to despair and depression.
IRC has been around for decades as have bulletin boards. IRC is real-time versus slower bulletin boards but are graphical. What is it with social media that is so different?
I've used per-Internet BBS, IRC, bulletin boards and I feel the difference in social media. The closest I can come is chat rooms in games where there is a mix of anonymity, comradeship, contempt, bullying but all by people there to game. Social media mixes people who normally would not associate all in the same space. Whether it's young and old or left vs right, religious or not.
The difference between social media and IRC / IM / fourms is the pervasiveness into all aspects of our lives. The older style communities were focused around specific topics / activites and what was done there didn't spread outside that specific community. Now anything we do is broadcast (& recorded) to anyone and everyone who might take an interest, now or in the future.
All the charts stop in 2018, 2019, or at best 2020 for one of them (major depression). I'm deeply worried about what we will find when we extend the charts to include the two years of pandemic.
Aside from the terrible picture this paints and appreciation that this information is coming to light, it is frustrating that the authors chose to paint this as a gendered issue (#1.5) with girls being more impacted than boys. If they had bothered to look up CDC information they would see that teen boys suicide rates doubled during the same time period.
Girls and boys choose different ways to deal with depression and the authors focused on reportable depression and signs of self-harm which are biased gendered measurements of depression.
Hrm, US government seems to be saying "Hey! Look over there!"
Surely it's not rising inequality, inaction on climate, stagnating wages, less security in work, out of control cost of living, the constant warmongering, the dogged commitment to the imperial system, lack of universal healthcare or any of that. It's social media!
(Or maybe it's that kids in the US can see the universal healthcare in other countries and that's what's making them depressed?)
How much and how well were we measuring mental health - teens or otherwise - prior to the last decade or so?
We are what we consume - food or content. That said, imagine being young and looking back 20+ yrs. Tech bubble burst, 9/11, housing bubble burst, an unproductive gov, an unsupportive social infrastructure, etc.
Imagine thinking that past is your future. But sure, let the (do nothing) status quo powers blame social media. How convenient.
> We are what we consume - food or content. That said, imagine being young and looking back 20+ yrs. Tech bubble burst, 9/11, housing bubble burst, an unproductive gov, an unsupportive social infrastructure, etc.
When I was young and without social media, with NATO bombing a neighboring country, I heard a couple of times from some concerned adults about the entire situation. Now, I'd be flooded with images of the destruction, probably blamed for it somehow, told I'm not doing enough to stop it. They feel like vastly different worlds.
I was pretty depressed in high school, but simultaneously was aware it was likely to be a transient thing. I was athletic, smart, and reasonably popular. But I had virtually no autonomy and therefore no real social life outside of school. Which, again, was honestly pretty great.
I don't know how common my situation was but I imagine it was fairly typical. And most kids probably felt the burden of greater competition
I believe that a simple human being has not evolved to be constantly bombarded with every global problem imaginable. In the past you only worried about your direct environment that caused enough problems on its own. Now the thing is, the whole world has more or less become our direct environment and I'm not surprised mental problems our spiraling out of control as a result of it.
Yeah, Lets blame it on the social thing aka the present thing.
As if it teams mental health has always been great. I guess Social Media started the class cliques too in schools, the competition, the social pressure.
Social media started the 24hrs news cycle that is bombing everyone and making it look like the world is ending the next hour.
It is so obvious to any parent with a child in this age group the harm that phones and social media have done. My daughter, now 15, is on anxiety meds and scars up and down her arm from cutting. I'm an MD that crossed over to tech, but my earlier profession (vascular surgery) largely involved taking care of the wreckage that the tobacco industry wrought upon society. The parallels here are obvious and striking. The spell under which society was either ignorant or in denial (via advertising) about the harms of smoking in 1950 is very similar to what we have today.
1. More research needs to be done to solidify the data on what is pretty obviously happening, but we can't wait on the data to take action (it will be important for the lawsuits though).
2. We need regulation that forces these apps to only be able to execute for something like 2 hours in a 24-hour period before being sandboxed and shut off. They aren't mission-critical, nobody "needs" instagram more than this other than Meta. These kids need a break, and to breathe.
3. We need a large educational investment, quickly, to get people to understand the harmful combination of social media, device usage, and puberty. The comments in this thread make this readily apparent... The number of "but, but, but" and "whatabout" comments is pretty astounding here.
4. Social media companies must be litigated for knowingly and willingly doing this. Class-action lawsuits, in the many billions of dollars. The behavior of these companies will not change otherwise.
I think everyone's mental health is going down because of social media. Kids may be getting it worse because parents mental health going down can be doubly impacting on the kids. And teen is where they start using social media themselves.
The cause isn’t social media, social media simply prevents the terrible shit going on from being filtered out of their awareness by major news orgs. The cause is rampant disregard for looming environmental devastation, a society that is feudal at best, and the sense that everyone running the world hasn’t got a clue and so has siloed themselves into their small set of responsibilities and disregards every other axis of thought and concern. The kids see what’s wrong. The large scale effort to throw pills and other off the shelf mental health suppressive treatments at them is only masking their legitimate anxiety and reasonable loss of all sense of order and a future within the context presented them by the hapless adults. Kids are spot on to be freaking out, and honestly they would be justified in trying to grind the entire society to a halt until these issues are taken seriously.
IMO the cause is negative news sell best combined with social media and their algorithms. Maybe we need to change the news culture altogether? Why focus always on the bad stuff?
Have you noticed how much content in social media has become either hating those who deserve it, or hyper sentimentality? It’s like manic lizard brain theater.
Should health professionals run a campaign to advise parents not to let their teenage children have mobile phones? Severely resticrt internet access to them?
I think the point remains. The Chinese seem to grok that social media and everything that comes with it can be severe net negatives, and so they've gone the (predictably) authoritarian route of heavily restricting its use.
I don't think we have anything going on right now that we haven't had in the past. global health issues, national and global financial issues, war, threats of terrorism,... have all existed the past. What we have now is a world of social media that amplifies the issues, often negatively, to the point of overwhelming psychological impact. Social media is what is pushing us over the edge.
2014 is a curious date, because it's when I first understood that my utterly optimistic outlook on what the internet would do to at least western culture/society was misdirected.
It's when I first noticed how loud, oblivious and frenetic online interaction became at large and how - by self-selection - sociopaths took the lead on the stage that big central platforms provided them. But what I found/find even sadder were/are the engagement numbers around shallow multimedial diarrhea and influencers.
It's also the year I sharply cut back on my internet usage by about 90% and quit all communities (perhaps prematurely, but I was sort of shellshocked).
HN is almost all that's left (except one venerable gaming community) and it itself I consider one of the shallower communities (this is structural because of the lack of longitudinal communication since discussions are keyed on links, not longer-lived standalone threads. The crowd makes up for it though).
And now... I'm glad I made the connections and experiences I did before then, some of which carried over to today. I also learned how the psychopathological spectrum does not just exist in textbooks and how to bail when confronted with it.
Maybe when I have less things on my plate I'll stretch out my feelers once more and visit a couple online villages like I enjoyed so much back then.
HN is also extremely tiring to read. Constant sour venting about office politics and how it's all futile, and everyone is out there to get you, the darned sleazy manager abusing the developers, the dark government surveilling the people etc etc.
I mean even this very discussion is quite dark. I'm not saying these aren't realistic issues, but it's probably better to quit HN too. Almost all front page stories are some form of grumbling about the unfixable dark state of the world.
Hehe, it's gotten better I believe. I'm browsing it somewhat less than I used to so my sample may be off.
Eventually you numb slightly to it, and with a couple interesting pieces sprinkled in, the overall utility is still positive to me.
And more generally: Controversy is never going away, I just have to get better at detecting silent consensus that fits my ethics (i.e. where the gap between world models is not so large to make conversation impossible). These days this mostly entails belief in some form of shared reality and basic human rights; how the standards have fallen!
And on some occasions we simply like to scream into the ether. Personally, I don't hold it against anybody, even though it may be against community hygiene when overdone or inappropriate. But at that point there's moderation.
The IT crowd will manage. It's what's happening "outside" that worries me...
I don't know how much is true but it seems the web makes too many things too heavy available too early and often.
You see kids discussing existential concepts, business, .. at 13yo. I'm not sure previous generation were focused on these instead of just coasting along for fun. It's nice to make people more mature but too early and too much seems a failure.
While this is absolutely true, there's also another elephant in the room: a global pandemic that's destroyed every kid's routine, robbed 2+ years of their childhood from them, and for many put them severely behind in school and extracurricular achievement. Given all the pressure we put on kids these days to excel at everything in order to ensure their futures, it's not surprising that many are feeling more hopeless and jaded than even the generation that came before them.
Frankly, I think all of this jadedness and depression is at least partly a product of the inconceivably high stress of everyday life experienced by millennials and then Gen Z.
Most millennials saw all of this before finishing high school:
- Gulf war
- 9/11
- Wars in Iraq/Afghanistan/etc.
- Hurricane Katrina
- 2007 housing bubble/fuel shortage
- 2008 financial crisis
In short, America's "squeaky clean best country in the world" image falling apart;
Most Gen Z will have seen all of this before finishing high school:
- Sandy Hook shooting, among dozens of others
- The election of Donald Trump (who, love him or hate him, is _extremely_ unpopular and seen as an existential threat by most American teenagers)
- Rapidly increasing ecological destruction (West coast fires, Australian fires, Hurricane Maria, etc. etc.)
- The COVID-19 Pandemic
- The murder of George Floyd and many others besides
- The unbelievable greed of major corporations financializing nearly every aspect of modern life
- (as of a few days ago) the overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey vs. Planned Parenthood
In short, the basic fabric of society starting to unravel.
This analysis is obviously extremely slanted by my leftist bias and leaves out plenty of other tragedies and trials I could mention, and I'm not going to deny that. But the fact is that the teenagers I know have zero hope left that the future holds anything better for them. They're inheriting a broken world and they know it; their mental health reflects this. People love to wax philosophical about how "kids these days have no trust in authority or institutions" and...well shit, you wonder why.
Gee I wonder what teenagers saw during the black plague or conquest of the Mongols?
The problem kids face today isn't problems, those have always existed.
The problem today is non problems or problems that don't relate to the person in any way or hypothetical problems that are pumped to cause hysteria for political or economic gains get way too much attention. Which describes most of what you list.
People have survived and overcome massive problems in our historic past, but these bullshit "problems" have themselves become a problem and media, social and otherwise is a good part of the cause.
Downplaying the problems of the youth today because six hundred years ago kids had to deal with a plague, is a new one for me.
"You think you've got it rough? Well six hundred years ago there was a conquest of the Mongols. I bet you feel pretty stupid about your suicidal ideation now!"
This one-upmanship about the problems people face is toxic, and frankly boomer logic.
"Toxic" and "Boomer Logic" are lazy mind numbing cliches and no one is one-upsmanshiping anything.
Problems have always existed. What is different now?
A couple of things (in my opinion).
1) Entities, through media, are blowing up minor or hypothetical or non problems into existential crisis hammered 24-7 for political or financial gain. Happening on all sides of the political spectrum.
2) Kids aren't growing up learning a rational assessment and approach towards problems as much as was the case in the past. We "solve" too many small problems for children leaving them feeling powerless to solve the bigger problems later in life.
> While this is absolutely true, there's also another elephant in the room: a global pandemic that's destroyed every kid's routine, robbed 2+ years of their childhood from them, and for many put them severely behind in school and extracurricular achievement.
I'm baffled that you're one of the rare person mentioning this. We had 2 years stolen from us so of course people turned to social media to fill that void.
Maybe it's because i saw it first hand; my younger brother graduated high school in 2020 and my partner worked in education until mid 2021. I heard first hand accounts of just how horrific the pandemic was for school age kids.
This fits too neatly into the "new thing is going to kill/corrupt your children" meme that is very popular through history.
Having said that, advertising based platforms are basically all about making you feel worse about yourself to spur purchases. Who spends more money on advertised products the Zen master at one with themselves or the anxious person looking for the quick fix to make them beautiful, popular, trendy, etc.
Basically human insecurities and addictions are a market externality the same as carbon in the atmosphere. If they aren't internalised to the market then you're basically creating a highly efficient machine to seek them out and abuse them for profit.
We need to build different incentives in from the start than "do anything to get money and I'll take a cut" which obviously leads to bad places once the capitalist machine gets a hold of it.
Like a gun, it's a powerful tool, and you have to be careful where you point it.
I really think the real cause in anxiety and depression are more related to climate change, corporate greed, work culture, inflation, the pandemic, and war. Social media just informs teens the reality of these issues and it's depressing as fuck.
This just in: Digital drugs products like Facebook™, Instagram™, Twitter™, Snapchat™ and TikTok™ are destroying the minds of its users (especially teens) mental health.
I will start this off by saying I am a teen (14) and have suffered a unstable upbringing in the events of my childhood (mother was abusive).
I have had unmonitored internet access from the age of I think 5, and for what it is, I at least didn't end up as bad as some others did.
I was born in the last generation that parents bought their kids toys and let them watch TV, so you could imagine I was pissed off as much as the rest of you are about young kids being in a tablet 24/7.
I grew up with older games and computers and the likes and therefore have developed a fondness for older games, music, website design, culture and whatever else (early 2000s to early 2010s), and I say that to give you context as to why I don't mindlessly browse social media like the rest of my generation does the way I've seen them. I browse forums, websites like this, chat with people on discord about likeminded stuff (trust me, I would love to use Matrix if all my friends did too) and I never fell for the social media bullshit despite how much pressure I get to fall into it because of every other kid I've known being literally dependent on it (Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok as of recently and I fucking hate them all with a burning passion for ruining my generation), Twitter is for the part of my generation that thinks they're "different" but essentially they're just the same exact shit with the added pronouns and pride flag profile pictures. I have read a lot and talked to people my age personally to understand what exactly it is that promotes derogatory mental health, and it's the fact usually that nobody cares anymore.
People harass over opinions about them harassing others, "diversity" being pushed to ruin mental health even more and make people believe things about them that aren't true at all and make it their entire personality, the music my generation listens to promotes violence, unrest, "making money" which is just putting profits over values, and "getting p*ssy" which is literally just objectifying women more than ever (I'm not even gonna talk about how much female rappers influence this), use of drugs like nicotine and marijuana is being pushed more than ever and I know people as young as 16 who literally depend on them, social media like TikTok is just prime ways to serve them propaganda and useless bullshit nobody cares about, On top of all that, they barely have any interests of their own due to the fact their free thinking has been impaired because they're all so used to being spoonfed content by a centralized media platform on a phone and I am so glad I didn't fall for any of that shit.
I love computers and stuff like Linux, I love old games (half life, doom, sonic, sims 2&3, team fortress, guitar hero), I listen to metal (Killswitch Engage is my favorite band of all time) and my free time is usually occupied by that or talking to my friends, and I guarantee you if you got someone else my age to try and write about this, they'd say back "bruh I ain't even tryna do all that right now this shit all cap".
School system, home life for my generation, etc are problems, but if anyone wants to hear my perspective on those issues please ask me in the replies.
Please excuse any dumb phrases, swear words or crappy grammar btw.
>There is an emerging consensus that the correlation is in the ballpark of r = .10 to r = .15. A ballpark figure for the correlation just for girls is roughly r = .15 to r =
.22
Time to go back to the drawing board. If your correlation is so small then social media isn't the problem. Social media is a nice scapegoat but you literally disprove yourself if your correlation is so low.
>The “eyewitness testimony” confirms the academic findings: social media is a culprit.
Social sciences are notoriously bad for this. When you fail at your study with really bad correlations that should get you laughed at in any other legitimate science. You then go to the very scientific 'eyewitness testimony' this isn't laughable anymore, this is political. You are writing a study with a false conclusion with political motivation behind it. This is offensive, quite unlike Haidt.
>. Researchers and spokespeople for the major platforms who tell you that the evidence is “inconclusive” or that the effect sizes are “too small” should be asked directly: “OK, then what do YOU think caused this?”
Oh this is a simple one. The correlation between measurements of these kids and political polarization matches up quite a bit more than social media. This all derives from identity politics. Obama as 'first black president' was inevitably going to have a identity politics factor. There will always be consequences with this. The measurements detected in children at the same as adults.
Page 3 indicates a sharp rise since 2009. Instagram doesn't even launch until 2010 and obviously it didn't just go straight to being ultra popular. It wasn't until years later did really the big social media boom happen. Hence why social media correlation is so poor. Not to mention early social media wasn't quite the toxic pit that it is today.
Identity politics is toxic. No doubt all these children were sitting in classes hearing all about Obama and his identity politics. Doesnt even matter which way it rolls, perhaps they are in texas learning about how terrible obama is... doesn't matter. Though I would bet most teachers were pro-obama.
But once you pop that cork... you also have all the other politics coming through. Climate change no doubt being taught in schools. LGBT, Antiracism... all those poor white kids are oppressing their black friends...
But all of these are politically charged subjects that are not getting the nuance that the pundits give them. Their kindergarten teacher in everywhere except florida get to discuss gender and race issues these far too complicated subjects with kids. What do you expect to happen?
That's the danger of identity politics. It's insidious. It spreads like wild fire and leaves destruction in its path. It begets more identity politics.
Obama is a very smart dude who saw the consequences and this 'white male' problem but that's how the identity politics end. Working together again. You need to extend that hand to those 'white supremacists'. But what hand has been offered to date?
Years later... Obama isn't offering his hand. He's 'blasting' trump.
Without someone bringing both parties back to the table and getting to talk to each other again. This inevitably will result in far more violence. Yes the USA has had 2+ years of civil unrest and violence already. It's a matter of time it goes well beyond.
Play some video games, research something interesting, stay in school but don't take it too seriously, and learn a marketable skill slowly. Do this, dgaf about everyone else, you'll be ok.
It sounds cool but it could be taken as serious advice. If that's how you truly feel and act, you are not ok and you are missing out on what is most rewarding in life.
I'm sorry you feel that way. It doesn't need to be that bad at all. Nihilism is trendy now, but don't confuse a trend with life and reality; don't make life decisions on a fashion of the moment. Loving relationships have been a fashion for all of human history, and they aren't going away because of trolling.
I have an idea: let's body-shame them into believing they were born in the wrong body for their actual gender, and suggest that removing their reproductive organs and a devastating, life-long hormonal treatment will make it all alright.
That's because politics became injected into social media/internet. The problem isn't social media per se, it's politics, news, media, etc that has overrun social media in the past 15 years.
Before Obama, the internet and social media was place for young people to goof off. Then obama used youtube/etc to reach young people and then the lgbt/news/media/leftists went crazy on social media paving the way for Trump - which strangely became a problem. Before Trump arrived, politicians/lgbt/news/media/leftists destroying teens mental health was celebrated on social media/internet.
Of course nobody in the senate or government cares one lick about teens' mental health. They are only interested in better controlling social media to destroy teens' mental health for their own agenda.
I've advocated for social media to ban all politics and news. Lets see how that affects people's mental health. Or better yet, remove all politics and news from their recommendations or frontpage. Instead, social media/tech run "get out the vote" campaigns, lift "authoritative" voices and inject politics/news into everyone's lives.
> The fact that people exist who actually blame Obama
I don't blame Obama. I supported him. My point isn't that Obama is the problem, my point is that politics is the problem.
> should be proof enough that our society was mentally ill far before social media.
That's the point. Politics was toxic and has always been. Politics, the source of toxicity, got injected into social media starting with Obama. Then the lgbt/news/leftists ran with it and injected more toxicity. Which led to an opportunist like Trump taking advantage and injecting even more toxicity.
Once again, politics is the toxic agent that is hurting people on social media. Not social media itself.
Social media is also a savior for many kids while perverse high school social dynamics implant a dystopian foundation of the world, affecting perceptions into adulthood and often for the rest of their lives. This all sounds a bit like a near-sighted appeal to antiquity to me.
Even though I am in favour of Musk's purchase of Twitter, the implied idea that the slot machines in our pockets need broader engagement to improve discourse and society, and that engaging in more direct conflict in less-moderated forums will improve the mental health of young people - both seem like very big bets.
I'd still be willing to take those bets because there is a good chance the reason they're going nuts is the platforms manage and toy with their attention and instincts like animals, so they're probably acting a lot like they are beings in captivity. Something that breaks the spell might mitigate the effects. Maybe they're not that crazy, they're just indexed on something others can't see?
it must be said, even if its not what everyone wants to hear, that the fear-mongering corporate news media, who carpet the world in content that is deliberately designed to elicit a primordial brain-stem stress response, have probably contributed to this problem. whether they turn on the tv or they are sitting in the classroom, kids of all ages have it drilled into them that their country is evil and racist, that they are guilty almost implicitly for having white skin, doomed to a life of hardship if they have black skin, and also that the world is coming to rapid apocalypse which is completely the kids and the kids familys fault. i am not making a statement about whether any of that is true; what is undeniably true is that kids are being injected with this stuff 24/7 and its not good for them.
when i was a kid, we stood for the flag and sang the pledge of allegiance. there was a notion in the air of unity, order and strength. when i look back i recognize that this was very good for my mental health. you can have your opinion about the pledge but there is no denying that our children need an environment that is good for their mental health.
This person wrote a whole paper whining about college students standing up for themselves, then testified that social media is a leading cause of this mental health crisis based on nothing but children self-reporting it to be the case, and concludes that we should fix it by passing stronger data collection protection for teenagers.
Haidt wants to censor the speech he doesn’t like; he is pining for the old order. His main talking point is Diversity and Equity is bad. He even suggests diversity is bad. Watch this video from mid point. https://youtu.be/RKRuvKtFvqo
I am not familiar with his work, I watched his videos on YouTube. In the videos he is frequently talking against diversity and equity, and I was surprised a Professor of his stature advocating against diversity and equity. I found his arguments divisive and thought it was directed at the diversity and equity initiatives aimed at increasing enrollment of people of color in major universities and technology companies like Google.
Maybe his books are good, haven’t read it. I will listen to it on audible.
Can you clarify exactly how he suggests "diversity is bad" - linking off to a 20 minute video and saying "its in there" isn't exactly great for discussion.
I think you are taking what he is saying out of context and being very dishonest about it. He is not talking about diversity meaning he doesn't want different races or sexualities involved in the country. He is talking about the extreme fracturing of groups that is driven by social media.
I see this in my everyday life. Browsing any forum, almost every view expressed by any person is polarized to some side. However, being older and having enough people not connected to social media in my circle, I notice no one expresses the same polarization of thought that is so prevalent in social media and online communities. I also notice that the few people I interact with who do spend a large amount of time on social media are extremely polarized and mostly miserable.
Direct quote !
“ We have this idea diversity is good, and diversity has many good effects, but diversity also makes things come apart for a large secular nation like the United States what are the forces holding us together, what are the things blowing us apart, diversity makes group more creative when you have good norms..”
That is not a direct quote. Your semi-quote "but diversity also makes things come apart for a large secular nation like the United States" is inaccurate and extremely misleading; Haidt clearly ends the sentence at "come apart", and you left off the "And so" starting the next sentence.
The actual quote, starting at 9:20, with as much fidelity as I can muster:
"We have this idea that umm... that diversity is good, and diversity has many good effects. But.. diversity also makes things come apart. And so for a large secular nation like the United States you have to look at what are the forces holding us together, what are the things blowing us apart. Now diversity makes [a] group more creative when you have good norms, when things are well structured. We have to think really carefully about how to get the benefit from America's diversity, but it's hard to do because if you critique it you could get in big trouble. Now in terms of what actually holds a country together, traditionally it's shared gods, shared blood, and shared enemies. That's what nations usually have used. So we have a challenge, and it is a great experiment, and when social media came in -- when everybody was on social media beginning around 2012, 2013 when it gets hyperviralized, umm, the ability to have any shared understanding of what we're doing shatters. Social media allows us to participate in microstories that kind of bubble up and are gone. There is no ability to have a common understanding of what we're doing. Not that we ever were all one nation and all on the same page. But there's a qualitative change when it's like... here's the story of the day, and.. and.. umm.. uhh.. so there's no possibility for shared stories in the age of social media, widely shared stories. Umm... uh... there's huge decline of trust, trust in each other and trust in institutions. And here I'm drawing on recent social science - uh, political science research showing that social media generally leads to a decline of trust. Social media's incredibly powerful for tearing things down. And that can be a good thing in a dictatorship. But it's very bad at building things up. And in an ailing democracy like ours where our institutions need to be improved not ripped apart, it generally has... has made things worse."
Thank you for the whole transcript. I find the whole transcript very problematic. Especially the “shared gods” and “shared blood” part, does Professor Haidt really think this country was held together by “shared blood”? Is he that ignorant of America’s history?
I wager that you are having some issues reading the quote that was presented to you, so let me elaborate:
Traditionally, a shared cultural mythos- that is, the set of 'stories' that the society believes in and uses to bind themselves together- is one element of what holds societies together. Yes, even completely secular societies have their shared mythos and arguably even their own shared gods depending on how you look at it.
Also, all human beings are naturally inclined to heavily favor anyone who is similar to themselves, especially regarding physical traits (shared blood).
We now have neither of these convenient pillars, so Professor Haidt suggests that we have to be highly cautious in the way that we structure our society, such that we can reap the creative benefits of diversity without leaning too far into the natural tendency of diversity to push people apart from each other.
Maybe it is “Hope”, America is like the promised land for many people around the world.
This is Hacker News right; so I can think from the perspective of a Software Engineer, which Software Engineer in some part of the world wouldn’t like to spend some time in Silicon Valley? I would argue if you are a Software Engineer you like to be in the valley at-least once.
Maybe it is not one thing, America offers different things to different people.
He claims traditionally a country is held together by “shared gods, shared blood, and shared enemies”.
What is he saying, the issue is, this is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic country? I say, Professor Haidt, the train has left this station, America has progressed, it is not going back to “shared blood” and “shared gods” anymore. You better get used to some diversity.
Not literal faith. Otherwise he would have said God, not Gods.
He means shared ideals and ideas relating to the nation itself.
For example, the founders were shared Gods. Now a part of Americans thinks they were horrible racist people.
It’s not something that bonds anymore. It’s the opposite now.
I tried listening to more of his arguments after people thought I am misinterpreting his comments on diversity. What about this podcast?, In this he is wishing America was more like Scandinavia. No issue?
Again, you've link to a 40 minute podcast and are expecting to change minds.
Additionally, lots of people (and lots of people on the left) want to be more like Scandinavia - public health care, social safety nets, strong unions. Is that a problem too?
I believe he starts of talking about Scandinavia in the 5 minute mark. I can’t find a transcript online, and I am not good at transcribing. I find him arguing out of prejudice against people of color, at-least that is what I got listening to him. Reasonable people can disagree, this is how I see his stance.
I didn’t know who he was until recently, YouTube showed me his videos after I listened to some videos of Jordan Peterson. My reaction after watching a few of his videos was this person doesn’t really like America’s current cultural change. He has repeatedly complained about diversity and inclusion in those videos. I can only conclude he has some issue with diversity, otherwise why talk about it always.
If he doesn’t have an issue with diversity why go to school board meeting and to speak against a policy which will increase participation of African American and Hispanic students?.
My theory is that he is affected by America’s racial reckoning, and is blaming social media for it. So he has come up with these convoluted explanations to justify his insecurities.
The quote you complain about obviously can't be about racial diversity. He introduces a problem with diversity, and then links it to problems which, he says, and emphasizes in TFA, have increased very sharply since 2010-14. But racial diversity has been rising steadily for decades with no inflection point near 2014. Furthermore, he goes on to explain how social media leads to a fracturing of cliques and a tendency to maintain parallel lives. It's clear from this context that the "diversity" he's talking about must be a sort of diversity of perspectives and not of heredity or anything else like that.
Not ominous, in mid 2020 the whole of America realized the country wasn’t treating millions of its citizens fairly and started adopting policies to improve equity and diversity, and that upset Professor Haidt. Here he was among the protestors when a school district tried to enroll more minority students in a program.
1. Kids have little or no slack in their schedule. This means very little freedom, and very little time to work things out mentally. School, practice, volunteer, homework, bed, do it all again. This builds up to a very difficult to unwind ball of stress, anger, fear and despair.
2. Everything is conflicted and unclear. Schools teach cultural tolerance while enforcing zero-tolerance policies. Diversity is good, but being ____ is bad. So many areas where what we teach and preach are the opposite of what policies and actions actually do.
3. The stakes are too high. View the wrong website on your chromebook and get referred to law enforcement. Have a kid send you the wrong selfie and get charged with a sex crime. Get a bad grade and you are off the volleyball team, and you won't make the team next year - so done forever. Misbehave and you'll be arrested by the resource officer and face time at juvi, and potentially a conviction that will be held against you for a very long time (in some states juvi convictions count against three strikes laws).
3. Kids are targeted. Sexual predators, gangs, fringe and mainstream ideologues looking to recruit followers, sports agents and talent scouts all have one thing in common: they want to exploit kids or sell them something.
It's really hard to be a kid right now, and that needs to change. We need to lower the stakes, the stress and have something that resembles consistency.