All other issues aside, it would be shocking if reported rates of teen mental illness did not increase as long-standing stigmas gradually wane and these topic become more acceptable to speak about. If your kid cut themself in 1975, what were you going to do? Ask you husband to spend money to "shrink their head"? More likely you'd hide it, like past generations hid most of their traumas.
Now, there are many outlets for both that teen and their parents (and their teachers, and their friends, and their friends' parents) to say or do something in response. There are resources online that virtually anyone can access, phone numbers you can call, authority figures better-trained to recognize these problems. And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business, no matter how many unexplained bruises or cuts we witness.
Only now that we are openly discussing and grappling with these issues do we have ay hope of turning the tide.
I agree reporting bias could be a thing, but there are statistics like completed suicide which are less susceptible to it (though still present; you can imagine a suicide being declared an accidental death to help a family "avoid embarrassment"). And those statistics have also been steadily creeping up for decades.
I think reporting bias should be the starting point and the primary area of inquiry when looking at this topic. Unless I'm imagining the recent past where mental illness was literally verboten to speak about and mental health services were widely derided as scams. The change in discourse has been as rapid and dramatic as any social change I can think of, yet the authors seem to think it's enough to simply acknowledge that and focus instead on their many charts, most of which are about self-reporting or diagnoses.
I don't think many people are still calling therapists "quacks" and extreme things like that. Though I'm sure there's some Boomer men keeping that tradition alive.
Some of these issues are solved! People seek help, or are referred to help, and they get help. The article is showing in part that more people are seeking help, not that they're not getting help.
Though with minimal mental health funding, any kind of sustained help is out of reach for most people.
And speaking of men, it doesn't surprise me that the data is showing a larger increase among women. Men really seem to fetishize "handling things themself" and that kind of nonsense.
> And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business
I agree with your general sentiment (more recognition and treatment of mental illness is a good thing), but this line troubles me. Most of what happens in my family should stay in my family. Our business is our business. It's no one else's business. There's nothing absurd about this. There may be exceptions (and a child with severe, untreated mental illness may be an exception), but like all exceptions, they are special cases, not the norm. Let's not do away with all privacy in a rush to "turn the tide"...
I think it is an ongoing process that accelerated over the past 10 or so years. There are still many people who stigmatize mental health issues and view mental health services skeptically at best.
We've over-corrected so far now, people make up and put mental illnesses in their twitter bio to be part of some in-group. Mental illness has become a fashionable affectation. There's probably now people out there who keep theirs quiet because they don't want to get lumped with those groups.
The last thing most people want is turning their very real mental illness into an identity, but we've somehow made that the de-facto default.
It's compelling, but the international nature of the phenomenon makes me think it'd be incomplete as an explanation. Surely the stigma isn't equal everywhere
I suppose it depends on where you are. My work sent me from the US to the UK for six months in 2016. The difference in mental health stigma between these two first world nations was staggering. From what I've heard, it's even worse for eastern Europe.
A spiritual void, a loss of social cohesion, isolation, alienation, a loss of a culture that reinforces ways of life that enable flourishing, radical individualism. The decline of traditional religious faith in the West. The sexual revolution and its dreadful distortion of human sexuality. The culture of consumerism and the worship of desire and appetite divorced from reason and one's objective good.
So what's a smell that suggests this is the case? According to the triple melting pot theory, in countries like the US, ethnic identity, under the tendency toward some kind of assimilation, gives way to religious identity as not only religious identity, but a substitute for ethnic identity.
So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them. Various subcultures, many created by corporate interest around various products, do the same thing. You have "communities", so-called, that center around owning a particular brand of something. Corporate brand constructed false identities.
People don't know who they are. They've alone. They don't know the address of the destination, or even that there is an address. Their horizon goes only as far as satisfying their base appetites, and they pay lip service to ideologies to avoid being shunned from groups without which they cannot satisfy those appetites. And when they do, they discover that their satisfaction isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Here follows the realization that no hope is to be found in what has been sought. From here: suicide, or some higher realization.
>The sexual revolution and its dreadful distortion of human sexuality.
Please explain what you mean by this.
>So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them.
Two things--firstly, are you suggesting that religion is not a dehumanizing ideology? Moreover are you also suggesting that it also doesn't have political utility? I think both of these are demonstrably false given a brief look at history.
Secondly, you talk about the "appeal" of sexual and racial identities in recent times, and you seem to refer to these identities as "false and flimsy," can you explain what you mean here? Because it just comes off like you're arguing that anyone who doesn't identify as a cis-white heterosexual has a false sense of self.
Not that account, but its obvious a settler society such as America has little unity compared to other societies such as Mestizo or East Asian Societies. A lack of religion, social harmony and cohesion, as well as a typical "American" upbringing leaves many feeling alone and without purpose or family. Combined with the growth of the internet, and you have many people who take up horrid ideologies typically at the far ends of the spectrum to fill the void of not having a loving family or a stable friend group.
Its even worse now that the Russians have funded both the NRA and the BLM movement to radicalize both ends of the spectrum.
So, to piss off as many religious people as possible....
A couple of goat herder psychologist a couple of millennia ago figured out if you told people they had a purpose things in general worked better. The particular problem is they made up a whole bunch of shit and when the sciences in general came around, people when "wow, religion is a bunch of controlling bullshit".
Now, I will say that religion is only mostly a bunch of controlling bullshit, but they did understand people and that is why these religions had staying power that lasted thousands of years in some cases. As we came into the modern age we cast the religion away, but we did forget many of the important lessons on society building it had taught us. In the meantime psychology rapidly expanded, and it was used by both governments and corporations to control individuals with very little of that knowledge being broadly taught to society at large so they could inoculate themselves to it.
Add in global internet allowing instant communication anywhere and the consolidation and formation of massive corporate entities able to shape the communication of our modern lives. That communication tells us to continually consume more of their product, and if you can't you've failed. So yea, that will lead to some problems for sure.
> The particular problem is they made up a whole bunch of shit and when the sciences in general came around, people when "wow, religion is a bunch of controlling bullshit".
I think you have your history a bit backwards.
Galileo is considered the father of modern science, and he was one of the people that believed those goat herders. He argued that his views were in accordance with the Bible, not that the Bible was a bunch of random shit that was made up. Here’s his words on the matter:
>> Holy Scripture and nature both equally derive from the divine Word, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit, the latter as the most obedient executrix of God’s commands.[0]
The reading the rest of that letter also seems to indicate that he was pretty heavily invested in his beliefs of religion and science being supportive of one another. The father of modern science believing and arguing for religion kind of makes your whole argument a moot point.
You're really working backwards. At the time people like Galileo started down the path of scientific discovery, he didn't think his religion was wrong though it seemed he quite disagreed with some in the leadership at time.
Discovery after discovery afterwards, learning there was billions of years of history of Earth. Billions of years of evolution. That causality exists. That entropy exists. It was these pieces compounding that finally reached a tipping point for most letting them know "yes, this is a bunch of bullshit".
While the historical and societal critique of religion is a common topic, I believe there's more to be gained from a nuanced and respectful dialogue. People expressing disdain for religious beliefs are quite common, and often, this approach tends to overlook the complex interplay between religion, culture, and human psychology.
It's entirely possible to be an atheist and still acknowledge the role and significance of religion in human history and society. Religion, for many, has been a source of moral guidance, community, and comfort. Dismissing it wholesale as 'controlling bullshit' simplifies a very complex aspect of human existence.
I think that we like to look at social media as a cause for problems rather than an affect that worsens said problem Personally as a young person this is 100% due to the hyper vigilance in the news and the rise of helicopter parents, also due to the fact that we are stunting teenagers development by not letting them be y'know TEENAGERS. The hyper vigilance in the news has lead to children being forced to stay inside, which in turn leads to higher social media use, which can worsen overall mental health if not used properly.
Also, I understand the concerns with self diagnosis and "mental illness is quirky" but I don't think it's just that simple, self diagnosis exists because celebrities and mainstream media has put forth mental illnesses and diagnosis as some kind of solution to sadness and minor anxieties, rather than an actual problem with somebody's mental state. Meanwhile people with actual issues have been sidelined, it's not a badge of honour in the sense but a meaningless title to those who don't actually struggle with such issues.
I feel like people in general more easily diagnose themselves and others with depression or other mental diseases recently. I find it hard to judge whether it’s due to any external factor or some form of zeitgeist.
That's addressed in the post. There is some of that, but there are similar increases in hospitalisation for self-harm, which wouldn't be affected by an increase in awareness of mental illness.
Mental illness has become a badge to wear. "I have depression/ADHD/Autism/Bipo/sch"
Once you think you have it, you notice all the systems.
As a medical owner, I'm not going to deny someone money if they are coming. With grey areas, and the lack of science in medical, it very well could be a tracking thing.
I certainly wouldn't tell anyone I had a mental issue in the 90s or 00s. Today, its almost cool.
A related factor I've noticed is that at university at least, a diagnosis often gets you benefits like extra time for exams and some more leeway in terms of submission deadlines for assignments.
Which I'd imagine creates somewhat of an incentive to exaggerate even a diagnosis that doesn't actually meaningfully affect one's ability to finish an exam within the normal timespan.
I've seen an example of both kinds of cases, one student who clearly had ADHD, but was also clearly putting in the effort rather than seeming to abuse the benefits, and a roommate who just seemed to care more about gaming and used his diagnosis as an out for every responsibility even when the rest of us roommates tried to help him out.
So, while I am not in a position to judge who deserves or does not deserve those benefits, I wonder if that has contributed to mental illness becoming a bit of a badge.
I think it's definitely a tracking thing based on parents now paying more attention to their children's well being or 'academic achievements' than they did several decades ago.
One group is claiming that X is occurring more and another group is saying that X is occurring just as often as in the past, but awareness of X means we identify more cases. The argument that X is increasing because of awareness of X has increased is still, at its core, an argument that X has increased, and is a subset of the first group's argument.
The poster you replied to seemed to be looking for evidence that shows X was actually increasing by looking at an increase in reporting that wouldn't be solely caused by awareness of X and thus had to be because of an actual increase of X. To this end, your argument that the awareness of X is causing an actual increase of X would be one possible reason X is increasing, but that wasn't relevant to the previous poster's point, at least from my reading of it.
Of course when measuring X now, you have to ensure that methodology for measuring X has not changed.
For example, are medical examiners back then, or even now, more apt to rule a suicide an accidental death? Wide social trends can affect how these individual decisions are marked at population scales.
This is also complicated by the fact that, if you are about to self-harm or in the population of people verging on self-harm, you are overdue for a mental health diagnosis for depression or a condition like it.
It seems a little circular past this point. You may have diagnosed yourself, but if you saw a doctor, they would do the same.
I guess also suicide attempts and hospitalizations will be highly affected by how society views it. Actual successful suicides seem the least influenced by external trends.
Actual suicides can be quite influenced by events (eg other suicides and reporting about them in the media). This is known as the Werther effect (after Goethe's "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers").
If this were true, what happened around 2010-2012 to make this the case? And if that were the case, wouldn't the most likely explanation be because suddenly all these kids got easier access to the kind of online communities that would encourage this?
Isn’t this just the argument that it’s a social contagion?
And indeed, if you can be convinced those are the solutions to your problems, surely you can be convinced you have problems in the first place as well?
Instead think of social contagion as an additive/multiplicative factor that we don't know the value of.
So imagine a world where we're not allowed to talk about or problems. In that world you'll have your base measured rate X. Then you add a new stressor and get your increase over X.
In a model with social contagion you still have X, you still have your increase in your stressors, then you have the confounding factor of the social contagion.
I suppose the interesting question is what parents of non-sick teens are doing differently from parents of sick teens. Is it a property that some teens are inherently more resilient or is it a property that some teens have a different home environment? There's many post-hoc explanations possible but the really interesting question to me is how some aren't sick.
Is it just like PTSD where most people who encounter combat trauma just make it back fine and even that one-third of those who encounter extreme combat trauma make it back just fine? Or is it that it's like PTSD where most people never encounter traumatic events of any cause and therefore don't have PTSD.
Identifying what's different about those who are sick and those who aren't will probably yield something interesting.
I have three teenagers and they are all very different from each other in terms of personality, interests, work habits, and phone use among other things.
You could place all of them into three distinct challenging scenarios and a different one of them would excel while the others would flounder. But there isn't that kind of variety in most schools, or if there is students are expected to excel in all three scenarios.
From the inside looking out, I think that home environment is the driving factor as I could easily tiger-mom them into deep depression and anxiety. Are they achieving everything of which they are capable? Probably not, but I do see consistent gains in maturity and personal responsibility each year and that really helps put perspective on some of the struggles.
As a counter-study it would be interesting to track the adoption of PowerSchool software across the US and see if that correlates with teen anxiety.
I think the individual makes a lot of difference. Most people can go to a casino and have fun and be fine, most people can go to a bar and hav fun and be fine. Some people can't do either without destroying their life.
Everyone who is skeptical of the proposed plausible cause of social media in causing depression in this thread should explain why their alternative theory holds up to the evidence that no significant increase happened both pre-2010 and is global
To my knowledge there is currently no other better theory other than the rise of social media use that explains the phenomenon. Other proposed explanations such as Bad economy, capitalist alienation, terrible politics, parenting habits, global warming, atomic individualism, and lack of purpose all either cannot be generalized globally or did not start in 2010.
I'm an early millennial and even I feel that the very capable smartphone totally fried my brain. I tried to postpone having one for a very long time because I knew I was prone to screen addiction since my first 486. Now I'm in a point in my life where it's very easy and socially accepted to stagnate my life, so my fried brain is everything I need to get by. But kids still need to grow, the fried brain must hamper them so much more.
> [...] global warming [...] either cannot be generalized globally or did not start in 2010
I guess global warming _can_ be generalized globally?
It sure didn't started in 2010 but neither did social networks.
Facebook opened public access in 2006 which about the same period when Twitter was launched.
_An Inconvenient Truth_ was released in 2006 and it seemed like the start of a global discussion about global warming.
And behind _global warming_, there's actually the overall destruction of our environment by mankind.
I agree that social media is a cause, but the given arguments cannot exclude _global warming_. Quite the opposite.
global warming is actually peanuts compared to worries of previous generations, like the cold war, school kids got instructions on what to do if an atomic bomb would fall on city!
1. Both parents working jobs, so childhood is spent with ADHD diagnosis / adderall
2. Dating and gender stuff completely changed, no more "going steady" or waiting until marriage, and not even hooking up anymore, now everything old is cringe, but not sure what is supposed to happen. First generation where females will out-earn males and also no one is really sure what they contribute to society anymore
3. The big one... teens grew up with the Internet, and all the capitalist industries and images promoted on TikTok, Instagram, etc. It's a race to the bottom with exploitation and fake online personas, similarly to how crypto tokens are in a race to the bottom with generating fake volume etc. Now you're competing against the whole world.
4. They see very little to look forward to, because of AI and automation depressing jobs. Their dads are probably on opiates while their moms are on antidepressants. Their parents generation probably has the highest level of divorce of any in thousands of years.
5. AI and automation making jobs pay less, everyone having less to begin with, and AI will probably be funnier, sexier and more interesting than they are, and humans will stop even needing each other for anything anymore. Seems like the best case scenario is living in a zoo with AIs surrounding you and being able to change nothing. Plus with climate change and wars. What's to look forward to?
Just leave the United States, if you can afford it.
There is a massive pool of men and women outside the developed world, with different ideas of dating, as well as a more unified center of family, and friends, though, many are more socially conservative and traditional compared to Americans.
Its up to you I guess, but don't pretend like the developed world is the entire world.
I’m 18, in college. All my friends are basically addicts, I thankfully am not due to my locked down screen time settings[1]. No amount of research or lack thereof can convince me that social media is the major factor behind widespread mental illness. I believe what I see with my own eyes. Adults seem to be more resilient, I don’t know why, maybe because they didn’t grew up in the smartphone era.
Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly.
Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck.
I’m amazed that I had to read so many comments complaining about social media before I hit this one. How have so few failed to consider the idea that young people might be correctly anxious and worried about the future which looks, in many ways, pretty grim.
You're absolutely right - they're correctly anxious because the future LOOKS grim.
But the world has always been pretty grim: For most of humanity your existence was focused on sustenance. Then, once starving was taken care of, of not dying of some preventable disease. The privilege of self-actualization and even having to consider what the future of the earth could be is relatively new. We can certainly then look at the 50's and say well that was prosperity, and even ignoring the unique economic circumstances of the aftermath of the deadliest war in human history, everyone who grew up in this "prosperity" certainly wasn't very optimistic about the world. They were constantly living under the terror of global nuclear annihilation.
Except...they weren't. AHA, and here we come to the truth: To survive, and because doom gloom and anxiety were not to be tolerated, everyone bought into the propaganda. People did "duck and cover" drills and expected to survive a nuclear blast. People genuinely believed (in the West, and in the East) that eventually their side would prevail, and there'd be nothing to worry about.
People built, people invested in the future, because they HAD to. And then did the hard work of arms talks, detente, etc.
What am I trying to say? I think every generation had the right to be CORRECTLY anxious about the future being pretty grim. And this generation is the first one that is being told that it's valid to feel anxiety and to not just stifle away feelings.
And yet....I can't help but wonder if the only way humanity can get itself out of trouble is actually with some blind and empty optimism. Climate Doomerism is even infecting the left, and sites like this. "Why should I have children if the world is going to melt? Why should I reduce my carbon footprint if Exxon won't?" (btw. your carbon footprint stimulates demand for fossil fuel products that Exxon then provides. anyways)
To fix giant humanity-scale problems you must believe and have an optimistic outlook on the future of humanity. That doesn't mean sticking your head in the sand sand saying "everything will turn out fine", but it does mean saying "Yes, we CAN decarbonize. Yes we CAN create a more fair and equitable world for all. Yes we CAN maintain balance with our ecosystems and not wipe our species or every other one out."
And the teenagers need to hear it cuz buddy THEY'RE the ones who have to do it. It doesn't matter if it's hard. WHAT OTHER CHOICE DO YOU HAVE. Well, I suppose Suicide is one answer. I suppose I have heard that when depressed people kill themselves it's because the pain of existence is worse. I never understood it. I care too much about my mortality. I don't believe it. I think the increase in THOSE numbers is just based on more accurate reporting. I don't think teens are killing themselves because they're anxious about the economy or climate change.
Of course it's not the teens that should be held responsible for finding that optimism. It needs to be generated and nurtured by the adults around them, and in the media. And I don't mean consumerist influencer optimism, I mean people like Carl Sagan and Neil de Grasse Tyson, and educators, and influencers who can get people truly excited about changing the world for the better.
We must all do our part, especially if you're educated and prosperous. Have a child. Raise them well. Inspire them. Challenge them to be hopeful about the future, and being a part of shaping it.
How did the future looked like for a kid living through 1929’s crisis? A world in between wars. Or living through the Cold War and the possibility of a nuclear extinction of humans? Despair and hope have always been cyclical and yet we always think we’re “doomed” when living through hard times.
I'm not sure, but as an 80's kid things haven't gotten remarkably better in my time. Modern technology sure is grand, but I've been worried about economy/climate/politics my whole life because it just keeps getting worse in those areas. Especially a lifetime of impending climate crisis then adults, and now my adult peers don't seem to believe is real.
The doomsday clock is closer to midnight than it’s ever been https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ and now we avoid another 1929 by inflating away the gains of the middle class and siphoning value off to the 1%
I don't understand how the doomsday clock is closer to midnight now than it was during the Cuban missile crisis. It makes me think that it's not an objective measure.
Yes, similarly, I don’t understand why people keep looking at their credit card balances. If you don’t engage with bad news, everybody knows it ceases to impact the real world.
That seems like a denial of reality. You believe if they don't have social media to tell them that they're working 2 dead end jobs and can't afford to place to live while choking on smoke all summer that they wouldn't notice and just be happy?
If any of those were the explanation, you would find correlations between people with worsening mental health and those factors.
Is it worse in countries at most risk from climate change? No. Is it worse where financial security is worse? Possibly those with expectations of stable careers do better, but not at the national level from the numbers in the article. Life expectancy is not usually teens main concern, nor is debt. Which new wars correlate with the timing?
The recent pandemic had minimal impact on US life expectancy. Opioid poisoning and motor vehicle crashes have been a larger factor since before 2019 because they typically kill much younger people. This magnifies the impact on life expectancy.
That may have been the case in 2017, the date of your article, certainly then opiod deaths outweighed the nonexistant deaths from COVID.
Today, in 2024, looking back, there's a sharp decline in US life expectancy figures after 2019 that, according to the CDC and other epidemiologists, had little to do with opiods:
In 1980, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. and in comparably large and wealthy countries was similar, but over recent decades, life expectancy has improved by much more in peer nations than it has in the U.S. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased mortality and premature death rates in the U.S. by more than it did in most peer countries, widening a gap that already existed before the pandemic.
Life expectancy in the U.S. fell by 2.4 years from 2019 to 2021, whereas in peer countries’ life expectancies fell by an average of just 0.3 years in this period. COVID-19 has erased two decades of life expectancy growth in the U.S., whereas the average life expectancy for comparable countries has decreased only marginally, to 2018 levels.
- from [1], and
In 2021, 9 of the 10 leading causes of death remained the same as in 2020. The top leading cause in 2021 was heart disease, followed by cancer and COVID-19 (Figure 4).
Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis became the 9th leading cause of death in 2021, while influenza and pneumonia dropped from the list of 10 leading causes. The remaining leading causes in 2021 (unintentional injuries, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, and kidney disease) remained at the same ranks as in 2020.
- from [2]. Note than in [2] opiod deaths do not feature in the the ten leading causes of death in the USofA.
What does stand out is that OECD | G20 countries in general have steadily improved quality of life and expectancy whereas the USofA has been relative flat since 2012 (opiods and other reasons) and sharply dropped post COVID (poor community health responses).
The UK doesn't have an opioid crisis like the US, and road deaths have been falling for decades. The drop in UK life expectancy is almost entirely due to the pandemic. That doesn't just mean deaths from COVID though: in the UK an increased pressure on health services has lead to delays in all sorts of treatment, which have caused spikes in deaths from other causes too.
I think this has to be a huge chunk of it. I'm 40, have an established career, make the most money I've made in my life, live in a smaller city and I can barely afford to get by. I can't afford to take a vacation. I can't afford to buy land or a boat or something.
Retirement situation looks grim, likely a bullet to the head. I have literally nothing to look forward to and every day gets harder and harder to tell myself "better things are coming" because I know they're not. Short of a violent revolution in the US, the screws are going to continue to tighten. Like, this is it. This is the culmination of my life's work, barely getting by.
I can't imagine being a teen in today's world. I guess the benefit is that they probably don't understand just how fucked they are.
Sorry to hear this. If you're now making the most you ever have, and continue to do so, hopefully if you live somewhat frugally and save, you ought to be OK in the long-term? Speaking as someone who for various reasons, mostly the need to support family members, doesn't have the big bucks a lot of tech workers have. I've no prospect of owning land or a boat. ;) Or a fancy car. But I don't really care. :) Vacations - well ours are fine, we go to nice countryside, but doesn't involve flights, hotels, eating out or anything fancy. Seems to me in the West, many expect a high standard of living and feel a failure if we don't achieve that. But people in poorer countries are happy with much less. When I worked in the USA, I noticed many immigrants lived very happy lives on a fraction of resources of their American coworkers/ peers. They hadn't got used to expecting that standard of living. Possibly their kids would be more "American" and feel like that had to have more. * Caveat : US healthcare system is a mess and can cause huge bills , for some people frugality and saving is outweighed by health costs. This system needs fixing IMHO
Life has always been kinda shitty in every generation, but I think the difference is a lot of negative/apocalyptic messaging from all types of media surrounds people, and the positive/optimistic messages we used to get are lacking or treated as "cringe", eye rolls, etc. Pop music has a lot less positive love songs, all existing power structures are suspect, etc, etc.
Whether true or realistic or not, it's not helpful to kids to hear all this crap. The downer types are offering no realistic and/or hopeful alternative.
These are definitely problems, but here are some positive points to balance the negative:
The price of renewable energy has fallen 99.8% since 1975 [1] and power generation from renewables has increased 800% since 1965 and doubled since 2010 [2]
GDP per capita is 5-20 times higher than in 1820 [3]
Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1770 [4]
Armed conflict causes just 0.2% of global deaths [5] and relations between nations have become more peaceful since 1945 [6]
5 billion people own smartphones [7], which are orders of magnitude more powerful than a supercomputer of 50 years ago, and which they can use to access the entirety of human knowledge in the form of books, articles, and free lectures from top universities, plus instant communication and collaboration with people across the globe. These are all things that the richest people in the world didn't have access to for most of human history.
The ironic thing with increase in GDP is that life becomes almost too easy. In the past the difficulty of life didn't require a person to have use as much willpower.
Easier life with things like plentiful food and entertainment options requires willpower to not over-indulge. A factory worker or subsistence farmer didn't have force themselves to exercise or worry about spending to much time watching TV. They had to work to not starve.
The author attributes the rise in mental illness among teen girls to them "spending hours each day posting photos of themselves and scrolling through hundreds of carefully edited photos of other girls". As someone who was a teen girl suffering depression and extreme anxiety in the 2010s, the idea rings quite shallow. I can assure you I was not suicidal because ... other girls are pretty? what? ... but because of narcissistic controlling hyperreligious parents fucking me up mentally and withdrawing into a smaller and smaller fringe bubble, cutting me off from normal people and normal life. I think the main problem destroying people's mental health is social atomization/isolation/polarization/decay, and social media does have a role to play in that, but is not the problem in and of itself.
I'm not saying everyone has the same story as me, and I'm also not saying that social media has no role in depression/anxiety. I'm saying the talking point "girls' mental health is in the toilet because they're obsessed with selfies" is speculative and condescending, ignoring more serious issues that teens are struggling with, and it's valid to offer a first-hand perspective as a counterbalance to that.
It tends to be middle class young women regardless of ethnicity (though typically white) who suffer the most mentally due to social media giving them anorexia. The idea that selfies harm young women has a lot of basis in reality.
I find it fascinating how--according to these comments--easy it is to identify a single culprit, the all-mighty smartphone. Seems like gaslighting. Don't get me wrong, Always-Online is likely a contributing factor, but I highly doubt it is the root cause. I cant help but think of Smith: "it is purpose that defines, purpose that binds us", that purpose is something that we--in our modern society--lack more day by day. In essence, nobody needs nobody else anymore, because frankly, we dont need each other for survival anymore. Individualism is advanced enough to have destroyed most need for sticking together. And in a sense, that isn't only a bad thing. I remember "communities" I was forced into which I am very happy to have left behind. All humans are not nice to be around.
> In essence, nobody needs nobody else anymore, because frankly, we dont need each other for survival anymore. Individualism is advanced enough to have destroyed most need for sticking together.
Fascinating to see how far people are willing to go to not name the root cause: technology itself. It’s unthinkable to so many that modern technology as a whole may in fact be a bad idea.
While I am sometimes tempted to just blame it on technology, as someone who is arguably more dependant on tech then most people, I cant really just blame it on tech. Me is blind, and without technology, I am not even sure if I wouldn't be placed in some sort of institution. IOW, without technology, I might have been enslaved by humanity because "they" likely wouldnt have known how to integrate me in a useful way. With technology, I can at least free myself in a few situations, with adds up to at least allowing me to exist independantly. But that is a very specific example... I am aware of that. So maybe your intutition is still right. Without technology, some of us might be worse off, but nobody knows what it would do to humanity as a whole.
To be clear, I want not only a pre-modern-technology but also a muslim world. I know enough history to know that the non muslim version sucks. To serve just as an example, see how our prophet pbuh. treated blind people, making one his representative and making him a muazzin (person who makes the call for Islamic prayer).
Seems pretty simple. The bottom of Maslow’s pyramid is under attack with unnecessary layoffs and offshoring leading to extremely dismal prospects of stable, long-term employment. What kid is going to feel good if their parents are constantly stressed by employment woes? Even worse when the government tells you everything is fine and there’s nothing to fix.
Since my youth climate change has been A wildly depressing concept to grapple with. Environment destruction period.
I mean being depressed is one thing, living in a world that's literally cooking at the same time just takes it up a whole other level.
I guess in the past, no matter how bad things got for you on a personal level, you could kind of count on the world being there if you got through it, now it's sort of 50/50.
But talking about population has become quite the taboo. Utterly unacceptable to restrict reproduction, but it's cool to take people's transport/heating/protein away to save the planet?
> population has become quite the taboo. Utterly unacceptable to restrict reproduction
More like not necessary anymore, since birthrates tend do decline by themself in more afluent countries, once sex is decoupled from reproduction and children are not the primary retirement plan anymore. "Helping poor countries" is just easier to sell than "We must make them stop having babies".
Because the book was wrong for the most part. We really didn't do anything to restrict population in the US, and without immigration our population would collapse.
China is in far worse shape, they restricted number of children for decades, and now they are presented with a demographics crisis that could halve their population in 60 years.
It’s not unacceptable at all to restrict population, it’s just a controversial notion. I’d go as far as to say that population restriction being good is an elite consensus.
I was taught about Nuclear annihilation as well as global warming in the 80s. Fast forward to today and both are still on the table. Climate catastrophes make geopolitical conflict more likely.
I thought the same with all these snide comments, we still have the threat of nuclear war at almost any minute. It never went away, why people think it has? I have no idea.
It is a different sort of doom. Slim chance of something utterly catastrophic happening all at once vs seemingly inevitable failure to respond day after day, knowingly.
I mean I enjoyed having neither but then most people weren’t lucky enough to grow up in the 90’s.
During the cold war it was quite literally minute by minute, alive or dead. Every day was news of airspace incursions, naval confrontations, proxy conflicts etc. "Slim chance" it was not.
I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. It's 100% bad but it's just trash filling the hole society is making.
Looking top down at the problem, humans need self actualization or propose to be happy. Originally we evolved to live in medium sized social groups that worked together to ensure their survival, we took care of each other and that was what drove our purpose, or rather why that need evolved, it helped increase the odds a group survived.
Fast forward and we're now trying to derive purpose out of pure competition. What percentile is your IQ, your GPA, your income, your stack rank. Society is becoming hyper competitive because that is what makes the most money. Nobody interacts with their local community, they interact with those that provide the best chance of making enough money to survive: coworkers, their "network", prospective employers.
This is all great for perpetual exponential economic growth but not so great for humans. Instead of just being the best we can be for our community we're trying to make them compete, keeping people switched on in survival mode 24/7 to extract maximum profits. Instead of community we're trying to create a nice plastic wrapped substitute with social media and phones, they're not the cause, they're the symptom.
> I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark.
I think phones may well be responsible. Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime - unstructured moments with nothing to do except be in your surroundings, feel your own boredom, experience your thoughts. Now, the moment our attention isn’t occupied by something external, we reach for our phones to have something to fill the silence.
I believe this has negatively affected everyone’s mental health, but it stands to reason that children would be worse off because they’ve never known anything different: they’ve never had the opportunity to develop the ability to just be.
I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. I view phones as tool to 'solve' specific problems, such as communication. Apps and websites such as Outlook (email apps with notifications in general), LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, maybe also Hackernews etc. pose more of the role of ruining our downtime, as they are designed that way.
At the end it would probably be about the lack of media competency, not knowing which apps and sites want to keep you as long as possible on their sites and which sources could benefit you better mentally.
And for children, aren't we adults (& probably also young adults) responsible to teach them about what media is and how to detect the bad apples?
> I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally.
From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do.
I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always are on their phone or listening to something.
Well yes, what I was trying to imply was that we usually use our phones in combination with social media, not the phone without social media. If we were to try to mindlessly scroll through the android settings app, at some point it just gets boring and we put our phones away (or open up an actual social media app).
> I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly
heh, i have to ask, what is so great/healthy/engaging/enlightening about staring blankly? I think anything, reading a book/newspaper, talking to a stranger, petting a dog, would have been better than "staring blankly".
That said: I don’t pull out my phone when waiting in line, I don’t usually have a book or newspaper handy, and I often don’t feel like talking with a stranger (though I will sometimes). That leaves me alone with my thoughts. Despite the implication of descriptions like “staring blankly”, though, my mind is absolutely active during those times. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s running a mile a minute. Maybe I’m daydreaming, maybe I’m replaying a book or movie scene in my head, maybe I’m making plans for the day, maybe I’m debating with myself or thinking philosophical thoughts or trying to work out what I should say in an upcoming meeting. Thinking thoughts is active, and I don’t consider it time wasted.
Humans don’t have to be fed stimulation 24/7—the mind is a self‐stimulating organ.
I wouldn’t argue that staring blankly is helpful in itself. But having time with nothing to engage your attention almost forces you to face your own thoughts and feelings, which many people prefer to avoid. That type of avoidance is at the root of a lot of mental health problems, and people go to therapy to learn how to face their thoughts and feelings head-on.
I am not saying its useful or anything but I remember just being absolutely bored to death constantly when I was a child. I have to wait for 2-3 hours every day for my mom to come pick me up with absolutely NOTHING to do during that time. I don't have phones, all my friends already left, and I can't wonder outside of school. So I spent those time simply just sitting at the entrance gate and wander about random stuffs.
Now that might be psychopathic but being constantly poked by phones is not good either.
It's funny, because I'm the opposite. I have a habit where, when I see or hear someone I know coming, I quickly put my phone away and pretend I wasn't just on my phone, unless it's obvious, in which case I just put it away without hiding anything.
If you actually want to put your phone away but avoid doing so because you’re worried about what people would think, let me encourage you to ignore them. In my experience, one doesn’t suffer serious (or even moderate) social problems from being a phone‐skeptical person.
Maybe. I'd suggest phones are also symbolic of the affluence of the western world. We're so wealthy, we don't need to cooperate with anyone else for survival anymore. [For now.]
You don't see this shit in El Salvador. Parents don't pay $100 a month so their kids can ignore them and get their life lessons from Reddit.
Everyone is miserable because we need each other more than we admit. The kids really do treat each other worse than NPCs in a Westworld LARP. Those who grew up "trolling" (bullying) everyone around them online never learn how to interact with actual people in non-adversarial ways. Then they get bitter, resentful, and violent.
Every school shooter that doesn't stick the gun in their mouth at the end cites alienation and loneliness as a factor. Go figure.
>> Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime
Was there not a similar argument made as newspapers became commonplace? Before that the same argument had been made for books but newspapers were on another level - they were effectively limitless drugs, affordable and every single day a new one was available. Instead of talking, laughing and joking with the other workers waiting at the bus stop or in the canteen or whatever, instead you had a sea of silent men reading newspapers.
I’m not convinced phones are without potential harm, but I’m hesitant to get too worked up about them vs. What’s gone before.
I barely remember what it was like waiting for the bus with nothing else to do. But I remember vividly what it was like that the school bully was next to me waiting for the bus with nothing else to do. Hope my kids don't have to know what thats like.
My point is not that smartphones and social media are great things. But I agree with OP that they are just filling a gap created by something else. It is still possible to be bored or have time solely with your own thoughts with social media available. Why? Because even kids can (and do) understand that social media is not all that great. Of course they have to experience that on their own before they understand it. It's nothing that you can teach them.
When I see people say things like this I just think perhaps you were never taught to stand up for yourself.
bullies don't stop being bullies when you graduate high school, they just change tactics.
There comes a point where adults need to step in, but that isn't immediately because someone decided to pick on someone else. Learning to stand up for yourself is as much of a life skill as anything else.
I moved a lot as a kid and after a while I recognized a pattern. I'd move, someone would decide I was an easy target, I'd get into a fist fight, then everyone would leave me alone.
Today you consider a phone to be infinitely distracting because you haven’t experienced yet the next engrossing medium, we put our phones in our pockets occasionally today but perhaps tomorrow we just won’t take our iQuest3 thingys off our faces between sunrise and bedtime.
Someone will be well placed to make your argument - well at least you put your phone away at some point!
The socially challenging bit is the difference not the magnitude I think.
That's true up to a point, but digital media really is different from analog media which cannot be updated dynamically. That's the difference, I think.
(And, yes, more and more people are putting away the phone because they realize how intrusive it is in terms of time spent doomscrolling, etc.)
You miss the point, before newspapers no one was this distracted from the present. It’s not the magnitude of distraction - a phone obviously offers more opportunity for longer distraction. It was the delta change vs. What distraction existed before.
Both other animals and native tribes today spend significant amounts of their day doing nothing. Therefore it’s only logical this is the normal mode of operation of the human brain, with the opposite situation being unhealthy.
I'm going to say there's at least four factors, all related to bad parenting, not that bad parenting is the only cause.
The phone as a babysitter is a big one, but also parents on phones / social media.
There's also an atomisation of society (fewer extended family and friends, and institutions like church groups). And parents work longer hours.
Kids go home and suck on a digital pacifier so their parents can do the same, and those parents haven't got anything else to do. What chance does the kid have?
All this talk about “community” - what “community”? It simply doesn’t exist anymore even if you wanted it - short of arranging to stay near your extended family and in laws, what else is there in the modern western world?
Churches, I guess is the only other true community left…
Small communities exist everywhere, at least in Europe. Scouts, sports clubs, volunteer fire departments, political activism groups. In all of these groups we build a community around a non-competitive purpose (with the exception of some sports clubs) and in all of them we also help each other with stuff that is not related to the primary purpose of the club.
I think it happens if you have kids. Parents make friends with their kids' friends' parents. "Soccer moms" and other parents whose kids are enrolled in sports make friends with other parents of their kid's teammates. Parents also make friends with their kid's teachers.
And kids still make friends at school, and after school during extracurricular activities like sports and jazz band.
Besides that, I think you're right, unless you make friends with your coworkers. There are also still parts of the US where you make friends with your neighbors. My parents recently moved to different suburbs a few years ago, and they're friends with their neighbors.
Which is fine. I always found it easier to find online communities than IRL ones. Heck, I met my partner online. But these aren't something most folks include.
Music groups such as amateur orchestras, brass bands etc are still a bit of community. Admittedly quite niche, you need to know about them, find a way and have the ability to learn an instrument. There are informal ad-hoc communities e:g at my local leisure centre the regular swimmers chat to each other quite a lot. Kept a lot of people going mentally through lockdown I think. (swimming was allowed subject to restricted numbers and booking ahead)
Churches, dont make me laugh. In fact, church people, or believers in general were those people that convinced me that rural community is something I only want a big distance to. That, and excessive alcohol consumption during the day and evening. It improved when I moved to the next bigish city. But churches are really the antithesis for comfortable communities, to me.
There are affinity groups dedicated to more than just particular novel-gazing interpretations of the divine. We should be striving to make a space for affinity groups to meet & form.
I agree, young people don’t invest in others anymore. It has emotionally become a consumer world. E.g., try getting some volunteers at your local sports club.
The price of housing is outrageous and it's worldwide, somehow. The knock-on effects are huge and I think this is one of them.
Or maybe governments just can't last as long as they have and they steal all progress eventually. (WW2 reset most, but not the US, would help explain why it's worse here?) Or maybe it really is monkey-brain things and normies shouldn't be on the Internet.
This one is puzzling because "shelter" (right to adequate housing) is directly a human right we once agreed upon.
But when we view this as a commodity and allow housing to be an investment vehicle it really displays the lack of empathy and care for the humans around us we have.
Commoditization isn’t really a problem except that governments went overboard by leaving it to market to solve problems. This creates unhealthy incentives to only build commercial buildings for upper middle class and higher. It drives prices up. Good government should be aware of it but usually they rub shoulders with the project managers of the big building corporations.
Most people have shelter, they just want better shelter. There is a vast inflation in expectations. Previously more people have been living together in smaller spaces, thats why we have housing shortage now.
That's the issue. All the basic human rights have been rolled back especially in the anglosphere. Housing, public health services, employment (proper jobs, non gigs)
The other issue is that we didn't actually agree on this. It may be that something like the EU declaration of rights says that housing is a human right, but humanity overall has never agreed that is the case.
Running clubs and associations and churches and any nonprofit oriented community organization is hard work.
Throw more parties. That’s one solution. It’s not easy either, but it isn’t pure hedonism. It’s creating real social bonds. And it takes real work!! Underappreciated.
Not that building these is or was ever that easy for the impoverished, but hey, before civil society became more secular, folks still managed to throw together churches even without the Vatican. Not that I think we need more churches, but makerspaces are a very good idea, and should ideally serve a larger segment of their host community beyond just hardware and software nerds.
I've been trying to get a job and honestly, the only reason I want one is because I want enough money to buy all the things that I enjoy playing around with. Computers, electronics, machining, construction and whatever. Self actualization, in other words. I want to make stuff!
Having to worry about all that other crap is just a burden. It's had me down for years. I just want to do stuff, man..
That didn't change in 2010 though, did it? None of that seems particularly different from 25 years ago, and their figures show this was clearly a sudden change around 2010-2012. The smartphone does feel like the only convincing explanation to me, because it's the only thing that happened globally around then which was a persistent change in the lives of teens.
I think you're right. But society has been this way from way Before the mental illness epidemic. Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing.
That being said I do think you're right. It's just that there's two underlying trends here of "mental illness". The one your addressing has been longer term and more pervasive while the recent trend is, as stated, a new trend and seemingly caused by social media.
As someone who has 4 cousins and one brother that just went throught their teenage years:
Social media is definitely a factor. I was still in the generation where we had social media, but phones had no or very shitty cameras and mobile internet was too expensive for us teens. Some people didn't have phones, period.
But those kids have a constant comparison to ideals, especially the girls, be it their peers or celebrities. And if there is mobbing it is way, way worse than in my generation, because it is easier to have a true all against you situation (with many passive bystanders) and because it doesn't end when you are at home.
> society has been this way from way Before the mental illness epidemic.
Definitely agree.
> Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing.
Trends can't exist without metrics. What's recent are the observations of the behaviors and new politics and moved goalposts, not the behaviors themselves.
when do you have in mind? In recent modern history, we saw periods of high social mobility - competition works well in positive sum environments where the pie is getting bigger for everyone. Feels less good when the pie is getting smaller...
I don't think the Spanish society is especially competitive - no one cares about IQ, just a minority (going into academic sector) cares about GPA, stack rank is not a thing in any company I know here (maybe it exists, but if it does, it would be rare), and income... well, people do care about that, of course, but as they have always done and more out of practical reasons than sheer competitiveness - in fact, many people would rather be a public sector worker with a super stable contract than earn a lot of money with more instability.
And still, our teens are completely messed up. So I think either phones, or social networks, or a combination of both are more likely culprits.
I'm in Germany, not in Spain but I have family there. My impression is that young people in Spain do face quite a lot of insecurity and pretty dismal outlooks. Focusing on GPAs and the like is one way of dealing with that (that may be most prevalent in GP's bubble), but there are others. Lack of purpose and agency and a hopeful narrative for one's own future is pure poison to the mind though, and I think that's at the heart of GP's comment. Social media may very well just be the sniffing glue that makes misery more bearable, and indirectly fuel that misery, but not act as the (primary) cause of said misery.
The Latin cultures certainly don’t have the same hustle and competitiveness as the US seems to have. In fact, it always sounded strange to me how in English they have this concept of a “loser” as an insult, as if losing in the rat race means you’re worthless as an individual.
People have been citing Marx's theory of alienation for a century and a half. Conveniently, they are only started to manifest during the rise of social media.
> Fast forward and we're now trying to derive purpose out of pure competition. What percentile is your IQ, your GPA, your income, your stack rank
I hear this a lot, and this attitude does seem more pervasive on the internet, but in the real world, I find that people don't care about any of this any more than they have to, especially after college. The only people who I know who work "unhealthy hours" genuinely seem to enjoy work or are treating work as an escape. When you look at working hours in the US it's been mostly flat since 2010 and it's actually significantly lower than it was in the 1950s [1]. The real reason nobody is spending time with their community because they are too busy consuming media. The average teen spends over 7 hours a day consuming media [2].
Competition and stack ranking are nothing new, Imperial China was doing it in the 6th century with civil service exams. You might as well say humanity is the cause.
This is the actual problem, because the scope of realization is way too small for humans to comprehend. That is the reason why we're in a climate crisis, plastic waste crisis, middle east crisis, and housing crisis - all simultaneously.
How did that happen you might ask? Aren't people responsible for this?
Humans are very, very, very _bad_ at planning the future, and they should be absolved of that task, and absolved from the burden of making those decisions. We're in this mess because old people with old opinions lead our nations, and they were trained all their lifetime to only think for themselves and their small little community.
Right-wing populist propaganda works so well because they appeal to emotions around your "nice little community and its values", always painting a dangerous picture of change that people don't want to accept in their isolated world views.
Why humans still drive cars powered by oil today is the best example. Because they're not good at making decisions, and their moral values are always undermined by economic incentives.
> Humans are very, very, very _bad_ at planning the future, and they should be absolved of that task, and absolved from the burden of making those decisions.
I think this will always be the case as long as there's inequality of any kind in the world. People will do extraordinary things to get themselves into a better position.
I mean, just look at the things people are doing to migrate to other countries, let alone what they have to do once they're in the country. So much of it sounds dreadful, yet for some people it's still a better life than the alternative i.e. gang violence etc.
We went rather quickly from a situation where it was quite easy to explain to kids what is expected of them - you hunt, survive or maintain a farm to survive - to a situation where the value of an action depends on a million things.
And, just to add yet another layer of complexity, there are few certain things about the future regarding what you need to know or do to thrive in it. Most jobs today might be obsolete by the time kids graduate. .
THIS. But add the things you're not supposed to say:
1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot of people have kids for a hundred different reasons, not to have kids. You're supposed to, to keep a marriage together, to get attention, to feel superior to others, ...
2) hence, they neither explain to kids what is expected of them, don't help. Kids grow up in a directionless vacuum.
3) People's (average) abilities have not gone up in 20-30 years. So this is a much worse problem than simply not wanting to help. A worse problem than simply adults needing to put aside 30 minutes every day for the kids. Adults don't have the knowledge expected in high school. Nor do they have practical knowledge (it's not that most adults don't know math, or don't know how to be a plumber or open a shop, it's that they know nothing)
Which means most adults CAN'T provide direction for kids. Not even if they wanted to. Not before putting in a lot of effort themselves first.
4) The traditional escapes have been closed off: factory work, marriage (as a means to escape jobs), clergy (as a means to escape normal jobs). All this has diminished or even disappeared.
The marriage thing is a double whammy since marriage helps both partners on a lot of different fronts. Not just jobs, but housing, stress, cooking, housework, calling the doctor when something's wrong (or generally administrative stuff), and of course an outlet, someone to talk to and even sex.
5) most easy jobs that have replaced this, have global competition. "Influencer" for example. So, they're not at all as easy as they look.
6) and the solutions for this are "psychology". In case anyone failed to notice, this fundamentally means blaming the kid (therapists are only supposed to fix the symptoms), while making it as hard as possible to see that you're blaming the kid.
Psychologists/therapists are not capable people that will teach kids that, say, a career as programmer, consultant or engineer is open to them, and then learn them math, economics or ... Again: they're totally incompetent. They won't do that, as it's not expected of them, but they also can't.
7) and like any other neural network, if you don't a human mind enough feedback, it'll start by having wild swings in output, and eventually the signal to noise ratio in the output breaks down, which for humans probably means the person "in" the human mind effectively (eventually) disappears, replaced by wild, big, excessive, even violent impulses.
8) what therapy/psychologists do is ENTIRELY the wrong thing: they "focus on the negative", the symptoms. In other words, they take a human mind, and complain about the noise. Think of it like this: If you had to guess a number between 1 and 2 million, and numbers divisible by 314 (for example) are valid answers. If I only tell you "no", and discuss how bad your decision process to arrive at an answer is ... it'll take a while. If I help you and tell you how to arrive at the right answer, you'll have it in 2 or 3 guesses.
It is almost impossible to overstate the difference you'll see in "performance" between a kid that is left directionless for their first 15 years and someone who is "led up the ladder". Constantly explaining what they're supposed to do, and where their reasoning is flawed. Now you can can overdo this, but frankly, if you overdo it, the kid will become angry ... and still be extremely capable. Perhaps not ideal, but hardly a situation where the kid's life will crash and burn.
You have some interesting points but a lot of them which makes them a bit hard to address as a whole but;
My impression of failings of parenthood is quite a lot about (resignation in face of) partial cluelessness and the complexity of guiding your children. Every parent has aspects of personality where they find themselves clueless about how to guide the child. That can probably tie in to a lot of what you write. Focusing on the negative as you describe regarding psychology seems to be one important common theme.
P(aren't):
Don't do this, don't do that.
C(hild): But why?
P thinking: I don't really understand why. I have learned this by trial and error over a very long time. You will have to do the same. There is probably better ways to do this but I wouldn't know. And you wouldn't really understand or be able to do anything with this information anyways because you're a child so I won't even say it.
P: Because I say so. Now tie your shoes. We're going to school (for some reason).
(Disclaimer: I'm 37 and not a parent but I observe friends and family who are parents of young children. I kind of expect I wouldn't have the energy left for any observations if I was a parent myself.)
I'm a parent and I do recognize this. There's a "lower threshold" below which I'm not prepared to discuss. Like going to bed, washing up, and indeed tying shoelaces. But reasons for school and specific subjects we can discuss, and see where things are going and what to change and why. No problem.
People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit.
Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy factors, crime, drugs, values and taboos changing too fast, uncertainty about the future.
We will probably won't find a culprit, but if I had to bet, I would say that far reaching event like the Vietnam war, reagonomics, the downsizing mania from the 80's are probably more important factors than the recent creation of social networks. If we have to blame someone, maybe we should be looking at figures like Lee Yacoca, Carl Icahn, and Jack Welch instead of Mark Zukerberg.
People are quick to blame social media because there are exceedingly plausible mechanisms by which social media could cause such a phenomenon, and there is tremendous profit in doing so and not just of the money variety. State level actors run secret influence campaigns on facebook, and more recently, just create and control whole social media platforms without oversight.
The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.
People made the same arguments about violent video games (a major panic in the 1990s), about youth literature, about Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. All about depraving children and getting them hooked on smut for profit.
Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.
Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.
At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.
I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
> Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design
The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent.
Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health.
And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.
They aren't the same arguments at all. All of those things are about the occasional indulgence of a hobby vs the time sink of constantly sitting on your phone and spending time with companies that want ALL of your time. Companies that, themselves, have lots of internal reporting concluding their platforms increase division and cause mental health issues.
I don't see how you can compare it to Chocolate? It's in our pocket and it's infinite.
The number of people on social media even that can’t mentally withstand the negative effects absolutely dwarf the number of people who have ever placed violent video games.
Notice I’m not making a statement on games at all? The could be the absolute worst thing in the world for mental health, and by scale social media still is the larger issue.
We can take this even further: it's a Phone-Based Education and Social Discourse
What has happened in the "Anglosphere" is that we have opened a for-profit Pandora's Box of resentful and manipulative discourse that makes no damned sense to people who are looking to their society for sense and guidance.
As you say, the system is full of manipulative actors. Not all of them are foreign.
Social media didn't cause the problem, but it very much accelerated it. I think the media aspect of it is related to the uptick in 24-hour news that began with Ted Turner and CNN, and got its own acceleration with 9/11. Social media sort of piggybacked onto that and blew it wide open.
"The problem with capitalism is not that it creates problems for humans but that it exploits the problems that we would have regardless, drastically exacerbating the consequences."
Wow, I think the exact opposite. The wonder of capitalism is that it harnesses the problems that we would have regardless and at least points them in the general direction of social benefit. At least I can't think of any other system of economic organization that has been tried in the history of the world that I would prefer.
It's quite obvious to me that both are true, and that we should continue questioning the degree to which each of them are.
Karl Marx celebrated capitalism for the same reasons you do, while at the same time recognizing the unlikelihood of capitalism being the final form of human organization. Of course, that was before our current awareness of global warming.
Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation.
If we think that food is generally abundant, I think it would be fair to say that famines are caused because people are deprived of food that is available, but either too expensive, and/or too valuable to other parties.
Given that, any example of famine or malnutrition, should be considered.
> Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation.
Source(s), please?
TLDR; famines require political will to be prevented, first and foremost[0].
When you eliminate starvation, as it has happened also in non-capitalist socities, e.g. the USSR & China during the cold war, and despite horrible famines during the 20th century, everywhere, including in those two countries, height is driven by diet [1].
Specifically protein quality in developed- and protein quantity in developing countries. "Developing" says something about the standard of living, health care, access to food & water, or lack thereof.
It says nothing about the underlying economic system.
And any you make is at best correlation. Prooving causality would be extremely difficult and easily countered (see above, USSR & China, but there are many more examples). But as you made it, again, sources please.
But what is easy to make is actually the opposite point. That late stage capitalism drives inequalities in access to food in general and healthy food specifically[2,3].
And that it developed instruments that create what amounts to devastating effects to particularly people in developing societies. Often those that are capitalist economically or authoritarian politically or, worst, both. With your meaningless counterexamples in the middle eastern countries who have immense wealth from natural resources coupled with low population density.
That said: whenever I study food labels in a supermarket in the US and look at prices of food that is not highly processed and doesn't contain ingredients I would never put into my body, it is obvious that the same is true for a country that would certainly describe itself as both "capitalist" and "democratic". ;)
But to go back to your point: you are linking a cause (capitalism) with an effect (less starvation -> increase in avg. height) wrongly. What do you think Victorian England was[5]?
What do you think the middle ages in Europe[6] looked like, economically? Those are all examples of capitalist socities.
The main force that brought down starvation would probably be a combo of humanistic thinking (and eventually the acknowledgement of human rights) and modern logistics.
And the main counterforces in the 20th century be blatant ignorance of humanistic principles and wars of political systems (those two are often tightly coupled, obviously).
The Soviet Union collectivized the farms, and famine ensued. Then they allowed farmers to be capitalists again, and famine ended. Then they collectivized again, starvation followed.
Finally, the Soviets allowed farmers to farm small plots of land, and sell the result. This became the backbone of food production, not the collective farms.
In the 1980s Kansas became the "breadbasket of the Soviet Union" as Reagan sent huge quantities of Kansas wheat to the USSR.
As for the US, the never-ending specter of famine ended around 1805 or so. Since then the height of Americans shot up. It was not do to any humanist thinking or modern logistics or government programs. It was due to the free market.
I suggest just [0] to scratch the surface of understanding that cause and effect of famines anywhere, but not less so in the USSR, is debated about people who donate their life to the study of this.
While you seem certain simply that they're caused by the absence of a free market (the latter is, in itself, a challengeable claim).
For which you provide zero sources again as well as not providing any sources for the even more outlandish claim that capitalism increased average height. Which was the actual reason I replied to you.
Advertisements is a global phenomena. Advertisements are often made to make you depressed about your situation, so the more effective they are the more depressed people get.
I generally get downvoted hard when I raise my hand as an advertiser, but here goes.
I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem.
Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that.
But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time?
On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical.
Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so.
And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked.
The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice.
What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap.
That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010.
Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff.
So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself).
But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.
I think what changed, which is pretty easy to identify is an increased invasiveness in placement and format of advertising.
Advertisements in the past had always been fairly simple to ignore. Billboards, commercial breaks, and print or even radio ads were disconnected from the content.
Today ads are in many cases often indistinguishable, even if labeled from content.
Facebook ads look like regular posts, and many ads ARE regular posts. A fitness podcast talking about their sponsors product with the same tone and passion as the content or simply being paid to influence on a product.
Everyone pretty universally used to recognize and be annoyed by commercials and pay little attention to ads.
Now, especially young people, can barely even recognize ads. Especially those done by so called influencers which are just part of the regular content flow.
Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.
That type of content has always existed, though. They were called advertorials. Endless books going back to at least the 40s advocated making ads look as similar to regular content as possible for the very effect you're describing.
So I'm not arguing that that's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing, in my opinion. Anything that's done to deceive the audience in any way is unethical.
I'm saying it's not new, and certainly didn't suddenly take off in 2010. It's been a mainstay in mass media for almost as long mass media has existed.
Further, what Facebook has done is treat all ads the same as regular content. That's not something advertisers chose to do; it's something Facebook chose to do. Blaming advertisers for a decision they had no part in is missing the mark.
To be clear, I think many advertisers are probably pretty happy with what Facebook did there. But that's not the same as the advertisers being responsible for that decision. Facebook did it because it led to more clicks and therefore more revenue for Facebook. Same thing with how Google has progressively made search ads nearly indistinguishable from regular search results. Advertisers didn't do that. Google did. Advertisers didn't decide to make the first 75% of results on Amazon be sponsored or promoted products. Amazon did that themselves.
> Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.
They're media companies, not advertisers. They sell advertising, as virtually all media companies do (with exception for publicly funded or high-subscription-fee companies). Advertisers buy advertising space.
So if your argument is that Google, Amazon, and Facebook are making advertising worse, I agree. If your argument is that advertisers (the people buying the ads) are making things worse, and that this correlates to the drop in mental health, I don't completely discount the theory; but I'd need to see a lot more evidence to support that contention.
None of this seemed to be aiming at getting anyone depressed.
Every single one of those adverts gave the message "If you don't buy this product you'll be unhappy/unattractive/hungry/missing out/uncool." Every single one. None of them aim to make people depressed, but they all do exactly that if you don't buy the product.
It's worth noting that all the adverts you remember are for products that were wildly successful at the time. People are very willing to pay to avoid being unhappy, even if when the message is coming from a cartoon rabbit.
People have long complained about television, both in terms of bad behavior of fictional characters and tone of news shows.
At this point, though, young people are far more likely to doom scroll, fantasize about influence or whatever online than they are to be watching television.
It's also worth noting that this is a "teen mental health crisis"- television has been around long enough for several generations to go through teenage years without a similar experience.
> “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
~ Socrates
Seems like every generation is doomed to lose touch with the next generation and pontificate as to why they are the worst generation yet and everything is falling apart.
Late reply, but no. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and basically every single instance of "the next generation is awful because X" has proven to be bullshit for the last 2,500+ years. I don't know how many times we'll have to go through rock & roll panic to reefer madness panic to satanic panic to video games cause violence panic it'll take to make so called "hackers" the least bit skeptical to shit that we learned was bullshit as children. Somehow, some people forget everything that enabled them to be the people they are and want to force their children down a narrow path that they choose. But it's not enough that they choose, they have to dictate what other parents can choose because it's too difficult to say no to little Timmy if his friend's parent's have said yes.
The connection here does seem to be a lot more firm. Teen suicide rates are way up, and they do seem to strongly coincide with widespread smartphone and social media adoption. Do you believe those correlations are just circumstantial?
I have a different theory which is just as plausible.
These teen mental problems are a result in a shift in attitudes in America - the attitude that everyone is a victim, achievement is bad, one should get everything for free rather than the old idea that kids should work for their goodies, the mounds of presents kids get for Christmas, participation awards, everyone gets an A, parental supervision of kids play even into mid teens, testing is bad for kids' self-esteem, kids are too fragile for testing, and so on.
I.e. the old virtues of industriousness, thrift, personal responsibility, etc., have all but disappeared.
For example, in my day (when people walked uphill to school both ways) kids routinely got jobs as soon as they turned 16. Today, many peoples' first jobs are not until they graduate from college. That's a massive change.
Kids need to learn how to deal with adversity as they grow up. Parents these days are able to remove all adversity from kids' lives, up until the mid-teens. Then, parents cannot do that anymore, and the kids have not developed coping skills for adversity. No coping skills, parents can no longer fix it for them, leads to mental health crisis.
I think there's more to it than this, too. There's a greater push to mold kids into activists now than when I grew up.
It used to be that you'd color in some pictures to save the rainforest or the whales. Now, it's we need to radically change society or else climate change will kill us all. Despite more people being killed by fists and feet than rifles, school shootings sound like a daily occurrence and might happen at any moment. Having white skin makes you guilty of having too much privilege. Accidentally calling someone by the wrong gender is practically a crime. If your grades aren't good enough or you don't have enough extracurricular activities for college you'll never make enough money. Anything you say online will haunt you forever. Being popular among your peers doesn't just mean being cool at school, everyone is always online spreading influence. There's no way to turn off anymore, and they're convinced they can't or they'll miss out.
They're literally surrounded by existential crises day in and day out. Going through puberty is hard enough, but somehow we've made it harder for them.
I really appreciate the thorough response. I agree with everything you've said, except for it being the prime cause of the issue. I definitely feel that it's a contributing cause of the issue. Anecdotally, I've had this problem, and it was ultimately something I was able to mature out of. In my opinion, I think the problems you've described can be easily bucketed into a general issue with prolonged immaturity and adolescence. I definitely admit that getting to the primary cause of this issue is tough, and although I feel strongly about social media being one of the more primary causes, I'm not in a position to prove that claim.
Anyhow, I agree. Victimhood is a pernicious belief. People don't understand that it has an appeal to it which must be resisted. I'd describe it as a vice just like anything else: anger, jealousy, etc. These are natural emotions, and they do have their own appeal, despite being "negative." And although it can be difficult, these sorts of feelings must be kept in check for the sake of yourself and others.
Netflix's product isn't as good as social media is for getting past our defenses. Also, TV shows must be made for the masses so the propaganda is frequently obvious and the content is less addictive.
Maybe it's not as good as social media at getting past your defenses (Congratulations! You think you are good at dealing with propaganda!)
But we're talking about societal problems, not your particular case. You've no shortage of neighbours whose brain turns off the moment the boob tube turns on to some talking head screaming about something or other.
Social media is far worse because (A) cutting off social media cuts part of your social connections too (B) social media is an effectively infinite feed so it's harder to get bored and ignore it (C) social media is algorithmically customized to your preferences and TV by definition isn't.
Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health.
- It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction.
- It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way.
- It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine.
There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
> - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction.
Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles.
That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to.
Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene.
On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.
Wikipedia doesn't have "infinite scrolling", you have to make a choice to look at associated content. Better still, you get to choose what you look at instead of having an algorithm choose for you. And you could even bookmark what you found and continue exploring at a later date!
Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.
This is barely scraping the surface. Social media might not be the only thing causing harm to society, but it is still a raging dumpster fire which can be seen from space.
Social media is like that because a dopamine slot machine is about the best way to get people wired up ton stare at their phones all day, which it turns out is profitable for the people making the slot machine.
While I agree with the point that the causes of the current trend might be intergenerational, I think that this very important to mind fact is irrelevant for the topic.
Social media is a problem to in societies and economies that are wildly different to the US, unless you mean us forming modern societies with groups bigger than 100 people is the problem or you mean those factors lead to the shape of social media as we have it today.
I would imagine that social media would fuck with teenagers in ancient Rome in a similar way than it would with todays teens. There is something universal there.
The problem is that social media in the way they are structured have zero incentives to build good structures for young adults to thrive in and 100% incentives to keep them in a state where they can be influenced. And that is an astable state of insecurity. Which is why many want to be influencer, because then at least you are the one doing the influencing.
None of these ring a bell here in China. My Indian friends are probably unaffected by Carl Icahn, yet the problem is present there too.
Social media is an artifact of the internet spreading, it will fade away or we'll adapt to it, but during the transition period, people who cannot deal with it are being rejected, somewhat violently. It's like blaming the depression of horse riders on the war policies of the time.
Social media is of course not responsible for all our problems, but I do blame specifically social media for making people (including myself) who are materially well off and live a comfortable life irrationally angry about things outside of their control and think that everything is going to get worse and worse (which is a reinforcement loop because then some of these people start exhibiting destructive behaviour which does make things worse).
I know the various social media companies supposedly optimize for engagement and angry posts supposedly do best as that ...
I can't imagine an entirely neutral social media platform would be any different.
people are going to follow whoever engages them the most. the inventives, regardless of the algorithms used, are exactly the same. no manipulation by the social media companies required. all that's needed is a public voice and followers
Of course, people are people and react to certain stimuli.
But I still remember the internet of old. Not only the small, semi-gated internet forums, but at also when Facebook just started out and you would just talk to your friends and not everything would be about polarising subjects.
This is clearly something that has changed due to social media algorithms, though maybe as a society we're now already brainwashed by it and I'm not sure if we can go back.
Because they value profits over anything else? The only thing they care about it is having people spend more and more time on the webpages. You'd be surprised at the caliber of talent that spends their valuable years optimising for this. More ad revenue at the expense of mental health is totally acceptable for interwebs comps.
During COVID when the world got inside we just realised how sick 'social connection' sites are, from doomscrolling to outsourcing self-esteem to Tinder. It's an organised system of hijacking attention and minds.
For folks who don’t know, this is a great read and explores how we are connected and communicate is more important than what is communicated. Highly highly recommend.
Social media is like that because people are like that. The only way you’re changing based human instincts is through punishments like we’ve done in real life or gatekeeping of information.
I'm really not sure how OP meant with the "Reaganomics"; In regard to the Vietnam War, it caused a major mental health & drug crisis in the U.S. that greatly increased homelessness, addiction rates, issues with child rearing that is being felt today now that those kids are adults, etc.
Prior to the truth of the Vietnam war coming out, ordinary Americans tended to gave the benefit of the doubt to the government. They lost the baby boomer’s trust with Vietnam.
Bush 43’s Iraq war did the same to Gen X.
For Millenial Americans it was the government’s ruinous response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Then the COVID debacle happened.
Fast forward to the present moment where the vast majority of Americans have never seen functional institutions in their or their parent’s or grandparent’s lifetime.
A shockingly high percentage of gen z colleagues I speak with see government institutions, the American government itself, healthcare, tech, banking, capitalism, etc to be a giant scam. They believe they’re on their own and cannot count on society in any way for support.
They feel like they’re alone in the woods. I think it contributes to their anxiety.
No, what you are saying is factually wrong. Now if you are lying or just wrong would depend on how much of your income depends on it.
The culprit is manipulated mass media, the current version of it is social media so before mark Zuckerberg the culprit was television owners, not whatever excuse you are trying to find to not blame media.
Social sciences and psychology are not physics or math. Your extreme confidence in your preferred explanation is not warranted by the current record of social and psychological sciences.
You may well be right, I concede that I also believe that mass media is at least part of the explanation, but I don't think we should act so certain and refuse the debate. The current state of psychology and social sciences don't warrant by now this extreme level of confidence in a handful of studies that seems to corroborate this hypothesis.
> Social sciences and psychology are not physics or math. Your extreme confidence in your preferred explanation is not warranted by the current record of social and psychological sciences.
My preferred explanation (and the post preferred explanation) is the one with most evidence available. Yours is a very strange theory that got ranked above all the discussion about the negative influence of social media and the responsibility of the owners and workers. We are past the time to think that this is coincidence.
Yeah, I'd be more willing to say it's the collapse of community oriented society in a lot of places along with a general feeling of economic despair (you'll own nothing and be happy).
I think the wide gist of this point is correct, but then you're going and doing something a lot of people responding are also doing, which is ignoring the finding and pointing to specific historical factors that apply to your country.
The only real constant I can see across all countries is increasing interconnectedness, human movement, and rate of change. Kids increasingly find themselves living in a world far different from their parents and even more radically different from their grandparents. Laws, culture, school, and parenting all can't adapt quickly enough. If social media is doing anything on its own, it's the same as what regular media was doing but bigger and faster. More information is coming at you from more directions, your parents and family don't know about it, it's increasingly less trustworthy (compare viral Tweet to Nighttime News to wisdom handed down from a grandparent), the perspectives are increasingly divorced and different from what your family or culture would have presented to you.
It's a lot. None of it is necessarily bad. But it's a lot. If dealing with anything at all presents a challenge, then dealing with more of it presents more of a challenge. The threats humans face are increasingly benign, threats to beliefs and identity even as health, hunger, and survival are mostly taken care of. But there are nonetheless more of them and they come at you faster, at least if you stay connected and pay attention, and the human psyche is not equipped to deal with that. We do well with one major threat every few days that is familiar. It may be a tiger lurking in the trees that can kill us, but we know they're there and there aren't a lot of them. Four mean kids at school can't kill you, but they may torment you every single day. A social media feed full of bad events, people telling you the world is terrible, people telling you your culture is terrible, whatever it is, may be "words" rather than sticks and stones, but even if they hurt less, they do hurt, and there are so many more of them. Think of differences in experience from living on an island with a few giant predators who might attack once a month on average, mostly in a specific season, and you're good all the rest of the time, compared to being perpetually covered in mosquitoes and rats. It's breaking a leg but healing compared to chronic pain that never goes away.
Modern life, first with newspapers and cities, then with schools and office politics and rat races, then with 24 hour news cycles and political horseraces, now with social media, and trending toward the latter. The threats are individually tiny but there are so damn many of them that people feel overwhelmed if they can't step back and disconnect.
This is true everywhere and has nothing to do with unions disappearing or the breakdown of family values in the US. These are just the manifestations of modernity as they happened here, but something analogous and equally anxiety inducing happened somewhere else.
There’s very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days, and very little doubt that a race to the bottom on all our worst impulses is a big part of that. But the causal arrow is trickier.
The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new).
So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor.
Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps.
Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off?
So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.
Also retrospective studies of areas that adopted smartphones well after the financial crisis showed delayed effects that make it implausible to tie them to the crisis.
Those rich people created the wealth. Wealth was not "transferred" to Bill Gates, for example.
Gates created products. He then sold these products to people, who believed those products were worth the money they paid for them - i.e. it was an equal value trade. That is how Gates made money. It wasn't a transfer.
Theft, taxes, donations, subsidies and welfare are examples of a transfer of wealth.
No he didn't. His employees did. The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't. So he pays them what they'll accept and keeps the surplus.
But if you're not convinced, consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers when it comes to "poaching"[1] and "noncompete" agreements[2]. These suppress salaries, with the goal of funnelling more money to the C-suite and shareholders instead.
Gates traded money for the work of his employees. It was a fair trade, as both parties freely agreed. (Pedantically, Gates wrote Microsoft's first product - BASIC.)
> The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't.
You imply that they were stupid. They certainly were not. And at any time they could have demanded more money. And at any time they could have quit, started their own company, and received the full value of their work. (Many did so, the PNW is full of them.)
Story time! I know of a very successful salesman at BigCorp. He generated vast quantities of sales for them, and was paid him well. He could walk into any company and be ushered in to see the CEO, and make a sale. He quit to join a startup and do the sales.
He was unable to close a single deal. He couldn't even get an audience from the decision makers in other companies, let alone see the CEO. He returned to BigCorp, who was happy to get him back.
The point is, it was BigCorp standing behind him that enabled his success. Without that, it just didn't work for him.
> consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers
I know about that. The cartel was a handful of employers. It did not cover the zillions of other tech companies, nor was it remotely effective in stopping startups that they could start.
Walter you know I hold you in tremendous esteem: your achievements are among the most noteworthy of any of the regular commenters and frankly of living hackers, and many including myself wouldn't be in this business without your contributions. So please know I say this with the utmost respect.
But I think you make an error when you say or effectively say via implication that market failures don't happen in way that impacts both the public at large and people in our business particularly (not especially, just germane to these threads). Collusion and cartel-style illegality routinely distort markets, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy and connected and almost always at the cost of working people who actually create most of the value. Bludgeoning everyone else out of the personal computer business by breaking the law isn't "creating" value, it's capturing value, via capture.
I don't think too many people frequent this site who don't fundamentally believe in markets as something to embrace, and that number probably rounds to zero for people with my join date, but markets and free exchange are only part of the story: people with ironclad obligations to anything from dependents to the IRS take what is offered in terms of wages and in the presence of market manipulation that is in no way a "free exchange".
I came of age as a hacker during the 90s: I remember exactly how badly Gates had to break the law to get the Department of Justice to go after a domestic economic Cinderella story with hammer and tongs. Those people go after terrorists and money launderers and child traffickers, you have to really color outside the lines to get them to put that on hold to muzzle a domestic company with geopolitical reach. Gates did so for the first time that got him deposed when he tried to strangle the Web in the cradle, and it's neither the first nor the last time he's dealt with regulators or attorneys who'd rather be chasing conventional bad guys around.
Going back even further, the reason why he was the one signing the small(-er) checks and cashing the big ones finds it's origin story in the fact that his parents organized and substantially financed his high school having an IBM mainframe in it at a time when probably a few dozen young people had any access to computers at all outside of maybe the clubs where the Steves were hanging out. By the time the personal computer revolution was taking off he had many years of head start. I hasten to add that I'm not advocating for some draconian policy of creating perfect equality of outcomes or any of that nonsense, but I'm likewise completely unimpressed that he "got there first", he was born down the block and his career from there was pretty much pressing that advantage with brass knuckle tactics until he basically had to retire from public life long enough to re-brand as a philanthropist. He's a really weird example to choose for the case I think you're making. His meme picture before we even called it that was him in a Borg suit.
The major players tried to break the back of the last upwardly mobile desk profession again in the 2004-2010 timeframe, when again the people who go after al Quaeda for a day job decided it was bad enough to slap them hard enough to back off a little, which coupled with Sheryl defecting and paying "market" wages in the 2009-2014 timeframe incentivized a whole generation of people to go into CS. Sheryl was paying 2-5x what Eric was, which one was "market"? It's a hard case to make the case it was the guy who said in email that we need to suppress wages.
Now they're at it again, no the mass layoffs followed by record-shattering EPS beats weren't a coincidence or because of COVID hiring, in fact they're hiring a bunch of those people back now that it's clear that GPT-4 isn't obsoleting the regular Internet in the imminent future, though wages haven't recovered and plenty of veteran hackers are still burning savings to make mortgage payments that were predicated on the comp packages they signed up for (a decidedly asymmetrical situation). I can't prove this because everything I know about this that isn't plain as day was said off the record, but I also don't make shit like that up.
I'd petition you as someone people look up to (I certainly do) to examine why you feel so strongly that markets are generally free, employment is generally truly at will at truly "market" wages, and the status quo around all this is something we should all accept?
Thanks for the kind words. I'll provide a decent reply tomorrow. Right now I'm about to turn in, and learned a long time ago that I should not write or program when I'm tired :-/
Gates attended Lakeside school, a private school that had a computer. Gates and Allen took advantage of that to learn how to program. None of the other students did.
Then they went to Harvard, which also had a computer available to students. I expect most universities at the time did. They took advantage of it to develop a Basic interpreter. Nobody else at Harvard did, nor did any other students in the country who had access. Basics were developed for other processors by other people.
IBM came to Gates to get a DOS for their PC. Gates didn't have one, and sent them to Gary Kildall. Kildall failed to recognize the opportunity, and sent them back to Gates. Gates didn't have to be presented with opportunity twice. He still didn't have a DOS, but figured he could get one. He bought one from Tim Patterson for $50,000. Patterson also failed to notice the opportunity.
And the rest, as they say, is history. What is clear is that Gates/Allen were hardly the only one who had opportunity, but they were the only ones to recognize the opportunity. Nobody was cheated. Money was not extracted from anybody. It was all fair deals.
A couple years later, Steve Jobs also saw opportunity where nobody else did. We all know the result. Woz wrote a Basic without access to any other computer, showing this was hardly impossible.
I also had those opportunities, but I FAILED TO RECOGNIZE them, and so missed out on being a multi-billionaire. I was not rooked out of opportunity. Nobody oppressed me. I'm not angry about it. I, and tens of thousands of others, simply failed to see the opportunity, and/or lacked the guts to take the risk and to the hard work needed to take advantage of it.
I also competed straight up with Microsoft in the 1980s, and was fairly successful at it. I recognized the opportunity that C++ offered (finally I bet on the right horse!), and capitalized on it, doing very well by having the only native C++ compiler that worked on DOS. Until Microsoft and Borland belatedly got into that market, and yet I still prospered with it.
Microsoft and Borland never tried to bury me with any tactics, they eventually outcompeted me. Microsoft did try to buy me out at one point, but I declined as I thought the offer was too low. I turned out to be right on that one, too. Borland tried to hire me, too, but the offer was insufficient.
Microsoft was a tough competitor, sure, and if you wanted to compete with them you had to bring your A game. I've seen a lot of their competitors frankly whine about it, when they were making obvious missteps that were the actual architect of their demise.
At no point did Microsoft ever force anyone to work for them or force anyone to buy their products.
>very little doubt that social media is hard to use in a positive way these days
Horseshit. I use Facebook and Instagram and love both. When I see something I don't like, I click the 'Don't show me stuff like this' option. I have an endless feed of old european castles, guitars and a couple other obscure hobbies & interests. I have learned things about my hobbies I never would have otherwise and practice them at a higher level.
Even what you describe is an incredibly poor method of consuming information. There's no reasonable way to say you wouldn't have otherwise learned about something just because you learned about it in the way you did.
I learned far more quality information about my hobbies when there were vast Internet forums of users dedicated to discussing them.
Facebook groups and other social media has supplanted most of those forums but presents the information in a much more inferior fashion. However it creates far more engagement by exploiting the same principles as gambling addiction or animal training. Variable expectation of results and the level of work required, scrambling the feed, burying information, creating an inconsistent expectation of experience. That in and of itself wreaks havoc on brain chemistry and brings forth depression just like gambling addiction.
That is something I've been think about, what if social media wasn't designed to be addictive? There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook, so what if all the doom scrolling, likes, and corporate profiles where removed from Facebook? Would it be safer?
I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit. Either way is terrifying and should lead to a larger skepticism of new technology. The horrible reality of social media, and the ad funded Internet is what has fueled my reluctance to accept crypto currency and AI into my life, as much as it is within my control to do so.
Social media not designed to be addictive includes hacker news and PHP bulletin boards. Early Facebook might qualify as a relatively unaddictive UX as well, though they quickly started with the "optimizations".
> There shouldn't be anything inherently wrong in keeping in contact with your high school buddies on Facebook
I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled?
> I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled?
Or maybe there's also a problem with social media removing friction. E.g. I want to find out what my old high-school buddy is up to, but instead of meeting up of having a phone call, his updates are pushed to my feed, removing the impetus for real social contact.
Software engineers can be weird people (e.g. hyper-introverted) who are averse to thinking through the impacts of the technology they're building. Then there are entrepreneurs whose search for successful products effectively turns them into psychopaths. These are the people who are architecting our society.
> I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit.
People have been screaming that at the top of their lungs for years.
But what do we do with that information? Un-invent social media, ban it? How would such a ban work and what should it cover?
At this point I feel like we should pick a time in history, say the late 1930s or 1940s, somewhere around there, and use that as a frame of reference. Any new technology would be assessed based on the value added to average persons life, vs. the overall cost to society and the planet. Only if it hit a certain threshold is it to be implemented. Social media is out right away, negative impact on individual and society and provide little value that postcards and "letters from the readers" didn't already cover.
That's a very romantic approach ("good old times"), but it's fundamental broken even if we could implement it.
The late 1930s and 1940s weren't exactly the greatest time to be around, and using that as a yardstick sets us up for a large downhill climb. And then there's the problem that often, changes interact with each other, and their full value (or cost) is only clear when it's together with other inventions.
You can't ask "what would social media in a 1930s society be like, what's the impact". It requires the existence of computers, of the Internet, of ubiquitous device access. These require advanced electronics, rocketry, etc etc.
This also goes in the opposite direction - a "social media is out right away" would end up leaving a ton of people completely isolated. It can't be simply undone, the genie is out of the bottle. (It might also require removing all group texts apps, and you go from there)
We can only do what we've always done - assess risks before implementing, possibly implement, assess actual changes after implementing. There is no idyll we can return to. Only daily work to make things better.
> That's a very romantic approach ("good old times"),
My grandfather used to say: So when was the good old times, because I don't remember them? He was born in 1921.
The point of picking a somewhere in the past would be to avoid debating which things we'd want to get rid of, and instead focus on which technologies would we have adopted, if we had the current knowledge of it's ramifications. E.g. we'd skip the mass adoption of internal combustion engines and go for EVs if we had the full future vision and technology in 1940, so we should get rid of gas and diesel cars.
To it was just to have a reference point where living standards where fairly high and where most of us wouldn't be completely lost, and use that as a starting point for judging the value of various technologies.
> assessed based on the value added to average persons life, vs. the overall cost to society and the planet.
Cost presupposes value. If I'm the buyer in a transaction, I am trading value in exchange for value. The 'cost' is value that I am parting with.
I'm making this pedantic argument to say "cost to society or the planet" is the same as saying that "society" and "the planet" value things, and that those values are at odds with what the individual values.
The concept of "value" presupposes the question "of value to whom and for what?" Only individual people can value things. "Society" is just an arbitrarily defined group of individuals, each with their own values. So at best, what "society" values is what the majority of the individuals within that group value. And "the planet" is a rock. It values nothing.
While I don't think it's your intent, this word game (what "society values") is often used as a sneaky way of justifying transferring value from certain individuals to other individuals. Whoever gets to "represent society" gets to place their values first and claim that it's OK to target the individuals that are "costing society."
The way to approach the issue of social media causing damage is to demonstrate that it is providing a dis-value to all individuals and that each and every individual has healthier alternatives that they can choose that present a greater net value. In some extreme cases, if there is no healthy alternative, and the majority of individuals decide that the dis-value is great enough, they may vote to pass legislation to make the "thing" in question either more expensive or illegal ... such as with the case of tobacco for example.
Banning dragnet spying and/or making retaining data about people very risky, has some chance of killing algorithm-feed social media (by drying up ad dollars) and would be a good thing to do anyway.
Making companies liable not for content they host or deliver/show to an explicit recipient or set of recipients, but for content they both host and actively elect to promote, would kill the algorithm feed, suggested videos, et c, but not ordinary Internet hosting services or messaging platforms (or even traditional forums!).
Neither is impossible, and either would probably be good to do anyway.
If the core problem is companies shoving shit at you based on what drives "engagement" and with little regard for anything else, those are policies to look at.
Just banning more or less all advertising would probably do the trick. In general advertising and marketing are an even bigger problem for mental health too.
Social media in the late 2000s was basically this. It was before they really figured out how to super-charge the addictiveness. I remember it and it was a lot less toxic.
BBSes were, once they exceeded a certain size threshold. Usenet had its toxic corners. Large IRC channels without strong moderators were a hellscape.
There are two ingredients to toxicity, as far as I can tell. One is sheer size of a group - you get a million people in a room, you have 1000 assholes of a 1-in-a-1000 caliber in there. It's a pure numbers game.
The second is strong moderation. Moderation that actively intercedes at the first sign of toxicity keeps group conversations less toxic. (For the free speech argument here: I believe we're better off with moderated groups as long as everybody is free to run their own moderated group. Everybody is free to speak, but the rest of the world must be free to choose to not listen - this is where big social media really fails)
Ask Metafilter made the point that possibly "cost of entry" might help as well, but I strongly believe that's ultimately the size argument combined with selection bias reducing the need for moderation.
So what you remember as "less toxic" might well just be "social media was smaller back then". Or more selective groups.
There's nothing inherently "wrong" with communication, which at its simplest form is what "social media" is. It is just communication, with media. We have had this for a long while.
The difference came when the businesses started optimising for engagement rather than happiness or connectedness to friends.
Using engagement, which drives ad revenue, as the metric for success means you design a system that is addictive.
The issue is optimising for engagement because humans are hardwired to find certain things moreish. Our dopamine system is easily abused and hijacked.
Digital communication is good. Engagement optimisation is bad. This means businesses need another model of revenue outside ad revenue, which sadly is the most profitable.
At a lower level, capitalism thrives on over-consumption. Fast fashion, doom scrolling, high-waste food produce supply chains; it's all over-consumption that takes advantage of human psychology to fuel energy gradients from which profits can be found as cash transits across the gradient as people expend energy maintaining it.
This might sound reductive, but until we realise that sustainability in ALL things is very important, and we built that into consumer mindset, we will keep being hijacked on every front.
The question is, how do we design things that are SUSTAINABLE from revenue to user psychology? Given that we can't collectively manage to do that to save our own planet, I don't hold much hope in us even looking for an answer. The system is broken. Sustainability isn't profitable. Humans are myopic.
Agreed. It's like dining out versus having a healthy home cooked meal. Restaurants will sell you delicious food loaded with sodium, sugar, and fat because they want you to crave their food. Likewise, when you outsource your family values, entertainment, news to social media, you meet a similar problem.
Relatedly, beware of the hidden ads in social media. It takes much less money to astroturf a community like reddit than to advertise through conventional means (e.g. commercials, product placements, banner ads). You may be aware of ads on youtube, but you may not be aware of the ads in the comment section. I've seen youtube comments as follows:
Ed: Christ! My stock portfolio has gone down so much since the pandemic... it hurts.
Bob: Mine did too, however in the past year I've been able to recover financially.
Ed: Really? Please help me, how did you recover your losses?
Bob: I'd hate to share my secret, but Jonathon Harris provided me with amazing investment tips.
Sal: Mr. Jonathon Harris helped 10X our portfolio! You can reach him at jonharris@gmail.com
</ad scam>
That was my re-enactment of their discussion. Sure, that was an example of an obvious ad. But think of all the times you read a conversation about a product or service and became convinced to try something just based on a conversation between two supposed strangers online? I've never bought anything from a conventional ad, but I've purchased plenty of things after reading what the socials say about a product, and that makes me ashamed of myself. Word of mouth is effective for a reason, but it's insidious online. And that's where they get you. Steel your mind, when online.
What's worse is that people do genuinely advertise products they like, so it's hard to tell if a conversation is astroturfing. I've done the same thing. I see it particularly for video games and software. There's a meme about how Hollow Knight fans advertise it so much that they suggest you play Hollow Knight even if you were asking about a completely different genre.
Social media is an amplifier of negative aspects of social interaction. We've not had anything like that before.
The algorithms are aimed at farming attention for the paying customers; advertisers. To do that, the algorithms shovel outrage, instant trends, negativity, and massively amplified in-group out-group dichotomies... They do all of this on purpose. This is new.
None of today's teenagers are impacted by the Vietnam war, by Reagan, or anything from the 80s at all. Gen X felt those things. But a teenager today was born between 2003 and 2010. Most of them don't even know who Jack Welch is or that Chrysler used to be one of the "Big 3" (and used to be called Chrysler). But they know what TikTok is, they know Twitter, and Twitch, and YouTube, and Instagram. And they suffer from interacting with a system designed to manipulate attention. These systems are far more immediately detrimental to mental health, especially for someone entering adolescence when negative emotional complexes arise naturally as a neurological consequence of maturing, than any of the business or political activities of the 80s.
Zuckerberg's own company had studies that showed this to be true. Studies that showed dramatic increases in suicidal tendencies among teenage girls on social media as compared to those who avoided it, for example. They know their systems are harmful. Social media is this generations Big Tobacco.
If we have to blame someone, maybe we're looking at exactly the right people in 2024 when we cast our gaze at Zuckerberg, Pichai, and the government running TikTok.
Yeah, it is just weaponized 24/7 always online peer pressure and bullying that follows you around in your pocket. Kids have always been awful and now its harder to escape them than ever before. Unless someone has convincing evidence that the obvious cause isn't the real cause there's no need to start getting so counterintuitively clever by searching for other explanations.
11 years ago I visited Lombok, and island adjacent to Bali in Indonesia, where people generally lived very traditional village lifestyles and most adults over 30 were illiterate. They had recently been provided 4g cellular coverage, and all the teenagers and young adults were lounging around doomscrolling Facebook lite on their $50 android phones. There was no multigenerational transition for them.
Literacy was over 95% in 2010 in Indonesia. It takes 5 seconds to Google for it. Since most of Indonesia are Moslems, they learn to read the Koran at an early age. Yes, I know that small parts of Lombok are Hindus.
I was going off what the family I stayed with in Kuta told me. The mother of the family could not read. Indonesia is quite diverse. There are many isolated ethnic groups. On Lombok material quality of life can vary quite a bit from one village to the next, as can their commitment to Islam.
Kuta? Now, I am completely lost. You stayed in Bali (where Kuta is located) and the family was telling you about life in a the next island (Lombok). Strange. I would have not believed it unless they had intimate ties to Lombok.
A lot, I recommend finding a library subscription to read a portion of "Diplomatic History - Europe and the Vietnam War: A Thirty-Year Perspective" [0].
The effect was quite dramatic for all of Europe. Way too many things to even enumerate here.
Everything US spreads to Europe. If you follow American politics, you'll notice the talking points dripping down with some delay of some months or year.
This is like trying to dismiss cigarette/cancer links by pointing out that we have also built more power plants and have more cars and our lifestyles have changed and that must be why we have more lung cancer.
No, it's cigarettes.
I refer to social media companies as "tobacco companies of the mind."
> People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that.
This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids.
It doesn't matter why it happens, it just matters that it happens. But instead of preventing or discouraging kids (or people in general) from using social media, you can blame the ghost of Ronald Reagan--the gift that keeps on giving.
> This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids.
Which of these approaches is more likely to result in someone changing their behaviour? Is there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods?
What an unusual attitude for an engineer to have. I suppose you fix bugs by “just not writing bugs in the first place”, too.
This is funny because most therapists these days practice CBT or one of its variants, which is explicitly focused on behaviors and outcomes and gives minimal weight to investigating "root causes" like that. The kind of worldview that comes from never doing therapy I guess.
I understand such therapy is rather formatted that when the patient asks “why do I strike my children?” the therapy looks not for root causes but immediate ones. “What do you feel leading up to these violent incidents? Once you understand that, it becomes your choice to head them off.”
While it may be taboo to say so, I believe this is a strong factor. Most changes in life have tradeoffs, winners and losers. Divorce may be great for the general happiness of the adults involved, but despite all boomer rationalizations in the line "I can raise happy kids if I am not absolutely happy", it generally sucks for kids.
I grew up in a dysfunctional family, and while the breakup was tough, it was miles better than listening to my parents screaming their heads off at each other (after drinking) every night. Maybe the boomers thought divorce was good not because of their own happiness, but because many of them experienced the "stick together at all costs" culture of their parents and didn't want to put their kids through that.
If it was trite, there wouldn't be as much resistance to it. It's important to use words accurately. Contentious, controversial, unpopular, iconoclastic maybe, not trite.
Idk, as a young adult with divorced parents, I can say with utmost certainty I was better off with them separate rather than putting up with each other in the same house I grew up in
Comrade, have you ever studied the history of the USSR? Give it a try, it's fun. It tells a story how 1/6 of the planet's land surface for 80 years was turned into garbage. They did it with one simple trick.
Communism/socialism failed like Chernobyl reactor number 4.
Adopting a new socio-economic system some young cocky pal imagines in his head? Nope, thank you. I'm too old and experienced for that. Not in a million of years.
Yes but we didnt' have the entire thing uploaded into our heads. To use Byung-Chul Han's phrase, you're both master and slave in one now. You're not even a subject any more (that has some places to escape to) but a project.
To tie it into the article, the social media dynamic, young girls seeing themselves as never-ending beauty projects that have to get lip-fillers, more clicks, more likes, compete with each other, is just the logic of capital without even someone needing to subject them to it, they're doing it themselves.
Capital's eaten all the physical space, it's still hungry so it's gobling up all the mental space, and information tech was the vector to jump from one to the other. And it does to the mental environment exactly what it did to physical spaces once its done harvesting them.
Not this level of capitalism. The post-war consensus economy of the west had heavy state intervention and economic involvement.
Things started to change towards "free market" neoliberalism (AKA voodoo economics) in around the 1970's, and the rate of the change exploded after the fall of Soviet Union.
Capitalism (an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit) was invented prior to written history so the reformation only exists in the context of private property being a core assumption of society. That assumption is NEW in the history of humanity, the concept of "property" has only existed for about 50,000 years
The protestant reformation then was an attempt to wrest property away from the catholic organization and distribute it. The goal being to eliminate the primary economic organization and "democratize" it.
The concept of hoarding property flowed from scarcity anxieties that are only socially maintained and hoarding property is the root issue
I’m sorry that you’re ignorant of every single indigenous culture but that’s really not my problem
No matter, you’ll simply make the following argument: that might makes right because those indigenous cultures couldn’t stand up to the genocidal domination tactics of property based thought right?
I know this may come as a shock, so you may want to sit down for this one: those indigenous tribes and cultures were genociding each other for millennia before Adam Smith ever wrote The Wealth of Nations.
If I predict ahead of time that my plans to install a puppet government in Machuria and invade China are going to be compared unfavorably to Japan's actions in WW2, that doesn't somehow magically make the comparison inaccurate just because I predicted it.
Because the mechanism doesn't make much sense - the electromagnetic fields we are now subject to are absolutely tiny compared to the noise from the earth and the sun. How can a 0.1 W (right at the antenna) WiFi router disrupt our brains when the 1000 W/m^2 (hitting the ground, and only counting the visible spectrum) Sun doesn't?
Did we evolve with the polarized pulsed microwave radiation from man-made devices? Or Did we evolve with the non-polarized radiation from the sun?
You cannot compare that. The proof of this is that the FCC has safety regulations against how close you are to the sources. But these were devised with two and 3G technologies. Also, most of the studies are not real world studies, and so they lack many of the key characteristics of our exposure.
And make no mistake, I think a lot of people could be positively affected by this type of electromagnetic radiation, unfortunately, I don’t think I’m one of those, however. It’s really mostly about genetics.
If there might be a problem, then we should investigate it, correct? But instead, we’re just rolling it out more and more and faster faster. Whatever happened to the precautionary principal and health?
Sure, it's worth investigating, I support that. But I do not support making a claim like "I do think it plays one of the largest roles in the increase of neurological disorders since the 2000s. Including autism." when there's little evidence and no obvious mechanism.
> and the same type voltage gated calcium ion channel is also affected by electromagnetic fields?
This is the kind of broad brush statement that makes people face-palm. A "voltage gated" anything is necessarily affected by electromagnetic fields, because that's what those words mean…
…but the character of that effect depends almost entirely on the specifics. Specifically, your brain cells do things at about 100-1000 Hz, whereas most of the new RF noise is about 6 orders of magnitude higher frequency. To understand why 6 orders of magnitude matters, if you go up a further 6 orders of magnitude you get slightly more than the entire range of visible light (red light is ~500e12 Hz, violet is ~800e12).
What might genuinely affect our brain chemistry is the 50-60 Hz range of the mains grid… except we've had that all over the place since electricity was introduced, so this trend wouldn't be new in developed nations, it would be a thing that shows up in the statistics from the interwar era when we got electricity, and the only places that would get this trend now would be places that are finally getting electricity for the first time ever.
If there is a signal for this, I've never heard of it. That doesn't mean there isn't one, but that's what you actually need to look for, not a statement that's technically so general it can be said about literally everything in the universe including spacetime itself, but even with more generous interpretations is still general to the point of trivially applying to basically everything you ever experience.
> This is the kind of broad brush statement that makes people face-palm. A "voltage gated" anything is necessarily affected by electromagnetic fields, because that's what those words mean…
It’s not a broadbrush statement, it’s a very specific statement. It’s a statement that this is how EMFs can affect our neurology and our biology. I don’t understand you’re complained about this at all.
> Specifically, your brain cells do things at about 100-1000 Hz, whereas most of the new RF noise is about 6 orders of magnitude higher frequency.
Why are you assuming there has to be some residence between the EMFs and the speed of the fire neurons for the voltage gated ion channels to be triggered or disrupted? This makes no sense.
There’s plenty of signal, you just don’t have the antennas to receive it.
There is considerable evidence that exposure to RF-EMF could cause various types of genotoxic effects in cells (Lai and Singh, 2004; Lee et al., 2005; Phillips et al., 2009; Ruediger, 2009; Xu et al., 2010). Exposure to RF-EMFs (1,800 MHz, SAR 2 W/kg) caused DNA oxidative damage in the mitochondria, DNA fragmentation and DNA strand breaks in neurons (Xu et al., 2010). This have been reported in lymphocytes exposed to various ranges of RF-EMFs (Phillips et al., 2009). In addition, RF-EMF exposure has been reported to cause chromosomal instability, alteration of gene expression and gene mutations. Such genetic toxic effects have been reported in, but are not limited to, neurons, blood lymphocytes, sperm, red blood cells, epithelial cells, hematopoietic tissue, lung cells and bone marrow (Magras and Xenos, 1997; Mashevich et al., 2003; Demsia et al., 2004; Zhao et al., 2007; Baan et al., 2011). It has also been found that exposure to electromagnetic radiation, a type of RF-EMF, increases the incidence of chromosomal aneuploidy (Mashevich et al., 2003). Genetic toxic effects, including aneuploidy, can lead to genetic disorders with abnormal gene formation, and can even lead to cancer (Hoeijmakers, 2009).
> It’s not a broadbrush statement, it’s a very specific statement. It’s a statement that this is how EMFs can affect our neurology and our biology. I don’t understand you’re complained about this at all.
That fact you think your statement isn't broadbrush suggests you don't understand the rest of my previous comment.
All interactions in your daily life are either the electromagnetic field, or gravity. Even though some of the radiation you're constantly experiencing is coming from the weak nuclear force, the radiation that does your chemistry any harm is the bit that interacts via electromagnetic fields.
It's EM fields that make lighting bolts work. It's EM fields that travel along your nerves. It's EM fields that stop you from falling through the floor, that keep the floor intact, and stop the Earth from collapsing into a black hole. It's EM fields that give you sunburn and vitamin D.
Saying "EM fields affects us" is as true as saying "chemicals affect us": Yes, light is an EM field, water is a chemical. You don't get to remove these things from our environment, they are our environment.
That is why it's such a ridiculously broad brush. Without specifying power level, duration, and frequency, one can get literally any result from no impact to you exploding (which would happen not only from too much, but also if one were to suppress every EM field in your body).
> Why are you assuming there has to be some residence between the EMFs and the speed of the fire neurons for the voltage gated ion channels to be triggered or disrupted? This makes no sense.
Because basically all electrical interactions depend on frequency. If I have a circuit with a capacitor in it, that acts as a high-pass filter; if I have one with an inductor in it, that acts as a low-pass filter. Almost everything acts a bit like both a capacitor and an inductor, including our bodies.
And the fact you think that makes no sense, suggests you don't know the absolute basics of electronics, because I managed to pick that up from 101 courses.
Likewise, basically all chemicals in your body have different responses depending on which wavelengths of EM field they're exposed to. Your brain is wired to respond strongly to extremely low frequencies.
…that quote was on the section about genotoxic effects, which have almost nothing in common with anything from the section of calcium channels, judging by the citations used.
A different quote from the same link:
> Thus, the vague fear for the many unknown effects of RF-EMF exposure is expressed as ungrounded negative effects not only to the scientific community but also to the general public. In addition to this, scientific data published by various researchers have been contradictory in their outcome.
You’re missing the simplicity of my point. Yes I said EMF affect us, and that was supposed to include everything. The fact that we’re adding new and different EMFs is the point. There’s a very fact that it’s highly unrecognized by psychiatrist that solar flares affect the rate of psychiatric hospitalization. We can’t even get it across to them that even natural occurring EMFs affect mood. If they won’t recognize that effect, why would they recognize RF – EMFs? What is not a broad statement is explaining how these electromagnetic fields affect us, that is by affecting voltage gated ion channels.
Also, you’re thinking as a technician, not as a biologist.
I encourage you if you’re so skeptical to keep reading the papers. I’m not going to post on hacker news anymore because my original comment was flagged and I think that’s censorship and bias in this community that I’m not going to tolerate.
Is there a reliable overview of all such evidence that you can recommend?
>I know you’re all gonna laugh at this
Alas it is this attitude itself that might become laughable. I don't get what is so incredibly unbelievable about EMF interacting with biology, and I certainly hope we don't discover this the wrong way.
Unfortunately, there’s not, annd unfortunately a lot of it is really bad. I would just keep up with the studies that are being published and the sources of their funding. The website the environmental health trust has a lot of material that I would categorize as mostly reliable.
I’m not, I’ve been at this for a while. It’s very strong bias of those in the tech industry that there’s no problem with radio frequency electromagnetic radiation. I was the same way. I was a network engineer for Cisco Systems from 1996 to 2000. I would’ve said the same thing before I realized it affected me in the late 201Os. There’s been such strong propaganda from the telecommunications industry because of the money involved. Just the fact that people keep saying “radiation comes from the sun as well” is proof of this fact sis, it ignores the fundamental science of how radio frequency telecommunications work. Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to comment about my post being flagged.
I’m not gonna post on hacker news anymore, there’s just too much noise.
I don't deny radio frequency electromagnetic radiation could be harmful. But clearly the change is behavioral and it is not the radiation that makes teenagers doomscroll 16 hours/day.
I think that's a lazy excuse, the same as saying the food in US is worse so that's the reason for the fat epidemic, not excessive eating mixed with a widespread sedentary lifestyle
Can you elaborate on this? From what I can tell, the outcome that you’re speaking of has occurred for the opposite reason.
Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small businesses, disenfranchisement, etc.
Yes, the reality is we've been in a starve the beast situation for decades in the US. It's a spiral as the bad actors get to say "See, we have X but X doesn't work" leaving out the conditions they've forced on X to cause these deficiencies. Repeat until the X thing is dead or completely toothless.
Consider all the labor regulations since. All the complexity of the taxes. The design of cars today is completely driven by regulations - for example, the tendency for cars to all look alike comes from regulation of every aspect of them.
Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.
> Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.
Do you have any sources? I think most offshoring is driven by significantly lower labor costs in other countries. For example, China has a highly controlled economy, but American companies still offshore work there simply because labor is cheaper. Indeed, we've seen some "onshoring" in recent years[1] now that automation is far more prevalent and labor cost is less significant as a portion of operating costs.
No, I don't have a specific cite. But the reason for offshoring is always going to be about lower total costs, of which labor is a large component. There are quite a lot of regulations around labor and benefits, along with the NLRB which is very tilted towards the interests of unions. California recently passed a law where the wages of fast food workers are set by some government board.
In tech, while there are some regulations, I definitely believe that more need to be established, especially regarding the topic of the article. Tech is a bit too loose right now, with the exception of the health industry.
I think a possible explanation would be that the increasing desire for more government regulation, or at least functional government, runs counter to the world, which is increasingly ruled by inhuman, (even anti-human) forces. This breeds a desperation in people as they realize that humanity is viewed as a resource, not an end in itself, for the inhuman forces (call it capital, technology, whatever) to consume and mold toward their own ends. While the left is obviously more in favor of “big government”, I think it’s easy to forget that conservatives are also perpetually in rebellion against a government they feel has abandoned the goal of protecting the traditional structures they hold dear, while also delegating the role of speech police and moral authority to the dreaded socially liberal wings of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
No, not at all, just that (post) modern techno-capitalism has grown out of the need to justify itself via appeals to humanism. Another way of looking at this is by considering the difference between life/death drive in psychology as they relate to humanism/anti-humanism and how that manifests in systems.
Alban Uzoma Nwapa (born 26 August 1957), better known by his stage name Dr. Alban, is a Nigerian-born Swedish musician and producer with his own record label, Dr. Records.
His music can best be described as Eurodance/hip-hop reggae in a dancehall style.
He has sold an estimated 16 million records worldwide and is most famous for his worldwide 1992 hit "It's My Life", from the album One Love.
You'll find similar examples in all the scandinavian countries, it features in many of the scandi-noir hand knitted sweater hurdy-gurdy-murder tv series.
Hello from socialist Sweden. For generations we have looked to the government to solve a lot of our problems. Can't remember any mental illness epidemic when I was a teen though.
This mode of thinking is very prevalent on the left but it’s actually the opposite on the right, which is instead anti government. So it really isn’t a universal shift.
Danes, Norwegians*, Swedes, and Finns will have the opinions that their governments tell them to have. Pretty much everywhere in the world and at any year of history, the average citizen will say that his government/president/king/warlord/chairman/pope is the best that has ever been. So "popular opinion" doesn't mean much.
Whenever anything bad happens, there's always a cry for "there oughtta be a law against it!" and laws get crafted and passed when emotions are running high. This doesn't make for good laws.
Well, if the Big Government was not so hellbent on helping making billionaires trillionaires at the expense of the working class, maybe the poor could learn to be more self-reliant.
Pretty hard for a lot of people that doesn't make multiple hundreds of thousands dollars an year to not depend on the government, when lax fiscal policies completely devalue their money while inflating the assets and the pockets of the oligarchic class.
Get real, the oligarchs don't want less government, they want less of the big goverment money going for other people than the oligarchs. Not a single one of them want free markets, not one of them wants fiscal discipline, not a single one of them want real free trade.
They nurture crises for years so they can extract more when we cannot ignore the crisis anymore, and emergency measures are required. They have postponed the energy transition, their foundations and their grants helped to demonize nuclear when we desperately needed for it to evolve and expand. Now we are faced with an emergency, and we are pretending that nobody is going to make loads of money out of renewables, and that probably it is going to be the same people who made lots of money from oil. The bills will explode for the common folk, like they are doing in Europe, and in the end, if we escape deindustrialization, they will use the government to extract money from the people again to finally nuclearize our power generation.
So, if we want to talk about big government, let's talk about big government, but let's be honest and admit that big government, big corporate and big finance are basically siamese twins.
fiscal policies in the US have been very far from "lax" -- they have been highly engineered via "quantitative easing" to artificially grow the economy (the debt, really) through massive money-printing and asset inflation programs.
"Lax" policies would have avoided repeated and continuous intervention and let the chips fall where they may.
Now, there are many outlets for both that teen and their parents (and their teachers, and their friends, and their friends' parents) to say or do something in response. There are resources online that virtually anyone can access, phone numbers you can call, authority figures better-trained to recognize these problems. And perhaps most importantly, we got rid of the absurd mentality that what happens in other families is none of our business, no matter how many unexplained bruises or cuts we witness.
Only now that we are openly discussing and grappling with these issues do we have ay hope of turning the tide.