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.
I don't know much about kids from the "Anglosphere" but I do know that preventing kids from making their own experiments and adventures is the craziest approach ever (parents being interrogated by the police for letting their kids walk back from school when they're 10...!!!)
In France my kids walked to school by themselves at age 7, including taking a bus and the metro, and coming back at night in the winter.
I'm currently in Morocco and here one sees scores of very young children running around everywhere, with no adult supervision whatsoever, at all hours. That's how it should be, IMHO.
Not just social media, but always online mentality. Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world and I believe being online always is a major negative.
Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also.
Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.
> Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.
We easily can. With the network effect, we can just encourage everyone we know that socializing with real people in real life is important and set up some coffees, lunches, dinners, walks, board games, etc, and then encourage those people to do the same with the people they know.
Won't take very many hops to reach everyone this way and get back on track.
Sometimes I wonder if people read what they actually write?
What you're saying is you want everyone to disconnect and no longer be part of the network effect we're currently under.... This thinking seems to have a few flaws.
1. You have to remain within the supposed 'bad' network effect to broadcast your message. If you leave and go do your IRL things, you won't be there to broadcast your message (maybe bots doing it for you?).
2. You expect said networks to carry your message. You: "Lets all go outside", X: "Your message has been deleted due to violations of community standards".
3. You assume that being terminally online is not an addiction. That is just saying "Hey, lets go outside" has any effect on the vast majority of people that need to hear the message. Don't think of being on like smoking, it's not something you can just ban because it's part of life now. Think of it like eating, and how poorly that is going for the world at the moment with ever increasing obesity rates.
Sticking with the tech analogy, People can and do switch networks all the time. You also don't have to wait for average user to become an early adopter.
The issue I’ve been seeing in wealthy industrialized countries, is that people are becoming poorer as they grow older, the prices of energy are rising, the prices of land are rising, so simply getting people together is less viable than even 20 odd years ago.
The internet gives you an instant connection to people who have interests specific to you better than even an expensive international convention can do for essentially free. If you decide this is worth it anyways, well you’re going to end up financially behind somebody using the internet in a cheap apartment on undesirable land, and that is going to undermine you bit by bit.
Those who thrive in this era of humanity I think are just going to be well adapted to an online world, or just be wealthy enough that they can afford the luxury of meeting in person. The only way in which I see this trend moving in the opposite direction is that the average amount of people living in each home is likely to rise due to land cost.
>If you decide this is worth it anyways, well you’re going to end up financially behind somebody using the internet in a cheap apartment on undesirable land, and that is going to undermine you bit by bit. Money can't help you when you're dead, so if you don't use it to improve your life or someone else's, it doesn't help at all.
How is the depressed person living in an undesirable place ahead exactly?
In my thought experiment I’m trying to compare somebody who is perfectly happy in this new world spending much time behind screens, and somebody who needs more face to face interaction to be happy. I think the latter are doomed to try and keep up with the former by making personal sacrifices.
I think about this because in my youth the kids who spent all day in front of a computer were treated as disabled, disordered, and aberrant who needed to be pushed to be more social to succeed. Mostly boys were treated in this way. Yet I feel it’s these socially driven people who are fucked. Mostly women.
A lot of people want to spend more time with people irl but just dont know how/dont have access to like minded people irl.
Part of the allure of the internet is that if I want to talk about Mass Effect tabletop roll playing, there are plenty of other people to talk about that with. If I want to have a conversation about the same thing in person... Maybe there is someone in my city who might want to talk about that? But it is so much more work to make that happen than online.
I dont mind talking about sports/local stuff/mass media/small talk all that much but that is most of what I'm going to get from the folks I'm interacting with on a regular basis IRL.
This is like saying we can easily stop the obesity epidemic. The problem is pretty simple conceptually, but it's not going to be solved. The requirements for ignoring social media and practicing true impulse control lay outside of the bell curve of impulse control for much of humanity. People _could_ stop using social media, but they're not going to. Same reason why most people are fat. Yes, I know there are environmental factors, but all those do is squeeze a tighter box around the percentile of people who have the impulse control and resources to eat and exercise properly to maintain a good physique.
Okay, I traveled back in time 30 years and convinced people to recognize the danger of being online all the time. I even made sure there would be innumerable studies suggesting it, and that pretty much everyone was at least aware of the danger. So, now that I'm back in 2024, everybody should already know that being online all the time is not healthy. I haven't checked yet, did it stop them from being addicted? I'm sure it did, right?!
I think this is an issue of "can" in the "technically possible" vs "realistically possible".
There are lots of people who have done exactly what you said, and others that never became terminally online, yet real-world re-adoption has been slow.
I think what you are both missing is that everyone reading this thread can, right now, schedule coffees and lunches and dinners for a month out and text people and get the ball rolling. We should not underestimate the impact of a few people making this effort, it will compound into great and positive results. I will be doing this myself since I recommended it. I expect to have at least five coffees or dinners scheduled for the next week by the end of the day. Let’s do it! Let’s get it done!
I already have a several social dinners and social activities a week, and have been doing this for years. Most of my friends at this point are people who also socialize in real life at this point.
I say this not to by cynical or cop-out. Im actually pretty optimistic about that things will swing back in the opposite direction. I just dont think it will be a quick snap out of it, but a painful lesson for many people, and a lot of people will be left behind.
That is to say, a quick global anti-online revolution is compatible with the laws of physics, but I dont think it is likely.
The good news is that nobody has to wait for the global revolution. They can do whatever they want starting today. I find physical interactions more rewarding and healthy, so I put in the effort to have them. I suspect most people would be happier if they did the same.
I've actually got to wonder if part of it is the disappearance of frontier-type online spaces in favor of corporate real-name social media. Spending "too much" time online used to be a refuge that allowed you to be a completely different person - IRC, forums, etc. I'd say that most people who grew up online 20-30 years ago view the digital world as a welcome escape.
Now that outlet has been replaced by a digital version of the exact same inescapable social matrix from school. Perhaps this theory is less supported by the observed effect being greater on girls (at first glance one would think a frontier would be more important to boys). But on the other hand psuedonymity allowed everyone to have personas not tied to gender, and perhaps girls actually need the escape more.
People don't tolerate information well. When we are young we need our small safety bubbles where we are sufficiently isolated from information so that we can fantasise that we matter. That we amount to something. Social truth that (nearly?) all of us don't is apparently too hard to bear.
And I don't think we can come back from this. That we can go back to ignorance. We need to adapt, the way species always adapted. By letting weaker ones die. And that's exactly what will happen unless by sheer accident some technological miracle pops up to save us from this problem. We won't step back from profitable technologies. We never did.
No, exposing the shit and concentrating on it is not accurate. Building your world view on the part of the world you can personally observe, which has some good and mostly boring normal aspects, is not ignorance. I'd argue that for most people it's in fact more accurate.
So quick to blame social media, even the article just waves it's hand and makes the assumption.
Why not declining social mobility? Why not climate change anxiety? Why not late stage capitalism? Nah, it's always easy to blame Tik Tok as if the chosen release isn't indicative of something much greater going on.
> Here are 13 Other Explanations for the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis.
She finally gets to the deciding modern condition - the one where kids are systemically denied critical growth time (daily blocks of adult-free time & safe places to roam [safe=no threat of police or other compulsive adults]).
And even tho she has this on her list of false suppositions she admits probably isn't as false as she infers.
But she then immediately minimizes this historic erasure of development by saying it's just 'independence' kids have lost. Gaslighting done, she bizarrely accuses devices & social media of causing it, even tho it was obvious by the 1980s that options for free-roaming and adult-free time were well on the way to being eradicated.
Perhaps being so invested in pregurgitated conclusions, she's unable to notice super-obvious competing factors.
The article is about mental health crisis being international. Meanwhile, German, French, Swiss, Japan or Scandinavian kids walk around towns free without adults. They walk to school at age of 6 or even sooner.
If it was just about independence, countries like Germany or France would not had the issue.
Exactly. Everybody just immediately jumps to their pet theory without actually digesting the full set of data that needs to be explained. The article very clearly lays out why those other explanations are less plausible than social media, and the cross-cultural nature of it is a big point.
All that said, the authors who publish on that site are also very pro-unsupervised free play and think its decline has caused mental health issues of its own (see Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind).
People are really bad about interpreting complex multifactor causations, it seems in every discipline.
I think human social systems have a lot of 'anti-fragile' built into them. That is any one factor, unless it is insanely serious, isn't going to cause a mass collapse of society. We adapt and smooth things over. This is something we see in ecological systems all the time. The problems start cropping up when multiple stressors are introduced to the environment. For example, I'd say the disappearance of 'third places' forces more youth to social media thereby increasing said harm of social media.
Also, social media likely needs broken into a series of different factors on what is harmful about it. You have the direct "Kids going things to kids", but neglecting what social media is doing to their parents would be missing the forest for the trees. The 24 hour news cycle tapped into the fear sells, and online has taken it to 'fear gets eyeballs'. Add in advertisers being unscrupulous, and countless bots attempting to manipulate you, it's no wonder we're not all insane.
What is social media if not an aspect of late stage capitalism? Unlike a normal customer <-> business relationship social media companies don't give the slightest shit about your well-being or satisfaction. Indeed, you're not the customer at all.
Even if it were one of those things; nothing has changed since 2010 to make them worse. The current negative economic trends set in around 1970, "social mobility" isn't a thing most people ever have access to.
I've never been able to figure out what the problem is with climate change was so I dunno; maybe that is fair. But nothing new seems to have happened in the last decade that wasn't also happening in the 2000s.
I think awareness of microplastics, etc. kind of undermines this theory. In the 60s we were spraying all kinds of crazy crap - CFCs, DDT - into the environment and plastic was already pretty widely used, while recycling was nowhere in sight. 5-6 decades of additional plastic accumulation is not nothing, but people are much more aware - hence the return of metal water bottles, for example. Many pesticides/herbicides have also either been banned outright or are much harder to get since then.
Plus microplastics likely accumulate over your lifetime - a mental health issue caused by microplastics would show up much more quickly in the elderly of middle aged than in teens.
I was worried when I was a kid, now I'm much less worried. Plenty of other things to worry about, and there's still a non-zero risk, but I think there's enough money to be made fixing that particular issue that we'll probably be OK.
I think the sort of people who push "climate change anxiety" and espouse theories about "late stage capitalism" are a huge, huge part of the problem. Near every communist I've met was miserable.
It's easier to refer to the true and highly studied issue here, depressive realism. "Leftists" have more accurate knowledge of the world and that leads to depression. Ignorance is bliss. That's not even mentioning the fact that the right belittles mental health and those who seek help.
Being always online wasn’t quite so shitty til the last 10-15 years. Many people did it and were just fine for a long time. To me this feels like blaming food poisoning on the fact you have to eat food. Maybe the food is just bad.
the current state of online is the food. it just really sucks.
If you look at the people who did it early, they're very different in personality than the people who are now doing it. I was the kid who would have preferred to sit in the library all day reading. Not that they let me. For me, I've been plugged into the absolutely largest library mankind has ever been built, since 1994 or so... and I still find myself amazed at what can be found online even now. Some of it are recently digitized works that because they were obscure, I could never have known they existed. Other things are discoveries (even amateur ones) that people post online today that would have been forgotten or unknown in the 1980s (unlikely for the people to have even put it in one of those crappy xeroxed newsletters).
I check out Facebook once or twice a month because my wife tells me to like something on it. I didn't even create the account, she did it for me years ago.
Even now, I read. And read. And read. Everything from rigorous scientific studies on down to the weirdest shitposting. From great works of literature down to fringe science theories. But all I see other people doing, if I notice at all, is watching Tiktok videos. Are any of the rest of you out there reluctant to bother with consuming video/audio content, even if a search seems to indicate that it might be the only place the information you seek might be found? Well, then you might be one of those personalities for which being online wasn't/isn't so shitty.
10-15 years ago roughly aligns with the popularization of smartphones. Before that, almost nobody was going around all day with the internet in their pocket so the experience of "always" online was very different.
In the past we could stay online for long hours doing some few activities (chatting, playing games, browsing few sites).
These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.
>These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.
reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perpetuating?
Like, if I wanted to develop a mobile-phone habit would it be best for me to get interested in social media, and vice versa?
Maybe my ducking of these trends just stems from my aversion to social media all together, and that saved me from mobile-phone overuse?
I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
p.s. to be clear, i'm not gloating -- if anything it's kind of loneliness inducing that I can't relate to the struggle.. but it's kind of a bittersweet feeling like being one of the few who doesn't catch a plague and has to watch others suffer.
> I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.
I feel the same way. HN is as close as I get to social media, I don't even look at reddit.
I think it is a "good thing" people use your "royal we" term in that at least people see phone addiction as a problem. It is usually always couched in the tone of "the problem is too far gone" which isn't a good thing.
I wonder what it would be like if an entire country picked one hour during one day, and everyone just somehow disabled data on their phones, calls only, with the idea being that you only make calls that are required, not to stymie boredom.
I don't think it's a plague, but more like a bunch of attractors now that ~everyone has expectation that everyone else is "always online". I'd say I'm in a similar position as you with regards to not opting into most of it, yet I still feel the social pressure of being drawn into crap like group texts. People, who a decade or two ago wouldn't call you back for days, now pile on within the hour with walls of emote-laden content-free well-wishes. If I were 10 years younger I'd probably have declared bankruptcy already and written an LLM autoresponse bot.
The other half of the mobile 1-2 punch is that the UX is terrible, due to both the limited form factor and the hostile software. People are social animals so most just suffer through it for the connection, and not knowing that the experience can be so much better on a real computer. Using software that functions across devices, I do feel the same attractors on a fully fledged desktop. But it's much less concentrated as I can read the entire context without scrolling, type out a response at a comfortable speed, and then switch away from that window until I poll it again. Whereas even with a phone running mostly libre software it feels like being sucked into a tap-tap-tap morass that I'm only using because I have to.
I don't use social media, but I have Whatsapp groups for organizing, and its useful if I want to read something I don't have immediately on hand on the go, or if I want to take a picture, or take a call, or check the map if I want to go somewhere or if I get lost. I can look up recipes or set timers while cooking, use it as an alarm clock, stopwatch. Plus the one, billion, quadrillion apps; though, they were a lot cooler back when smartphones first came out, and, as I said, I usually don't use any apps besides email and the browser and maybe also a music streaming app.
I think those are the main things I use my phone for, and getting rid of it would be very inconvenient at this point, especially since I have an iPhone anyway so I can shut off all push notifications and all tracking software and what have you. It's not 100% secure, but what can you do. Though, to be honest, I think this will be my last smartphone, I won't get another one after it breaks. I was in my local library the other day, just checking it out, and there happened to be a travel guide for a city I'm visiting soon. My god, that thing was way better than any info I've found online, and it was quite pleasant to sit down and read a book for a few hours, instead of frantically browsing through one million websites to find out what was cool, interesting, and legit, and what was a tourist trap. Its a shithole, the internet, its just a means for large-scale fraud, theft, and surveillance. But there are still a few good things left, and that redeems it somewhat.
15 years ago, we would somewhat choose whom to be “always online with”. It was more of a selected in-group of people, having similar interests and ideas. Right now, it just feels like “everyone screaming into the void” as “every app is for everyone”. It feels much different for some reason. Or maybe I’m just getting older and not a teen anymore.
I agree this might be the distinction. Communities are too permeable. The constant conflict we're seeing now reminds me a lot of e.g. harry potter fandom ship raids, except at a broad scale and for everything. We're not hissing about how people who want Harry and Hermione to fuck are dirty traitors to Ron and Hermione, we're trying to get someone's source of healthcare (employment) to kick them off for whatever they said about Ukraine/Russia.
Before cell phones there were beepers. and people could always reach you on a landline. or leave a message on the machine. payphones. people weren’t really that much farther than they are now, it just required a little more coordination.
and cell phones have been around a lot longer than 10 years when this really picked up steam. even if you filter this statement to exclude everything but smart phones - smart, internet connected phones were around well before ~2012 when we saw a sharp spike begin in this trend, and that’s really the dawn of dominance of the YT/FB/IG/etc era.
I would be surprised if the parent you’re responding to is even remotely discussing phone calls or answering machine messages, but rather the depth of what smartphones enable distraction-wise nowadays. Cell phones existed before but you weren’t browsing the entire web on them. ;P
A beeper isn’t even in the same league and it’s really not a point here.
What percentage of the population do you think had them? What percentage of school children?
Nerds doing nerd stuff aren't going to affect the zeitgeist much, it's the network effect of having essentially 100% of your peers spending much of their time on social media.
Not that I am blaming porn. I am not. But once the screens and bandwidth became large enough, UI's easy enough to navigate etc AND the devices themselves became quite commonplace, the always online mentality became one used much less for essential communication and business and transitioned more to a cultural way of life (porn is just an easy and funny way to drive that point home).
Doom scrolling wasnt really as much of a thing until Android and iOS matured enough and gained enough acceptance that it was no longer a status symbol. Heck i cant even tell you most of the social media apps these days, much less dating, but having some conversations with my younger cousins over break, there really arent many ways to meet folks outside of some of these apps (at least to them), which is sad. Apparently something as simple as "why not just join some type of IRL hobby and meet people that way" was scoffed at.
Doom scrolling is an intentional social media "feature". Before infinite scrolling, algorithmic feeds doom scrolling required some effort on the users part. Now you can just keep flicking your thumb up and keep getting more shit.
> algorithmically generated feeds based on engagement
This is one thing that really gets me.
Your feed is based on engagement. It doesn't have to be GOOD engagement, just engagement.
So when you angrily reply to a tweet you hate, that's engagement. You will be shown more content that makes you angry.
Most of the things people complain about in terms of what Twitter shows them, I don't experience. I don't follow people I hate, and if someone quote-tweets, I avoid replying. Definitely don't click the original tweet to see what other people have said.
It was. And I agree that plays a part. But Desktops are, by nature, much less accessible. Even a laptop is.
You didnt have people nearly as commonly doomscrolling on the subway on the way to work, or in the car, or in the living room around family, when the computer was restricted to a specific space/time etc.
agreed, chronological feeds have a visible signal to users telling them how far they've scrolled. If you're seeing posts from Feb of the past year, you've been scrolling too long.
Ad-based social apps (all of them) replaced that with algorithmic, so you have no real signifier of how long you've spent scrolling.
Tiktok takes this one step further by stripping the date from the videos.
Nobody except a very small minority of techno-nerds (and most of those not teenagers) was alawys online until about 15 years ago, the advent of the smartphone. It took easily another 5 years before a significant amount of teenagers had them, especially outside the richest countries.
But of course it's not the technical capability that's the problem, it's the always-online culture, the network effects, the constant doomscrolling through algorithm-optimized feeds, the instant notification when someone replies to your kneejerk vitrolic comment with even more vitrol.
And then again, that culture was not possible without the technical capabilities and widespread adoption of them. Nobody was motivated to build a site or app optimized for doomscrolling until there were enough eyeballs and advertising dollars to capture.
Then why does this trend disproportionately affect girls? There is nothing particular special about “onlineness” that should affect them particularly worse than boys, but plenty of very real evidence that shows social media sites like IG are very harmful to girls (and meta knows it).
There are plenty of millennials that have been terminally online since at least their early teens and weren’t showing this same trend. I’m saying there’s nothing inherent about “online-ness” that should warrant mass levels of depression like this.
I don't know about other social media, but IG combines a culture of posting visual content with heavy use of face/body filters. If you're already feeling self-conscious about your body, this is a recipe for body image issues and self-hate. Girls were facing the same issue from advertising and the fashion industry in the pre-internet era, but now it's beamed directly to everyone's phone.
There are well-founded stereotypes regarding women's need for gossip. Men compete in other ways. It's women who are most addicted to social media, instagram, etc.
> There is nothing particular special about “onlineness” that should affect them particularly worse than boys
Females are on average far more social than males. If there's a dose-response effect social media time and mental health, then we should plausibly expect girls to be affected more.
Why do you assert that onlineness doesn't affect women disproportionately?
Women face all sorts of abuse and minimization online. I've heard of many women using male sounding names online in order to be taken seriously or avoid harassment. The general advice on subreddits dominated by women is to turn off personaal messaging to avoid the inevitable rape threats.
Take a look on Instagram and take a look at some musicians that are men and some that are women. The level of hatred directed towards women and the extra barriers they face will be very clear.
You also have subreddits that glorify misogyny like WomenAreThings or MisogynyKink. You have others where guys steal pictures from girls' social medias and redistribute them with captions about rape fantasy or where they use AI to force their victims into sexual media.
You look on YouTube and the algorithm wants to push misogynistic content aimed at disillusioned young boys and more and more of them are tuning in and blaming women for all their problems, asserting that feminism was a mistake.
If you're on Instagram compare how many women have their profiles set to private than men. This is to avoid the constant harassment they'd otherwise face.
I'm seeing more research every year that suggests women are actively self-censoring, silencing themselves or pretending to be men when online.
Here's a few interesting bits of further reading. I've been told off in the past for sharing these things here because women's rights are politics and therefore against the guidelines of the site but I hope it's relevant enough to the discussion here:
While all of that is true, nobody hates women like other women. Men are just way more conspicuous and aggressive about it. Women conceal their abuse through rhetoric and political games.
On what basis are you making these assertions? I'm not sure what you mean by "rhetoric and political games" but it's the conspicuous agressive kind of hatred that would lead to women being disproptionately affected in a negative way, I would think.
I didn't actually say anything about men being the problem. Hatred against women hurts women was my whole point. I hope you can appreciate the irony in your comment: I pointed out some of the ways that women might struggle online, even linked to a variety of articles about it, and you felt the need to jump in and baselessly assert that women are the worst offenders.
I'm trying to comprehend the point of your comment, particularly how it relates to the article you linked. If nobody hates women but women, but we're all women online... where does that leave us?
I feel like there must be some generation coming that feels like being highly online is weird and embarassing, having grown up and seen the way their parents and other adults behave, and use the internet more as a utility rather than a place to try to primarily live. What makes this hard I think is how addictive it is for children, so by the time they might realize how embarassing it is they have already been addicted by devices their parents gave them.
What makes it hard is the stigmatization of letting children roam free unsupervised, and the isolating nature of suburbs coupled with both parents being working parents.
Kids can’t go anywhere and are stuck at home. None of their friends are within walking distance. What do you expect them to do?
No, I would say this is a totally different issue actually.
It doesn't matter where kids go these days because every single one of them has an internet connected cell phone at their side.
When they are with their friends, they are still with the internet. Their actions are moulded by it, as well they should be. If anything you do could be captured in video and posted online forever, you're going to change your behavior to reflect that reality.
Looking at my nephews, it’s highly unlikely to happen. From what they’ve told me, if you’re not online and at least aware of the “latest trends”, you become an outcast in school. Their way of trying to be less cringe and protesting is just being on “less mainstream apps”. Which yields the same results but with different colors. Not having any social media is also pretty awful as you’ll just be an outsider again. I wish there was some sort of a national effort where parents would unite and not let their children be on social media.
Maybe it will just be a counterculture thing but I could imagine a group of people thinking it’s really lame to follow all the latest internet trends. We need a version of punk rock that hates the internet.
My theory is it is effect of ever faster economic growth across the world. Now it has given great many benefits to great many people. Negative effects so far discussed are only in term of destruction of ecology, depletion of natural resources, pollution etc.
To me this growth has created a sense of anxiety in all teens and older. Now the societal structures, jobs, careers, education, medicine etc do not change over multiple generations but multiple times in single generation. This relentlessness has affected me for last 20 years and still does despite all success at surface level.
Is it about the growth itself though? Or rather the growth as seen through social media? You can't be sad about being left behind if you don't know you are being left behind or at least of you are not pestered daily about it by the algorithm that needs to trigger you into engagement.
Hard disagree. Economic growth is what raises people's standard of living. We're not going to eliminate poverty without continued growth. That doesn't mean it doesn't also cause problems, but those problems are solvable.
But we know that in the medium term, growth is limited to cubic; and in the long term to quadratic. Building a society that depends on a few centuries or millenia of exponential growth is designing for failure when that asymptote is reached, and all the assumptions about future growth are violated.
You're talking about centuries from now, when technology and culture could be very different. We might spread out through the solar system. It's not something to worry about now.
If it's growing at a constant percentage per year, it's growing exponentially, so it must be getting faster in absolute terms, since 2% of today's economy is much more than 2% of 1950s economy.
My theory is that this is by design. Unhappy people buy things to make them feel happy - this is beneficial to corporations and governments. The answers are within, but the won't be found in this or that product, government, teachers, careers, mental health workers, etc.
This resonates with what I've observed: I've asked several close family members and friends (between 16-22) what's troubling them and the most common answer is that they feel they're behind in life. They feel that they must already be driving an exotic car, surrounded by tons of potential partners, and at the top of their game—I assume these expectations are set by the content they consume and interact with on a daily basis.
> They feel that they must already be driving an exotic car, surrounded by tons of potential partners
Really? I'm way older than that, but have a fair bit of contact with people that age via my kids and music/theatre stuff I'm involved in, and I don't know anyone who feels like this
Even without raised expectations, people have got to be disappointed that they can't get the same things as the previous generation. Hell they can't even get basic things at a reasonable price.
I'm out of touch with the reality of teenagers, but it feels like they're expected to fight harder and harder for less and less.
Someone else also talked about how everything became dominated by metrics and competition. It has got to become alienating to chase hard, abstract goals with rewards that never seem to come.
Perhaps social media is just throwing oil on top of that fire.
"but it feels like they're expected to fight harder and harder for less and less."
And they also should feel ashamed for what they get and consume, as it has a CO2 impact and their future is doomed if they use too much. But in my experience, climate change is a minor factor, compared to the always comparing yourself not to your local group anymore, but the whole world.
> And they also should feel ashamed for what they get and consume, as it has a CO2 impact and their future is doomed if they use too much.
I loathe how this has turned into an easy way to dismiss any product you don't like, a thought-terminating cliche, because hey, you're not going to argue that your iphone is more important than the planet, right? What a jerk!
I have seriously had probably a dozen discussions where people insisted that wireless charging was bad because the extra 2.5w of power for 2 hours a day was contributing to global warming. And of course sending the delivery truck out a couple times a year with extra cables doesn't count - not that deliveries aren't efficient, but even a single extra delivery certainly uses more than the 1 kWH a year that wireless charging "wastes", plus the cables themselves, etc.
There isn't such a thing as a product that's not meant for you personally anymore, or a product that is built on the assumption of a different use-case/lifecycle from the one you wanted, or a product that's just bad. It's actually bad because you're a monster who's burning down the rainforests personally. And meanwhile all the things I like are pure unalloyed social-positives.
That's been the whole android/iphone lifecycle discussion for years now. Every single product anyone dislikes is now instantly labeled a "waste of sand" or whatever, because if you don't personally want to buy an RX 6400 it should actually be outlawed by the EU because it's bad for society and bad for the planet. It pretty much is godwin's law for tech discussions at this point.
As the old joke goes - "guy who never goes anywhere with nothing in his apartment except xbox and a mattress on the floor has the lowest carbon footprint but y'all ain't ready for that discussion". The efficiency difference between gaming for 8 hours a day on ampere and rdna2 for the rest of your life is utterly annihilated by taking a single vacation once in your life. And if you point that out people go into this dumb "well that's bad too!" mode, like everyone should just stare at a blank wall all day just because some other guy doesn't like apple products or whatever.
Being charitable I'm sure tons of people just have an extremely bad intuitive yardstick for what actually matters, but it's also kinda just turned into a way to shut down the discussion while virtue-signaling, and again, it always turns into this "all consumption is bad, actually" as if it's possible to exist in a capitalist society without consumption.
"Being charitable I'm sure tons of people just have an extremely bad intuitive yardstick for what actually matters"
People on average just have very bad physic knowledge. No understanding of basic science at all. I actually think that we cannot solve climate change without fixing those knowledge holes - otherwise we just get more pointless activism (like the ones you mention) and ignorance.
Yeah. And again, in fairness, I suppose it's counterintuitive how much energy is stored by a gallon of fuel, unless you have already been surprised by it in the past :) But even comparing to batteries, you have to stationary-bicycle for a long time to make the energy to charge even a single 18650. Hydrocarbon fuels are the rocketship that fueled the 20th century's insane industrialization (on top of their use as fertilizers, feedstock, etc) and things would look very different if we were still cranking the washing machine by hand, so to speak.
But I also agree with your point on the importance of "napkin math", understanding the relative order-of-magnitude of effects and being able to do some rough estimates on the spot, etc. I had some teachers who were big on doing this and I hear it's a fairly frequent interview question as well (often in the form of things like "how many ping-pong balls can you fit into a sedan").
Whole-systems thinking is another tough one, and unfortunately it's full of confounding effects that make this extremely difficult. Improving efficiency in one area but requiring a supply of physically-delivered goods is often not really a win in total. Another place this came up recently was discussion about the UA Flight 232 was that the FAA knows that having kids riding on lap in airplanes isn't ideal, but they allow it because the alternative (making people pay for a seat for children) would increase the number of car trips, which likely substantially increases the total death toll etc due to higher risk-per-mile.
Gotta be careful about "pushing the problem around", and that's an engineering lesson too. Making the application 10x faster but blowing up the DB is much worse - we can scale out to more containers if we need, but scaling the DB is hard. So even a "higher-efficiency system" (serialize JSON in C vs in java) might perform worse once it hits the wall. You haven't solved the problem, you've just pushed it around, and this is a worse place for a problem.
I think social media and technology in general ism while important, to some extent a second order effect response to a breakdown in community This is measured in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone as occurring after 1965-ish[1] through a variety of measures, or for example more recently measuring where couples meet in the US, [2] which were declining well before the 2010s.
The Middletown studies of the 1920s for example noticing decreased community activities such as church attendance pointed the finger at new passive and individual leisure activities such as radio.
While there's a variety of factors Robert Putnam points towards, I think income inequality and it's effect on well-being is the most under appreciated measure. Putman's measures roughly line up with Peter Turchin's[2] Inequality and Well being measures - the 1965 Great society program coincides with a measured high water mark of well being. You can also point to a lot of the measures on the WTF happened in 1971 website as being roughly equivalent.
When people have more money and time for leisure activities, they are more able to engage with their communities and form healthy social bonds. The more time people spend frustrated, screwed over and left behind, the less time and they have for social engagement and other activities like parenting.
Housing costs have increased, daycare is shooting through the roof, and everyone seems to be working harder to scrape by, at least in the US.
Daycare in particular is quite painful; there are high standards, but government subsidy is so low that simultaneously parents cannot afford it and programs cannot afford to staff adequately.
The unspoken truth is daycare is highly regulated and that regulation compliance is much of the contributing factor. Either compensate constituents for the externalities of your protective legislation or go back to letting any jill turn her house into a an unlicensed daycare center which is the dirty truth of how people got by for an affordable price before.
The scientific name for this is “baumols cost disease”, namely the proposition that as productivity increases over time, the only things that will stay expensive (and even become relatively more expensive) are the things that consist primarily of labor and can’t be automated away. And childcare is the textbook example of that.
As you mention, regulations say you can’t have more than 6 children per caretaker, and tbh that’s probably not too far off the practical maximum either. Once they’re in school you can increase the ratio (a bit, ideally not to 30 either) but having a dozen infants or toddlers per caretaker means they’re getting neglected.
That’s the bind - it’s not even that it’s regulations, it’s that one person can’t keep track of a dozen mini-humans with no programming burned in yet. If you want child-rearing in a society there has to be a fairly significant fraction of the labor devoted to that, regardless of whether it’s a stay-at-home partner or grandma or a daycare center.
In turn, unless they’re slaves or massively underpaid (au pairs lol), that person needs to eat and pay for their kids’ care too. So, naively, you would expect the cost to trend towards roughly 1/6th of a typical household income (2.5 kids for 2 partners etc). Right on target.
That's certainly part of it. In my state ratio change by 3x from infant to 5 yet tuition only changes about 30% despite similar employee pay across ages.
It's quite consistent, and the explanation is largely regulatory and compliance overhead (especially required liability insurance).
Daycare in SoCal for 3 kids is > 2x our mortgage. And this is a very, very average-price school. I love the school, and they're doing their best, but the economics of daycare (for parents, teachers, and the school administration) in the US are completely broken right now.
Our society is teaching us to seek money, power, intelligence, beauty, bodily satisfaction, all of which will never satisfy us.
“If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
― David Foster Wallace,
Generally I think this is what the advertising world relies on to push consumerism on the public - just buy this product to make yourself more attractive, to get money and power and respect, and if your life is miserable, here is some junk food and alcohol for a brief mood alteration, although it will damage your health, but that's okay, since health care is a profit center and without sick people to feed into it, well, profits would fall. Round and round it goes, generating sick depressed people who fill their homes with useless junk ordered on Amazon.
Breaking out of this mindless consumer cycle is among the best things one can do for one's mental (and physical) health - even if it may 'hurt the economy'.
True. I'm not religious but when people stop worshipping the invisible sky daddy they turn to worshipping OnlyFans models, Amouranth-style twitch streamers and toxic masculinity gurus like Andrew Tate.
People were already struggling before any of those people became popular.
The population always did this through the ages.
Social media came and came in fast. Today's society is still figuring out it's effects on people and what they can do about it.
Andrew Tate has been preaching the young folks to work hard, which in fact, is something they need to hear because they are extremely lazy (I agree from personal experience in dealing with young men).
Onlyfans, on the otherhand, is probably one of the most dangerous things on social media right now, since it's glorifying and promoting e-prostitution while hiding in the lie of it not being so.
If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls?
Many of the reactions I've seen over the years to these authors' work focuses on some particular frustrations or complaints about American society, the economy, our culture, and so on. The problem with these theories is that none of that stuff abruptly changed in the 2010s, and even then there's no particular reason that a 13-year old girl would be so much more negatively impacted by changes that did occur than anyone else.
Haidt's theory focuses a lot on technological change like smartphones and social media (though it has some other components). Ten years ago this seemed believable because it appeared at that time that teen girls were more interested in these technologies than boys. However, the under-30 mental health problem is ongoing (and may even be accelerating), and yet it's much less clear now that there is any gender difference in technology uptake.
I haven't seen a satisfying explanation from Haidt about the more recent data, and have come to believe that there is no adequate explanation right now.
Social media created a perpetual church gossip culture where every action and statement is endlessly evaluated by the peanut gallery, while also creating a land rush for finding new moral angles to exploit for social status. Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular.
Why specifically social media? It's a function of communication efficiency. It's why church is associated with this sort of cattiness, everyone knows everyone and is brought together regularly to provide a venue to trade gossip. It also supplies the moral standard by which everyone is evaluated and one's social status is tied to how well one appears to meet this standard. The cattiness is just status games playing out given these constraints.
Why 2010? It's when the "always online" culture went from niche nerd to ubiquitous.
> Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular.
Why naturally? Can you describe this without leaning on a vague and misogynist adjective. There might be something here but as stated it's no more nuanced and has no more explanatory power than "women are like that."
Women are more social, i.e. more agreeable[1], more people-oriented[2], and so on. As such, they will be more susceptible to status anxiety derived from their place in the social hierarchy. Men's social status is more about who you are, what you do, or what you have, and so social hierarchy is less relevant. Social media has massively scaled up the complexity and the stakes of managing one's place in the social hierarchy. Women feel this more acutely than men. Teens even moreso because they are actively negotiating their place in the hierarchy and are less likely to have a rigid social network to fall back on and feel secure in.
The fact you even had to explain this is surprising to me. We don't need papers to tell us this stuff, this is something one can learn by basic common sense observation of the world. Why are people so keen on pretending like there aren't very basic psychological differences between the sexes?
It's one thing to notice differences, it's completely another to attribute specific phenomena to them based on these lay observations. I mean, in recent memory, the "basic common sense" consensus was that women were not capable of owning property or voting because of these observed differences.
And I mean do I even need to point out that "cattiness" is not exactly a well-attested psychological axis in use by reputable professionals? This is simple straightforward misogyny. They adequately laundered it through a thesaurus to HN standards when pressed but the underlying attitude is just crusty old sexism.
By your lights, its literally impossible to refer to behaviors that are gender biased without being sexist. It turns out that stereotypes typically have a ring of truth to them. It is absurd to make any mention of them verboten in some misplaced effort to excise sexism from the discourse. We cant improve things if we can't accurately describe them. It's also stupid to insist on unnecessarily verbose descriptions just to avoid charges of sexism, which still wasn't enough for you. Efficient communication is a virtue.
> Naturally, this catty culture will affect females more and teen girls in particular.
How does it follow that this "naturally" affects teen girls more than other demographics?
This strikes me as at best hand-wavey. If you suspect some underlying cause of this, please state it explicitly rather than implying a tautological "teen girls are just like this."
> If you want to posit an explanation for this phenomenon, you have to be able to explain two things: what changed abruptly in the early/mid 2010s?, and why did it uniquely affect teen girls?
And that it's cross-cultural, so three things.
> and yet it's much less clear now that there is any gender difference in technology uptake.
There are definitely well known differences in how the tech is used by the different sexes. Females are typically far more social than males.
>and even then there's no particular reason that a 13-year old girl would be so much more negatively impacted by changes that did occur than anyone else.
It would be a comparable reason (maybe even the exact same particular reason) to the reason that teen girls were uniquely impacted by earlier mass media to develop body image issues (and boy-band fandoms..). I think this is the (maybe implied) gender difference that a lot of people are seeing that you're missing.
Also, if the proposed explanation is exposure + susceptibility, with a gender difference in susceptibility, then your counterarguments that there's no gender difference in exposure doesn't really work.
Few deny that a drinking age is necessary. We also need a smart phone age. It's quite obvious that many teens are addicted to their phones and the mostly useless content they consume there.
Except with drinking, there's at least many adults that can effectively consider the risks of drinking. With smartphone usage, I'd argue that adults are just as bad, if not worse, in judging their own usage.
I fail to see how this is anything but blaming the youth (or, modern speech "ageism").
I interviewed a lawmaker from Utah on a panel last year, and I specifically asked about their new law and how they plan to enforce it without requiring ID from everyone: https://socialmedia.utah.gov/
That's only because teetotalers never really went away. Even after the repeal of Prohibition, they still existed and eventually morphed into MADD. In Europe drinking ages are pretty relaxed. France was serving wine to school children.
So yeh, I deny it. And that I'm alone in doing it has more to do with ovine tendencies of humanity, than anyone actually giving it much actual thought.
Alternatively, we could get better at killing off businesses that capitalize on bad dopamine hygiene. Being over the likely smartphone age doesn't give me superpowers.
I'm very curious what will happen to the drinking age in the US if full self driving cars ever come to be. The justification for adults age 18-20 being denied the ability to drink alcohol was the outsized frequency with which drivers in that age group ended up in wrecks while intoxicated. If they're no longer driving, that restriction on their liberty is more difficult to justify.
When I grew up in Germany you were allowed to drink beer and wine at 16. It's hard to drink yourself into the hospital with those and you are still living with your parents. It provided a safe environment to experiment and learn how to deal with alcohol. At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks. However, you weren't as excited about the novelty of liquor. It's the only policy are I feel Germany has nailed better than anyone else I'm aware of
Hard to drink yourself into the hospital with wine? I know Europeans drink a ton but remarks like this really drive home the point. One bottle of wine is easy to drink and enough to get me vomiting. Two wouldn't be hard and is definitely in alcohol poisoning territory for people who aren't experienced alcoholics.
Anyway, I don't think America should emulate European drinking laws until it can be shown that Europeans drink less than Americans. The average German drinks 13.4 liters of pure alcohol a year, vs 9.8 liters for Americans (still too high): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...
If you’re not a veteran wine drinker, which few adolescents are, then it takes real effort and dedication to get crazy drunk on wine. If you pass out it’s because you wanted to pass out.
With distilled spirits, and especially cocktails, it’s not at all hard to get dangerously drunk without intending to, so it’s a lot riskier.
Huh? If you're a novice to wine it's much easier to drink way too much. It tastes like juice and you can drink way too much too fast. At least liquor tastes like gasoline to warn novices off. Of liquor, beer and wine, wine is easily the most dangerous for novice drinkers.
You need to drink a lot of wine for it to get dangerous. A novice drinker on his first glass of alcohol is not going to slam them back unless they’re already determined to get violently drunk (e.g. crazier than most).
> It's the only policy are I feel Germany has nailed better than anyone else I'm aware of
I'm not super familiar, but my impression is Germany also handled early 90s-ish hackers better than the US did. Just comparing the CCC in Germany to stuff like Operation Sundevil.
"At 18 you were able to get a driver's license and start drinking stronger drinks"
You must have lived in a different german reality then.
For us it was always easy to get someone else to buy your booze, if it was not already given to you somehow by the older guys. Or if you looked slightly older(I was NEVER asked for ID while buying drinks). Many people in my age group developed a drinking habit - and big surprise, quite some of them turned into alcoholics later. Also no surprise, with so many adult role models being drinkers as well.
The general principle of gradually allowing more, might help a tiny little bit preventing early access for some people, but it absolutely did not help prevent alcohol abuse. There is just a general culture of alcohol abuse (Oktoberfest and co). So yeah, we had also fun, but I strongly reject the idea, that alcohol could help preventing smartphone addicts or is somehow better. Rather the contrary as teens still drink today and can just get addicted to both.
I learned to drink in Germany as a 16 year old exchange student and then came back to US and experienced drinking culture here.
You are absolutely correct that German teens have much easier access to hard liquor the American terns. I presume this is some combination of the culture and enforcement realities in Germany compared to the US.
However, I would also (anecdotally) say that the teen culture in Germany around drinking is healthier and less prone to binging than in America. That doesn't mean there aren't problems, but they seemed less frequent and more muted.
My personal hypothesis is that this is because that 16 year limit and the difference in culture meant that teens ate far more likely to drink with and around their family. This facilitates intergenerational knowledge transfer about responsible alcohol usage and reduces risks.
"However, I would also (anecdotally) say that the teen culture in Germany around drinking is healthier and less prone to binging than in America."
There are huge local differences. In my youth and hometown, it was definitely binge drinking - and we just followed tradition. But what I learned of other areas, was actually quite similar. Healthy alcohol consumption was rather the exception, but there is a trend towards it.
And I have not been to the US to directly compare, but I cannot really say that I experienced "intergenerational knowledge transfer about responsible alcohol usage" in germany. That is, my father does not drink, because my grandfather drank too much. Does this count? Otherwise I just know too many families with at least one alcoholic and some on the way.
And teenage drinking is just something teens are expected to do and the parents just try to limit the extremes. But many would be actually worried if their children never drank, because it might mean, they are isolated oddballs.
In addition to local differences (I was in very northern Germany) I'm sure my perceptions were colored by being at a Gymnasium, but I did also interact with kids from other schools.
I'm not saying that alcoholism isn't an issue in Germany. However the data I've found says alcoholism is about twice as prevelant in the USA as in Germany. Healthiness of drinking behavior isn't all all or nothing thing but a spectrum.
Having a sober father may have meant that you missed out on more direct knowledge transfere from your parents. You still would have had some of that knowledge transfere indirectly via your peers
In the USA, due to the laws, underage drinking, especially in highschool, tends to be much more segregated in terms of age. Each generation of teenages has to learn how to drink while hiding it from their parents. In my experience this means that teenage drinkers in germany tend to be more aware of their level of inebriation and thus tend to not binge as hard. There is more of an expectation socially to keep your shit together while in the USA there's more of a tendency to celebrate and brag about losing control, especially among the young for whom it is more novel. It's also possible (indeed likely) that many of the Germans kids I knew started drinking before 16 and that accounts for some of the differences I observed.
"I'm sure my perceptions were colored by being at a Gymnasium, but I did also interact with kids from other schools."
I was at a gymnasium as well ... and we were drinking with the teachers on occasions.
"However the data I've found says alcoholism is about twice as prevelant in the USA as in Germany. Healthiness of drinking behavior isn't all all or nothing thing but a spectrum."
It is of course possible, that you have it even worse. But my point was that I cannot confirm, that we have a healthy drinking culture in germany. We do have a drinking culture and some of it may prevent some escapades, but all in all I do not think it is healthy as indeeds promotes regular drinking as something normal.
"It's also possible (indeed likely) that many of the Germans kids I knew started drinking before 16 and that accounts for some of the differences I observed."
Very likely. We started with beer with 12 ... and the first time totally drunk was with 14.
"tendency to celebrate and brag about losing control, especially among the young for whom it is more novel"
And this was (and still is) totally a thing as well.
Lol, I wasn't suggesting that drinking alcohol is good. I was merely saying that allowing a gradual on-ramp when kids still are living with their parents is less bad. Compare the German situation to the opposite extreme of the US where you aren't allowed to drink anything till you are 21 and living with other people your age. You could hardly design a worse approach of you tried.
It also means they get arrested and the older brother who bought the case of beer could face jail time. Stupid laws that have harmed far more people than they’ve helped.
It it's a choice between drinking with friends outside or playing on your phone alone at home, it might be that the first option is better for most people's mental health even if alcohol, in isolation, is bad for it.
Depressant doesn't mean it makes you depressed. Alcohol is as old as civilization and absolutely will improve mental health if not over consumed. It's called having fun and enjoying your limited time here.
I’m in my mid-40s and am not an alcoholic. But I am quite shy. A drink or two in a social setting can absolutely help me open up and engage with others and enjoy myself. And having good social interactions improves my mental health.
Of course trying to drink away your depression doesn’t work, but alcohol can be a tool in a mentally healthy lifestyle.
Previous generations had the same problem with television. We also have this problem with video games, gambling, junk food, pornography, etc. Behavioral addictions are usually a coping mechanism for underlying problems. I don't think we should have the state banning all of these things. It's the responsibility of individuals to engage in self-reflection, moderate their own behavior, and if they're under a certain age, for the parents to set boundaries and teach them healthy habits.
Eh, so there are a number of oddities with your statements here that don't reflect the reality of what actually happened.
> I don't think we should have the state banning all of these things.
The issue here on your part is one of understanding hard power versus soft power. Looking at TV from a holistic perspective, the state has banned a lot of what we'd consider harmful behavior. Over the air programming is relatively tame, and content we consider harmful is more gated and behind paywalls.
For the average video game the condition is the same. You have Sony and Microsoft gating the consoles. You have steam gating much of the PC world, and outside of that you have the credit card companies gating making money of more controversial items.
An area we have the opposite problem is the one of junk food. This entire just self regulate while companies reap record profits selling you purposefully addictive food is working out "fucking great"... for the companies that is, of course for the ever increasing burden of obesity on the country, things aren't going so well.
The post I was responding to was advocating for a "smart phone age", i.e. the state banning smartphone use for people under a certain age like we have for alcohol and other hard drugs. All of your examples are examples of regulations, not bans on a particular product. The video game example doesn't even involve the state; all you mentioned are private companies.
I'm not opposed to all regulations. I just don't believe we should have the state deciding when people can or can't use a computer, which is what a smartphone really is. It's up to parents to decide up to a certain age, and after that people have autonomy and can make their own decisions.
Because of drunk driving. If that was not an issue, we certainly wouldn't have a drinking age of 21 in the US. Several states still allow your family to serve their children alcohol, which is closer to the example of letting your kid use the internet.
In the UK the restriction is around the sale and was set to 18 in 1923 and had nothing to do with drunk driving.
The restriction was because of concerns around minors being too young and naïve to fully understand the full implications of their actions. Which is why consumption is/was allowed at home on the basis that responsible adults will help children to learn to handle alcohol sensibly while stopping them doing anything too stupid ... at least that's the theory anyway.
Similar rules apply to driving, voting, smoking etc in most places. And as it is possible to live a perfectly meaningful life without being bombarded by TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc, it's really hard to understand why similar should not apply to Social Media.
I've honestly never heard those two being linked before. That would seem to imply that Canada, with a drinking age of 18, would you have a a higher drunk driving rate than the US, and I wonder if that's the case.
In most of Canada the drinking age is 19 (only a few provinces are 18), but it’s also slightly harder to get your drivers license in Canada. You’re required to take a written test and then two driving tests in order to receive a full license.
Sure, OK, but that's still at least two extra years. We didn't used to have the two driving tests, and in Alberta we don't anymore - you transition off GDL after a set time without a test, but all the GDLs were instituted relatively recently, so we should be able to look at data 20-30 years ago to see data matching that claim, right?
This is why for pretty much the majority of human history, we had some form of religion to trick ourselves into ignoring this. Now that religion is on a decline...
I dont think you can argue your position without reverting to a sunken cost fallacy or an ideological ignorance of the amount of suffering inflicted through simple existence, even in the best of circumstances.
If you want to argue that suicide is always an option, let me remind you that this is how the Romans justified the conditions of slavery.
I could always be wrong here, but i dont think you are able to explain how. To put it bluntly, fanatics never can. Or want to because they prefer feeling right. Pls do explain how i am wrong here.
Depression is not a rational response though, is it? It's an irrational response that persists even when there is no reason to be unhappy.
That's why I give little credence to ideas like those in your link. I don't consider the worldview of depressed people to be valuable to my own life experience.
Depressive realism might be. And there is no ethical way for me to argue for that.
My link is also not arguing for being depressed. Once you are here, by all means make the best of it. But to give you all a flashback to sex ed, do the right thing and use a condom.
Sure it is. "Depression" might just be our perception of the biological phenomenon where an individual decides to spare the group's resources and thereby increasing the chances of the group. First by becoming tired (saving resources, biding time), cutting off contacts, and finally disappearing if nothing changes in the environment.
Self-sacrifice occurs in animals too. From what I've seen, it isn't controversial.
> It's an irrational response that persists even when there is no reason to be unhappy.
What if there is?
Generally, we are not very good at judging what makes us happy. Happiness research points to things that many of us are indeed missing in life: physical activity, social connectedness, interacting with nature.
The reason for unhappiness might also be internal; bad diet, lack of exercise, etc. throws your body's hormones off-balance, making you feel like crap and causing, quite predictably, unhappiness.
Let's not conflate unhappiness with depression. Many a depressed person who has tried can tell you that exercise, social contact, and immaculate diet do not cure depression.
They can certainly help a bit sometimes, just like not punching yourself in the face every day while you have a broken leg helps with the pain and makes recovery go more smoothly. But it is not a solution to the underlying problems in many cases.
These things are important to everyone's wellbeing, but there are many, many people who eat like crap and don't exercise who are not clinically depressed. And there are plenty of people living with depression despite being disciplined in these important lifestyle choices.
Aaron Brown checked a sample of the papers Haidt relies on to build his case and found that they couldn't support his claims. They're of the sort of quality we've come to expect from the field, dominated by tiny unrepresentative samples, bad methodologies, bad statistics, weak signals and so on.
Unfortunately Haidt's initial response was to make a circular argument, saying you can't demand a high quality of evidence for the crisis because there's a crisis, and to engage in a subtle form of gish gallop by saying that surely not all 300 papers he selected can be bad even if a subsample were.
I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).
"A bad study is like a bad mortgage loan," I wrote in my original piece. "Packaging them up on the assumption that somehow their defects will cancel each other out is based on flawed logic, and it's a recipe for drawing fantastically wrong conclusions."
It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis.
This fits what I've read. Data driven decision making is the way to go, but good data is hard to come by in these fields. We have no baseline for many parts of physical health, let alone mental health. Every time a pop culture scientist tries to justify their world perspective without taking the source of data seriously, it does the field as a whole serious harm.
Brown never denied that -- He argued that there's not much high-quality evidence it's caused by social media. This is clear from the title alone ("The Statistically Flawed Evidence That Social Media Is Causing the Teen Mental Health Crisis").
> Haidt's claims about a teen mental health epidemic have been pretty convincingly debunked [...] It's quite probable that there is no teen mental health crisis.
I don't see how you can reach this conclusion when it's very clear in the data that hospitalizations for teens due to self-harm has gone up significantly. Are you suggesting that hospitals are not now or were not previously correctly reporting this data?
Self harm is a behaviour, not a disorder. There isn't a predictable relationship between the rate of self harm and the rate of underlying psychiatric pathology. We have reasonable evidence to suggest that self harm tends to be socially contagious, occurring in socially-connected clusters rather than consistently across the population; young people whose friends engage in self-harm are dramatically more likely to engage in self-harm.
It might seem contradictory, but it is entirely plausible to argue that the internet is causing a self-harm epidemic rather than a mental illness epidemic. Obviously that would still be a serious problem, but it would lead us to very different conclusions and interventions.
A fair counterargument, but I think that the line delineating "psychiatric pathology" is not as clear as you imply. Many such pathologies are arguably socially constructed and sometimes even contagious in similar ways (see the book "Crazy Like Us").
I think "being vulnerable to social contagion to an extent that leads you to literally inflict harm on yourself" is definitely within the scope of being classified as a psychiatric pathology, even if it hasn't been yet. It seems like there's little difference between this and, say, anorexia.
Haidt presents datasets that are very short. The graphs begin in 2004. Teens have been depressed for a lot longer than 20 years. It's hard to know what the natural variance of this statistic is given just his articles.
If you look at longer term US suicide stats (stratified by gender but not age) there's quite a bit of variation over time.
The 1970s were really rough for women, but not men. 1990 was rough for men but not women. These graphs show that variance can be pretty high when taking the long view. Current overall suicide levels aren't anything special, even though they've been going up for decades (watch out for the non-linear X axis).
If we look at the 10-14 girls dataset that Haidt picks where the change seems most dramatic, it goes from 1 per 100,000 to 2 per 100,000. Very few people commit suicide at that age, fortunately. We're talking on the order of 100-200 girls in that age range per year in the entire USA. At these low initial levels, even very small changes will look big on a graph. Every death is tragic, but if "crisis" now means something that affects such an truly tiny percentage of the population then almost anything can be a crisis.
The other unrelated issue is that if you look at his graphs, self harm and suicides started going up in 2007, not 2012 as he claims. I don't see how you'd pick 2012 as the inflection point if not trying to force the smartphone narrative.
> Haidt presents datasets that are very short. The graphs begin in 2004. Teens have been depressed for a lot longer than 20 years. It's hard to know what the natural variance of this statistic is given just his article
I'm not talking about depression, but self-harm. Yes the graph starts in 2004, and then we see a 188% increase in self-harm among girls, after being basically stable for at least 6 years. That's pretty dramatic.
> Current overall suicide levels aren't anything special, even though they've been going up for decades (watch out for the non-linear X axis).
Even supposing I accept that suicide rate hasn't changed much, a stable suicide rate with increasing self-harm rate still qualifies as a mental health crisis. You keep focusing on suicide when the self-harm rate among girls was 20 times higher than their suicide rate when it was stable 2004-2010, but is now 72 times higher. That's clearly a problem.
> The other unrelated issue is that if you look at his graphs, self harm and suicides started going up in 2007, not 2012 as he claims.
That is not correct. The graph clearly shows that 2007 was at or slightly below 2004 levels. You can also see a slight increase from 2006 to 2007, and then a ~25% decline in 2008, then another ~10% decline in 2009, then a return to the 2007 levels in 2010. After 2010, you can see increases past historic levels, and 2012 you see a very sharp increase. (edit: I'm talking about Figure 2 at the link, just so we're on the same page)
That might be a coincidence, but it's not completely arbitrary as you're implying.
People underestimate the change that took place between 2008 and 2012 with ubiquitous phone usage. All of a sudden we all started staring at these devices for several hours a day. We never leave this thing.
The resulting impact on our mental state cannot be overstated.
I have fell into this trap and I'm 30. When I'm bored I'm thinkin about projects and business ideas.
But when I use my phone for 5 hours in a day my brain is done. I am now working really hard to set boundaries with my phone and limit usage. Because I have a feeling I will look back when my time comes and feel like I wasted great years looking at stupid garbage.
There are some great creators on youtube and other platforms but the suggested videos may suck you in.
Boredom drives in person socialising and creativity.
Human contact and the act of creation engender life satisfaction, a long term persistent sense of well-being that is far better for you than short term spikes of happiness, and the antithesis of depression.
This isn’t true. I’m reminded of this interview with some women who lived through Victorian era England (before any phones existed)[0]. Towards the middle of the interview she talks about the mud in the streets and how they spent hours brushing mud off their dresses. She even makes a quip and says, “of course now those hours are spent looking at the television”. If the interview happened today, I’m sure she would have said cell phone instead of television.
So - boredom is our natural instinct meant to steer us towards socialization. The ever present phone gives us stimuli that makes our intuition think that we are engaging socially. But the reward we are looking for is social bonding but it doesn't happen because our cognitive functions that makes sense of bonding can't execute because there's no full person to bond to. Most often it's an anonymous disembodied text or an influencer or celebrity that do not know you...?
Maybe people also don't really process or understand their emotions when the phone is available. If you always have your phone to entertain you (play music, scroll on instagram etc.), then you don't give yourself time to reflect on your current mental state
I’d argue that the author glosses over 2008 recession as the underlying issue by saying that the recovery was well underway by 2012.
The reality of the recovery wasn’t shared equally and those who got the short end of the stick for the last decade likely shared those worries with their children (directly or indirectly)
Does anyone know how the child’s parental income impacts the growth of depression / anxiety over the same time period?
I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no attention, possibly because it’s an inconvenient truth for a lot of parents who prefer it that way.
The causal link to social media is presented very simply in the article, but I suspect that's mainly because the article is not about diagnosis, but about the prevalence of the pattern.
There is a lot of data to support the social media effect specifically (some referenced in the linked articles from Twenge), and I suspect the next few posts from Rausch will dive in more deeply, so it's not right to claim that they're jumping to convenient answers - these aren't casual bloggers sharing their reckons.
Not only is there a lot more content on the blog about the topic but Haidt and Rausch have several public Google docs where they keep an ongoing list of evidence for and against their hypotheses.
Every time one of their articles gets discussed on HN (which happens at least once a month at this point) the discussion goes in circles about evidence and causality without engaging the meat of the content.
HN just doesn’t have any mechanism to promote long term discussions about this topic.
It seems inevitable for online discussions of a topic this large to be completely unproductive. It's broad enough that everyone's favorite societal ill can be blamed, yet virtually no one reads Haidt's research explaining why other explanations are insufficient.
Kids need more time away from other kids. They're spending too much time in the insane asylum with the other inmates. This leads to bullying, gossiping, comparing themselves against one another. Social media made it worse.
Kids at home on the farm, reading books, exploring nature - that was healthy. Now they're addicted to algorithmic peer pressure before their brains can even adjust to filtering it out.
It doesn't have to be a literal farm though. I spent so much time in my childhood building Legos or with metal construction sets or reading in my room alone.
Reacting to your first sentences and ignoring the rest, it made me think of my own cohort on the tail end of Gen X, where there were fewer of us following the masses of boomers and their Gen X echo.
This affects basic things like the ratio of contacts with your own childhood peers versus those of other ages. It also affects how much the media and pop culture seems to cover your interests versus others. In my experience, it was those larger groups who lived in the echo chamber, while we had more isolation or a sense of being on the outside looking in.
Could it be as simple as the anglosphere has been repeating this kind of baby bust? I can only imagine how it would feel to grow up with this sense of otherness plus the panopticon of social media. I am less certain that the angst about global warming etc can explain it. I think we had a comparable zeitgeist with the cold war and environmental concerns.
But, I can also imagine some other environmental or nutritional hypothesis for an anglosphere trend, rather than demographic experiences...
Seriously, we moved to the middle of nowhere when I was a kid and it sucked. Nobody to play with. Not much to do outside (it was mostly just fields).
So of course I found things to get up to that often got me into trouble. Boredom and lack of mental stimulation are not great for anyone, but for kids who don't yet have the skills to deal with it, the results can be a lot worse.
Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures (including pets, but mostly other humans). Kids are most happy when they and their friends are playing together, and my personal belief is that they are happiest when helping other people together (so much of my childhood play was around pretending being a hero, sacrificing and risking my life for the sake of others - what if that was channeled to real world aid).
> Humans, including kids, are inherently social creatures, and are happiest when communing with their fellow creatures
That may be generally true, but it doesn’t imply that time alone is always bad, nor that all time “being social” is good. It’s certainly plausible that the explosion of access to social media has been a net negative and that spending some of that time alone would be better.
Thinking back, the time I spent having sneaked to the school library during lunch break definitely felt healthier than the times I got caught by a teacher and sent back to “socially commune” with my tormentors, er, classmates.
Agreed that this topic requires more investigation but convenient answers. Occam's razor still applies though.
There are cultures where
> control, structure, and surveillance
have not been neglected the way they have been neglected in the western culture. So it would be interesting to check if youth mental issues did rise in such cultures too.
Put bluntly: Do taliban kids have the same mental issues as kids which were risen in an environment without
Jonathan Haidt, the man behind this article and most of this discussion, cofounded LetGrow.org [0] with the explicit intention of helping to free kids from the control that their helicopter parents increasingly smother them with. That organization is behind several laws in various states intended to protect parents who give their kids more freedom. He very much sees social media and helicopter parenting as two sides of the same coin, two tightly related forces that conspire to ruin childhood and thereby ruin children's mental health.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a trend among parents to latch on to Haidt's anti-social-media advocacy while ignoring his recommendations for what we fill the time with instead (hint: free roaming independence!), but it's not because he hasn't been vocal about both aspects.
This is a great point. So my parents were well-intentioned but were immensely restrictive in all areas of my life. I can't imagine just how much worse it'd be with the monitoring and restriction tools that are available nowadays. I actually stop myself from posting things on Instagram given that I have them on there. So I think there's some truth to this.
It's also worth noting that 'restrictiveness' is subjective. Your parents could be too restrictive for _you_, but in an alternative universe your hypothetical sibling could complain that his parents didn't care enough, let him do whatever and didn't prevent him from doing some things that he later he regretted, for instance starting drinking too early, getting himself involved in some sketchy people etc.
I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.
If a kid changes behavior because of a parent watching then that kid absolutely needs watching.
It's still free roaming because the kid is 100% in charge of where they will go. That's the part that matters, not that someone can tell where they are.
But what scares me more is how this trend has the potential to normalize surveillance in general. It's not uncommon to for people to treat their employer or the government as a surrogate parent. So why wouldn't kids raised in a digital surveillance family accept a digital surveillance state?
I have the related theory that the whole Santa Clause and Easter Bunny lie thing makes children more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. If all adults, including the weatherman conspire to lie to me for no actual gain, why wouldn't politicians and media personalities conspire to lie to me about the earth being flat or climate change if there is profit or power to be had?
Most children learn to distinguish reality from fantasy between the ages of 7 and 10. Conspiracy theories are based on the idea that some sinister entity is hiding some truth about the world, and that only a select few are aware of it. People are not born with this level of cynicism, and if they eventually acquire it, it will be during adolescence or adulthood, once they're already able to distinguish fantasy from reality. This is an entirely separate thought process than the one involved in child fantasies.
While pretend play may not be as crucial to development as previously thought[1], it's still a healthy and fun part of growing up. It increases the familial bond, and gradually prepares children to a less magical world. Let them enjoy it while it lasts.
You do realize there is nothing wrong with theorizing about conspiracies, kind of like theorizing about physics.
You are mixing up propgandists who run with theories as though they are proven fact on bad faith to push agendas without a shred of evidence.
Law enforcement engages in theorizing about conspiracies, intelligence agencies engage in theorizing about conspiracies, almost every country has laws making criminal conspiracy illegal. And there are plenty of conspiracies that turn out to be true, they also tend to be quite banal and human rather than sexy hollywood aliens, global gov conspiracies, etc.
Attacking theorizing with such a broad stroke is attacking critical thinking not disinformation. You can't decide what path of possible truth to persue without theorizing.
If anything santa and the easter bunny are gentle introductions for kids to learn how to tune their BS detection circuit.
You are wrong on so many levels for stating this as though many parents are adequate moral arbiters and not often irrational, unreasonable, or overprotective about what they think is okay for their kid to do. A child is not “100% in charge of where they will go” if they have to consider the consequences of or pay a price for doing innocuous things after returning home when they know they are being monitored.
Everybody, especially kids, deserves to have some alone time and actual agency.
Okay, so it's supervised roam. Who cares? It's much better than keeping your kids at home and only allowing them out on pre-arranged "play dates", which is the other major alternative.
In much of USA allowing free roam and not repenting and recanting the sin when CPS inevitably called and starts the inquisition will end with them in foster care with the same problems but now broken continuity of care.
A lot of that cultural change in attitudes can be traced back to the Etan Patz kidnapping case in 1979. That case received widespread, prolonged media attention at the time which made many parents more fearful. He was one of the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons which made it impossible to ignore.
The change happened gradually throughout the 90's. People born in the late 80's typically had free-roam experience, while those born in the miid-late 90's did not,
> I think that arc largely peaked in the 1980s and 1990s with stranger danger and the satanic panic nonsense. Helicopter parents and people calling social services on unattended kids was already a meme by the 90s.
It stopped being a meme because the expected level of parental supervision of children got much higher and it went from being perceived as a thing that only weird people to what is required of parents in most places.
Calling social services on unattended kids isn't something that makes the news as much simply because almost all parents agree that children should never be left unattended until they are old enough to have a driver's license now and there aren't any unattended children to have social services called on them
Yet if you attend to a child as anything but a stereotypical mom look you'll have the police called and men with guns roll up and scare your child and detain them because it's "suspicious" as happened to me as a racially mixed dad-family at the park with my kid. Accused of kidnapping and held for a good hour.
i worked really hard as a parent to convince my wife+MIL that it is safe to let our boys roam the neighborhood now that they're old enough to cross intersections safely. However, a 10 year old girl one street over went missing. That has undone 5 years of getting my wife+MIL comfortable. My wife grew up in the neighborhood Amber Hagerman was kidnapped/murdered in so i understand but my kids are completely trapped.
> Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time?
Add on top the permacrises/polycrisis time we're in.
My generation, we entered the workforce right during the 2008ff financial crisis. The Europeans got further fucked by the Euro crisis 2010, which crippled our career entries, and lasted for years with its consequences.
In parallel, in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out, leading to years of wars and refugees. Then in 2014, the Russians made their first move into Ukraine, and the migration crisis began that then fully escalated in 2015. Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went. As the migration crisis died down to manageable levels in 2019, we only had a few months of rest, as at the end of 2019 COVID hit the entire world - and before that was over, the Russians went into the rest of Ukraine. That in turn led to cost of living exploding, now also across the world instead of "just" in the urban agglomeration eras.
And the entire time, the far-right and authoritarians have been on the rise worldwide, politicians are doing nothing to meaningfully combat climate change or the demographic crisis or ever rising cost-of-living cost and income/wealth disparities.
And then people, particularly the Boomer generation, have the audacity of calling us snowflakes, weak, "depression is just a trend" or whatever? They created all this mess, they're all set in cheap homes they paid off decades ago, when wages were still worth something, while we've been fighting for survival? And our younger brothers and sisters have it even worse than we have, they saw us and our parents struggle all these years.
> Right in the midst of that, the US elected the 45th and we all know how that one went.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past 7 years (through Trump, Brexit and Covid) it’s that propaganda works.
See how you listed concrete issues for most of your complaints, but nothing specific for Trump? Just “we all know”. But if you actually think about his presidency, and ignore the fear mongering and propaganda, nothing bad actually happened! (Covid is, of course, another example, but whereas the virus itself wasn’t that bad, the governments’ reactions to it, was.)
> See how you listed concrete issues for most of your complaints, but nothing specific for Trump? Just “we all know”.
Because I don't wish to get too political here, not for stuff I'd assume to indeed be general knowledge:
- the fight of Conservatives and the far-right against LGBT rights and abortion rights (I'll admit the SC decision Dobbs v. Jackson happened later, during Biden's term, but Trump and McConnell set the stage for this with their SC judge picks). LGBT youth already face a significantly higher risk of suicide, no need to make that intentionally worse.
- Trump incited a coup with thousands marching on and invading the US Capitol as a result, and nearly getting a high amount of Senators killed or kidnapped (there's enough evidence to suggest it's mostly the actions of Eugene Goodman that led to this not happening [1]).
- related to this, there has been a marked, massive and sustained increase in political violence during his term, mostly from the far-right [2], as well as a general polarization of US society.
- Trump leading the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the most pressing issue for our generation
- Trump's abysmal handling of Covid and himself spreading fake news (hydroxychloroquine, Chinese lab conspiracy myth), leading to 1.1 million deaths [7], a complete breakdown of trust in something as basic and vital as vaccines [3] or masks or public health in general. Anthony Fauci had to deal with people threatening his life for years [4][5].
- Trump, the self-proclaimed "king of debt" who promised to reduce the debt prior to taking office, instead massively increased the US national debt [6]. I'll give a tiny pass due to Covid effects, but that's about it - better handling of the pandemic could have saved a lot of that money.
- Trump fanning the flames on the Israel-Palestine conflict by relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem. No matter one's stance on that conflict, it's undeniable that this move had a net negative effect. (Also note that Trump proposed a "deal" to solve that conflict that never happened in the end)
- Trump mocked media, women, disabled people, veterans, minorities relentlessly throughout his campaign, his term and after it. The resulting disgraceful decline of political conversation quality will have lasting effects (Overton effect), not to mention it was behavior completely unworthy of the President of the US.
- In his final days in office, Trump pushed the "Big Steal" lie so hard that it completely eroded trust in democracy itself among wide parts of the population [8]. To this day, he has not admitted he has legally lost the 2020 election (compared to Al Gore in the way sketchier 2000 elections). For me, this is the biggest most negative effect on the future - how much are free and fair elections actually worth if significant parts of the population do not believe that the elections were free and fair?
Adolescence is more prolonged than ever, the problems typically identified (isolation, excess social media, insufficient sunlight) aren't contingent on early adulthood unless we redefine adulthood to mean those things.
Most urban spaces these days are incredibly depressing. No points of interest within walking distance. Lots of large and difficult to cross roads. Combined with the very real danger of cycling in many places. As well as the loss of small businesses that used to be interspersed in residential areas.
You say urban, but this applies to suburban and rural areas as well. If anything, urban areas are the places that have probably resisted these factors the most effectively. For everyone else: "You get a stroad, and you get a stroad, everybody gets a stroad!"
Groups of teens hanging out at the mall buying a few small things are now considered a nuisance. They're not spending enough money to be welcome there.
I went to college in area where its absolutely car-dependent, the road sucks for the cars too. Not only it's very hard to walk to anywhere, there's just very little amount of free public spaces, like park for example..
It's very depressing. I wish my country doesn't follow US' style of building a city.
As has the former abundance of youth-centric spaces. Many such as malls and arcades don’t exist like they used to. Physical game stores (like for Magic: The Gathering) are also drying up as it increasingly becomes harder to sell enough product as maintenance costs rise. And perhaps it’s just me, but after a certain age parks became rather boring even with a friend group.
Personally, I feel we need more library awareness and “recreational areas” within libraries. They tend to have a large variance of media, and are typically a safe place to be. However all the libraries in my area tend to lack anywhere to hang out, which I understand due to budgeting constraints, but it’s a shame it’s not easier to provide areas for the more “interesting” media available.
But did it go down dramatically in particular in the early 2010’s? Because the data seems to suggest that the teen mental health situation accelerated dramatically in that time frame.
One thing that comes to mind is that during my lifetime, and it’s difficult to pin down a specific time frame, the stigma surrounding mental illness faded pretty dramatically it seems. Now I don’t know if that change inflected dramatically in the early 2010’s—I would think that that process would be more gradual, but perhaps not? Is it possible that an existing problem has simply become dramatically more visible to us?
> Is it possible that an existing problem has simply become dramatically more visible to us?
I believe that this is a much larger component of the issue than many may realize. Never has it been as easy for young people to discuss what they’re going through, and that’s no doubt led to realizations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
This effect likely extends well beyond teenagers, in my opinion. Across the board it’s become more socially acceptable to speak up when facing difficulties, which means a lot of things that used to get swept under the rug suddenly aren’t. It’s no longer required to keep up the appearance that all is well when it isn’t, and I think that’s probably a good thing.
I believe the rebuttal to this argument is partially done in the article by showing hospital admittance statistics. And if this was a factor, I trust that the authors would absolutely delve into this idea. They call out that self-reporting mental stat is not an accurate enough indicator, and choose to couple that with other statistics.
in no small part "thanks" to social media, no? like yeah in the us and anglosphere it's no small part car centricity, but like the blog post points out, this is a trend that's visible even places that don't have school shootings and car centricity, so it kind of has to be social media. (actually proving it is hard but, like, at this point, i don't see how it can even be disputed by any reasonable person, only pedants)
There are so many alternative explanations to go through before it "has" to be social media. Already mentioned was time spent outside. For instance, video games are (also) a huge drain on time spent outside.
Gen X and Millenials also had video games (including online ones that didn't require you to be playing physically together) and it didn't have the same effect - the mental health decline became prominent and accelerated during the rise of social media, not video games.
Video games are very different today. There are far more social and gambling features built-in to addict users than in the old mostly-single-player days. I'm not convinced you've disproved video games as being part of the problem.
I look at my ability to free roam as a young teen and even late single digits with appreciation and also recognition of the danger. But then I look at the amount of traffic on the streets I crossed on bicycle compared to when I was younger, it makes sense. Even residential streets are less safe from cars.
But I know those aren’t the reasons kids don’t play outside anymore.
I think this is a huge part of it. Kids need to be able socialize and spend time in their environment without constant supervision. It's not just kids either. What ever happened to parents taking their young children to the local playground? Part of it was for kids, but it was also an avenue for meeting other parents and socializing with them. I think dog parks serve more of a social role than playgrounds these days, and that's pretty sad.
2. Next new retirees, because they lose social connection from work and don't appreciate that social media + TV are unsuitable replacements.
3. Next, remote workers who moved from a city to a suburb, and become progressively more physically isolated unless they make a conscious effort to connect IRL outside the home with peers.
#1 is obvious. #2 is starting to hit my parents and their generation. #3 I'm seeing glimmers of and I think it will get more noticeable over time.
I believe the solution is liveable cities, and a return from suburbs to higher-density living in walkable neighborhoods. People need social contact, and I think remote workers + retirees + teens would be more happy living in closer proximity to others where spontaneous social connections are possible.
You mention work several times. Work does not make people less depressed unless it is a) gainful or b) meaningful.
I think a lot of it is a result of people conflating productivity with worth, and worth with satisfaction.
You can be broke and completely satisfied with life, yourself, your situation. Likewise you can have great finances and still be anxious and restless and discontent. I believe comes down to expectations. Managing expectations is critical and not many people do it enough, if at all.
Work is still a social activity for most people, and it takes much of their time.
It's hard to talk about suburbanization without talking about work, too. Suburbs were created so people could have an isolated home, but still go IRL to work. With remote work, they're left with an isolated home and isolated work.
I am noticing an obvious exception to this among religious communities because those have an orientation around, well, community. These have built in in-person services, lifecycle events, studying, etc.
It’s interesting how in previous decades all of this stuff could seem superfluous since secular people were likewise getting together in the physical space. But today it seems almost like an inoculation against a dire social illness.
#3: Isn't this what has happened anyway? Anecdotally, everyone I knew that was young, hip, and lived downtown moved to the surburbs once they reached a certain age.
I would have liked to have seen the increase in terms of percent of total population; I was surprised this wasn't shared automatically to provide context. Showing the base numbers as totals or percentage of totals always provides a clearer picture. 2 to 4 percent is a 100% increase, and of interest across large populations, but it's much less dramatic when phrased as an increase from 2 to 4%. Likewise, if population A has a 150% increase and population B only shows 25%, it can look like A is in crisis compared to B. But if Pop A is going from 5% to 7.5% of total and Pop B is going from 18% to 22.5%....the critical issues look a little different. In addition, I was surprised suicide mortaltity rates were not included alongside the admittance for self harm numbers.
It’s worth reading some of the other posts on this blog.
There a lot of very thoughtful consideration that goes into how the data is looked at for every post, and frank and earnest discussions of how much credence their conclusions merit given the quality of the data.
Opinion:
We’re treating kids like adults too early in their lives. Of course breaking laws isn’t ok but who here hasn’t done something crazy?
Neighborhoods aren’t being neighbors any longer and people simply want to have law enforcement be the negotiator for everything.
I don't think we're treating them like adults. We're kinda just treating them like toys. My parents grew up in a dictatorship and poor, but ironically they had more freedom of movement. There were significantly less eyes on them at all times and the only real expectation was that they get their homework and chores done.
I believe now kids outside of crazy dense areas basically study, playing video games, and are forced to depend on their family to take them around. They have no true independence because you can't get anywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if around the early 2010s phones were made much more accessible and that has some correlation with the issues seen in the article.
Kids used to be more adult before technology was around. I think it’s the opposite parents are coddling their kids plus you have this new lib stuff like safe spaces and the whole concept of “feeling unsafe”. We have an entire generation of babies who can’t handle conflict including internal conflict. So what can they do? Kill themselves or other people as we see them do
Because it’s a ridiculous notion. National crime is at an all time low and gets lower every year. You haven’t been safer more than you are today. Mental safety is feel good progressive nonsense. If you can’t handle reality, you are eventually going to snap.
Crime isn't the only thing that impacts people's health.
- Difficulty getting insurance to see the doctor impacts peoples' safety and sense of safety.
- Fear of gaps in insurance coverage keeps people in toxic jobs where they feel unsafe.
- Many people can't get prescription medicines they need, impacting health.
- Homelessness is increasing
- Polarized political speech, including hate speech, causes legitimate anxiety, contributing to poor psychological health.
None of the above things were as big of a problem 20 years ago.
Using "crime" as a measure of unsafety only makes sense if you have access to healthcare, a stable job, and don't face discrimination.
People can't just choose to stop feeling unsafe. Chronic stress causes brain damage and reduces tolerance to further stress. This is a fact. Calling people in this situation irrational accomplishes nothing.
Personally it's more that there is more awareness today and it's more ok to come forward saying you have a problem. When I grew up in the 70s there were a lot of people with problems but they were just labelled as "stupid" or "difficult". I personally had serious depression and social anxiety but there was nobody to talk to and I wouldn't have known the vocabulary to describe the situation. I know several people who I am pretty sure were gay. One guy was most likely trans. And a ton of people with depression and/or anxiety. My dad and a lot of men his age had PTSD from WW2. None of these went into any statistic.
Good to see more indepth research on this the last article I had read was asserting the social media access theory was correlation and not causatory because studies that were done in mental resiliency were showing that if you have built the resiliency then you can safely handle the social media... But it seems like that explanation doesn't take into account the developing mind. Love haidt's work and glad to see there's more research being done to find out exactly why.
I've seen similar claims (social media is correlation and not causation) and it does seem plausible to me.
What I haven't seen so far (and it's possible this data exists, I'll admit to not exactly looking for it) is studies around parental consumption of social media and the impacts it has on their children.
IMO social media/advertising can have amplification effects by targeting parents.
Yea we try to set a good example as parents. You can’t expect kids to not get addicted to social media when their parents are… constantly scrolling though their phone and social media! I bet even basic ground rules help. We try to adhere to: don’t be seen by our kid doing it. Some parents hold themselves to this rule when it comes to drinking and smoking, so why not apply it to smartphone scrolling too?
I would like to see a chart that shows "physical activity vs mental illness". Physical exercising is known to be one of the most effective methods to prevent and cure mental illnesses and especially kids' activity levels have plummeted in the past one or two decades. I think this might easily be the whole story and no other intervention is needed than to get the kids to play outside and do sports again.
I remember peer pressure being a big factor in teen years, mostly in the negative. Couldn't the rise of always-connected social media have super charged this negativity and made most teens feel like outcasts, with a few "teenfluencers" determining who is in and who is out? That would be a kind of hell for me to live in who was a teen before all this.
It induces and amplifies existential angst, particularly among teens. They are bombarded with over-sexualised imagery and levels of material consumption not easily attainable in their local economy. One way of reacting is to detach from that world, and play video games all day. Another is to strive to become a YouTuber.
We've devalued the meaning of having an ordinary life with an ordinary mate.
> I remember peer pressure being a big factor in teen years, mostly in the negative.
Some would argue this is a natural thing. Correction of social behavior as young adults are just learning how to interact in a more adult setting leading to mistakes that are then negatively reacted to, correcting the behavior for the future.
Doesn't work in all circumstances, but an argument nonetheless.
See the movie Eighth Grade for an anxiety inducing exploration of this theme. My personal take is that not having community is devastating, and the issue with social media is that it makes you think you have community in your brain, but your body/heart knows that you are actually just alone in your room. Even worse, it makes you crave a kind of unattainable community, so even people with loving family and friends might feel alone because they are longing for something nonexistent.
To your pet cat, the difference between you scrolling on your phone and you staring at the wall is nothing.
Sorry to make you feel bad, but that exact realization is the reason I don’t do remote work anymore. (I still scroll on my phone here and there!)
A cynic might retort that reading a book is also “doing nothing”, but I think there is a certain physical presence that is missing with the scrolling. Hard to describe, but you know it when you feel it.
There are so many different kinds of scrolling though.
For me:
- HN scrolling to find ideas/inspiration, staying longer if I find something interesting
- Twitter scrolling to get a glimpse of what's going on in the world and then staying if I get baited by something :D
- Facebook scrolling, usually for a particular purpose these days (maybe once every other week on average, to check up on someone in particular I happen to think of), then staying scrolling for a bit, past irrelevant posts for a while, where I might get warm/happy/nostalgic by some updates
- Instagram scrolling takes literally 30 seconds before I get annoyed by the ads and close the app (happens 100% of the time although I might last 1-2 minutes some times)
Those are all quite different experiences and I could do them all in quite different ways. I used to mindlessly scroll FB for example while not using Twitter at all. The psychological effects were quite different, but perhaps more socially attuned?
Nowadays I scroll less overall and more for intellectual reasons.
But... getting caught in the "must... scroll.... more...." mode is the same for all of them psychologically (Youtube as well), the same addictive behavior.
So yeah. I think there needs to be a distinction between scrolling for a (moderately healthy) while and doomscrolling. The algorithms can be quite very helpful in presenting relevant data, but they're also a potential black hole.
Oh and I'm not sure why I was replying to you specifically. I guess you got to be my therapist today.
There's nothing cynical about pointing out that "to a cat, there's no difference between staring at a wall and scrolling" is just a shallow truism that falls apart the moment you consider even many non-digital activities people engage in.
With a physical book people can ask "what's that about?" There's a big title on the back. When you are scrolling as far as anyone knows you're already in a conversation and there's nothing more isolating than that.
I think it sucks to be a kid today. You learn too much too fast now, there’s no magic or wonder to life, no theorizing about how things work or asking someone, just google it or watch a TikTok. And sometimes what you learn is just plain wrong, but you may never truly know it.
> As discussed in previous posts and as Twenge et al. (2022) showed, it can’t be the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The timing of that event is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect, namely: the epidemic should have started in 2009 and then gotten progressively better after 2012 as the economy improved in the USA and other countries.
The economies might have gotten better, but middle and lower classes have less and less opportunities to benefit from that. Lack of money while growing up will make children unhappy if this leads to social exclusion and deprivation.
Also kids are aware of the climate crisis since around then. Smartphones and social media might act as an amplifier, but such major shifts are usually multicausal.
The DSM-5 was published in 2013, redefining the 'mental health' diagnosis landscape substantially. You will see in some pf the graphs arpid onset of the climb in 2023.
Could changes in diagnosis and treatment be a factor in this?
I’d be surprised if this wasn’t at least a part of the effect. I wasn’t diagnosed with anxiety until three years ago. I don’t think I suddenly developed it in my 30s - it just wasn’t caught by any medical professionals back in the day.
This was a good development for me - a minimum dose medication helped improve my quality of life a ton
What about the awareness of what self-harm/depression is in the first place? It's easier to say you're depressed if you understand what depression is, and it's easy enough to Google that. Same with self-harm, I wouldn't ask my classmate but I could easily Google it. Similarly, mental health campaigns could contribute, accelerating how fast kids learn about bad mental health. We could've had the same percentage of depressed young people, they just wouldn't know how to express it/act on it.
I think that better diagnosis does account for some of the diagnosis count (like many mental health issues the solution used to just be "if you can't figure out how to act normal on your own you're going to a home/asylum, we may smack you around a bit first to see if we can get the message through to you").
But talking with any educators for that age group it's not just that the number of people diagnosed as depressed/anxiety but the level of depression/anxiety in the individuals diagnosed escalating that alarms them the most.
Jonathan Haidt is a very thoughtful researcher and has been looking at this and related issues for a very long time. I think your dismissal is perhaps a bit too casual.
"the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.”
The emphasis is mine. What does that to do with any of this? University students aren't children and, agree or disagree with the result, they are the ones with agency there.
There should be a variation of godwin's law for this, as it's the go-to excuse for anyone to justify not having to listen to anything that makes them uncomfortable.
Then both sides start doing the same and using same excuse. Final result is decay of democracy and ultimately civil war.
Looking from afar, US left/woke/whatever is nowhere close to objectively tolerant. Unless you use a very nuanced tolerance definition. It’s long past „live and let live".
Quite a lot of aggressors consider themselves to be righteous ad good when they attack some unpopular person/people.
The paradox of intolerance stems from the 1930s. When we stay there for a bit longer - do you think that the participants of the Kristallnacht considered themselves evil? No, they were brainwashed into thinking that they were righteous, fighting to save their country from corruption and evil brought upon it by ... their victims, who "had it coming".
"We are fighting for a just and important cause!" or "We are protecting the vulnerable!" means precisely nothing from the mouths of a mob. A mob is mostly a psychopathic entity that just seeks rationalizations for its outpouring of violence.
So the point is we have to listen to evil because we might be wrong about what is evil? It makes no sense. Especially when we're talking about, in some cases, literal modern Nazis.
The point is that you are not a reliable judge of what is evil and thus not a reliable judge of what should not be tolerated.
Since apparently it still isn't clear to you what they're saying, Nazis, like many other authoritarian regimes, punished criticism of them. That has the exact same logic as yours, they think they're doing the right thing, thus criticizing them is promoting evil and thus should be shut down (another very visible example of this would be the various forms of "hurt sentiments" related issues in various Asian countries). This is why "intolerance of intolerance" is a fallacy. It presumes that those being accused of intolerance are doing it in bad faith rather than out of a genuine belief that they are doing the right thing.
All "punishments" are not the same. Free speech means that you cannot be punished by the government for your speech. You can't imprisoned or physically harmed. But people equate that with speech without consequence and, even more, that they are entitled to someone else's forum for their speech. In authoritarian regimes we are talking about real criminal-type punishments. You're purposely conflating these ideas together when they are different.
If nobody wants to listen to your terrible idea or give you a forum for them then that's their right. If people don't want to associate with you because of what you believe that is their right. If people want to convince others to not give you that forum, that's their free speech. We don't have to give a forum to the very ideas that lead to real punishment of criticism.
I think you know jack-shit about totalitarian regimes.
For example USSR used a shit-ton of unofficial punishment styles. E.g. small time dissidents would have a hard time getting a job. Employers would be in the know about certain people they should steer away from. But it was illegal to not work in USSR :) So technically nobody was punishing those dissidents. But they had a hard time to make ends meet AND they could be easily sentenced for being unemployed if they started causing trouble.
Influential groups of society punishing people for wrongthink is pretty damn close.
What is protesting then? If I protest against a Nazi speaker at a university, which side of this totalitarianism am I on? Am I the influential group punishing someone for wrongthink? The implication here is yes I am. So apparently a healthy "non-totalitarian" society cannot allow protest...
Many (if not 99%) of silenced speakers were not nazis. Unless everything right of X is nazi and everything left is commie. Which is bullshit.
The „influential group“ refers to „consequences“ like making people loose their jobs after spamming their employers for controversial (at best) speech.
Protest is fine. But preventing speech is fine. Do you want to stay outside of a meeting room with a banner? Cool. Do you want to politely ask uncomfortable questions? Great. Do you want to prevent those people from speaking? That's where it gets bad.
> Do you want to prevent those people from speaking?
Nobody is prevented from speaking. It's never been easier in the history of the world to get your message out. But again, nobody is required to have a forum to speak and I'm not required to give that forum directly or indirectly. I can also use my speech to convince others to not provide that forum.
> spamming their employers
That's harassment. Harassment is already bad on it's own it doesn't have to be mixed into this. But outside of harassment if an employer doesn't want to associate with someone because of their speech, they're free to do that.
When a group of people sets up a speaker and another group prevents speaker from making his speech... That is preventing from speaking.
Allowing to fire people because of their political views is a very fine line. Especially if they cleanly separate political and professional lives.
Few years ago we had an ex-politician fired from stocking shelves in a supermarket. Arguably dude did have some contraversial opinions in his heyday. But he left the politics long ago and was trying to make a fair living. Then his opponents from the other far- side tracked him down and „informed“ the employer about the dude's past.
> another group prevents speaker from making his speech... That is preventing from speaking.
How are they preventing it? Physically holding the doors closed?
> Allowing to fire people because of their political views is a very fine line.
You can hold whatever political views you want. But people want only the positive results of broadcasting their political views and none of the negative. One might want to change the law so short people can't vote -- so they broadcast that view far and wide to make that consequence happen. But then why should that person be completely sheltered from any negative consequences of trying to affect that change.
The fact is that social pressure is generally what keeps us from falling into barbarism. Can it be abused? Sure. Anything can be abused. Even what you're suggesting can and is being abused.
> How are they preventing it? Physically holding the doors closed?
Looks like that does happen. No? Or just pushing university administrations to cancel speakers they just approved.
> But people want only the positive results of broadcasting their political views and none of the negative. <...> But then why should that person be completely sheltered from any negative consequences of trying to affect that change.
In a democracy, people decide on political views by voting. As long as people keep their views to themselves and don't harass coworkers, why would we care what views they hold? Unless the person in question starts calling for physical abuse etc. But then it's a police matter, not lynching crowds.
That specific case is very wrong in many cases. Dude basically caved in and got out of politics. Yet his political enemies carried on. What's the lesson? If you ever say something contraversial, the only way is to double-down, because you'll be hunted forever? Is voicing a contraversial opinion in one's youth worse than doing heavy crimes? Since ex-prisoners re-integration is quite a big thing.
I don't understand the point. Make people scared to step out of line? Create whole underclass of people who have nothing to loose for the rest of their lives? Both options are straight out of USSR playbook.
> The fact is that social pressure is generally what keeps us from falling into barbarism. Can it be abused? Sure. Anything can be abused. Even what you're suggesting can and is being abused.
Today's social pressure is used for barbarism. And it's so twisted that it's not only not stopping good thing, but even pushing wrong things. E.g. we had LGBT protest. Some people held a counter-protest. Then one famous LGBT dude went to counter-protesters, forced himself onto one of the main counter-protesters and kissed him. Sexual assault in public right there. Yet many shitheads went on to proclaim how cool this is. And LGBT dude didn't get into any legal problems. Wonder what would happen if a counter-protester would do the same to some girl on the other side. Somehow I really doubt the consequences would be the same :) Sort of like black vs White capitalisation BS.
People act on their political views by voting -- the decided on political views through what they hear and read. We agree that as long as people keep their views to themselves we don't care what views they hold. And we obviously agree that harassment is bad, lynching is bad, sexual harassment is bad. These continued straw men don't really add anything here.
> E.g. we had LGBT protest.
In the same city where you were? Did you personally see this protest? What do the LGBT protesters want? And there were counter-protesters? What do the counter-protesters want?
Anyway, you've provided all these weird small examples but I don't really get the point. If you feel personally aggrieved by how society reacts to your views, I'm sorry too bad. Society is free to react negatively or positively! Complaining that people who really don't like terrible ideas should keep that to themselves isn't very convincing to me.
If you take all the harassment away, which with both agree is bad, then it's just two groups of people expressing their opinions. If university administrators are convinced to change their minds because of protests then that just means the protest worked. We both agree that protests are good and protests exist to achieve a goal. Not all protests are good and not all goals are good for society but that doesn't matter.
> People act on their political views by voting -- the decided on political views through what they hear and read. We agree that as long as people keep their views to themselves we don't care what views they hold. And we obviously agree that harassment is bad, lynching is bad, sexual harassment is bad. These continued straw men don't really add anything here.
Running for an office with political views is part of acting on their political views. If you keep your political views to yourself at workplace, but you run for an office with them... Should your coworkers care or not? Or are you allowed to have any political views as long as you don't participate in the democratical process? :)
> What do the LGBT protesters want? And there were counter-protesters? What do the counter-protesters want?
I'm not sure if exact topics change wether sexual assault is fine or not. But it was pro and against same sex civic partnership if it makes any difference for you.
> Complaining that people who really don't like terrible ideas should keep that to themselves isn't very convincing to me.
Political ideas should be discussed at political level. Debates, elections and so on. Not all-out war where stepping out of line may ruin one's life. Especially with today's highly polarized political climate where „terrible ideas“ label is attached very easily.
> If you take all the harassment away, which with both agree is bad, then it's just two groups of people expressing their opinions. If university administrators are convinced to change their minds because of protests then that just means the protest worked.
IMO it's closer to mob rule forcing employers or university administration act in one way or another.
In any case, if the opinions are not illegal (= promoting violence etc), refusing employment or forbidding on-campus speech for such opinions feels a wee authoritarian. There's a very very fine line between employers/universities rights and society forcing dominant narrative and sanitising public discourse.
Would you like to be fired if some idea you hold would be seen as „terrible“ by your employer (or a mob forces them to act so)? Given how what is acceptable changed in the past decade or two, who knows how it will change in next few decades.
> Should your coworkers care or not? Or are you allowed to have any political views as long as you don't participate in the democratical process? :)
If think your political views involve taking the rights away from your coworkers or even causing them to feel unsafe I think they have the right to care? If I'm your coworker and I want to take away your rights, I think you'd want to care about that right? You're not just going to sit on you ass like a chump and do nothing.
> But it was pro and against same sex civic partnership if it makes any difference for you.
Why would someone be against same sex civic partnership? If you're not homosexual, it doesn't impact you at all.
> Especially with today's highly polarized political climate where „terrible ideas“ label is attached very easily.
And yet terrible ideas seem more common these days than ever.
> IMO it's closer to mob rule forcing employers or university administration act in one way or another.
What's the difference between a peaceful mob and a protest? People getting together to affect change is a "mob" if you don't like why they're saying and a "protest" if you do.
> refusing employment or forbidding on-campus speech for such opinions feels a wee authoritarian.
Sure, and you know what is also authoritarian? Authoritarians sharing authoritarian ideas, convincing others, and implementing. If you're tolerant of intolerance than you up with nothing but intolerance and you achieve authoritarianism that way. It's not like there's no historical precedent for this. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
> There's a very very fine line between employers/universities rights and society forcing dominant narrative and sanitising public discourse.
Yes there is a fine line. I'm accepting of that fine line but you want to just eliminate it. It's not that you for for free speech rights, it's just that you want one group to have them and another group to be restricted from having them. You accept that speech is important but you don't grasp why -- because it's meant to accomplish something. Speech is powerful, useful, and even dangerous.
> Would you like to be fired if some idea you hold would be seen as „terrible“ by your employer (or a mob forces them to act so)?
I'm willing to accept that. I believe my own political ideas are open and accepting enough that my coworkers and employers wouldn't care. And if they did care, then I wouldn't want to be employed by them.
> Given how what is acceptable changed in the past decade or two, who knows how it will change in next few decades.
Haidt is referring to the heckling and deplatforming of speakers on (US) university campuses because some group disagrees with their message. And one aspect of "safetyism" invoked to that end is claiming that to allowing said (lawful, non-inciting) speech itself per se makes students "feel unsafe", aka the "words are violence" trope Haidt mentions frequently. See e.g. 2016 NYU The Forum: "Right to Say: Freedom, Respect, and Campus Speech" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTU3hxgr2Kc
(As to to who ultimately has agency in inviting/platforming/deplatforming/protesting/canceling speakers on US campuses, that's a very long-running story, can involve media, donors, boards of regents, not just the students etc. But yes, noone's compelling the students to attend and listen, and in any case they can speak in response.)
A 2020 article on "safetyism" as defined by Haidt and Lukianoff in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind: “Safetyism refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”
: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/safetyism... . One incident commonly cited was the 2015 Yale Halloween costume matter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Christakis#Yale_Hallo...
It's ironic to me that "safetyism" is mixed in with screen time because it's never been easier for children to have access to ideas. For example, every middle school teacher in the country knows about Andrew Tate through their students.
You're conflating many many things, and between university and middle school (ages 10-14) children, also conflating the huge difference between them theoretically having "access to" ideas or people, versus getting recommended that several times an hour by online recommender systems, feed from friends etc.
I think you're quite aware there are severely different legal considerations on content access to under-13s, 13-17s, and over-18s, in most jurisdictions.
I didn't conflate those things, the article did. I pointed out that in my original comment. But I'm not actually sure what you're trying to say; it seems like you're agreeing with me.
As for legal considerations, it doesn't appear to matter that much.
I disagreed emphatically with claiming "it's never been easier for children to have access to ideas."
Most children online consume media and follow recommendations, ads and friend feeds, rather than intentionally searching for topics in a structured and coherent way. Doomscrolling, bingeing, mindless zombie mode, whatever. We may not like it but you're aware that's the way it actually is.
As for legal considerations, it does matter: they define/limit the ability of YT, FB, TT et al. to build a profile and blend recommendations, ads and organic content. More so for under-18s and under-13s, more so where there are privacy laws (GDPR). If the US actually passed meaningful privacy laws this would have more effect.
Both “the coddling of” and “the righteous” mind were pretty poor scholarship. The kind where the researcher starts with the conclusion and then looks for evidence that confirms the theory. Good science should either neutrally look at the evidence or, when starting with a theory, search for disconfirming evidence. Haidt does neither.
Furthermore, Haidt struggles to accurately represent his ideological adversaries. Another red flag. Disagreement is natural but public intellectuals should be able to effortlessly make a strong case for the positions they have themselves rejected.
I find the people protecting the woke tribe in these comments to lack any subjectivity or critical distance whatsoever. Are they accurately representing their ideological adversaries with drive-by derision and dismissing out of hand an article that doesn't spend the majority of its time hand-wringing the issue like they do?
The more I see of these snide attacks, the less I believe there's any veracity at all in their belief system, which now spans an entire constellation of fringe politics turned mainstream.
There's nothing real or good about online wokeism but the male Twitter sphere isn't better. I think the shared thread is the way online interfaces lower the executive function barrier to reading (or watching videos) so much that people become willing to engage with worthless text. Judith Butler drew more attention than pea brains in the hundred page medium but no longer in the hundredths of seconds media.
I would also argue that overprotectionism is also one key factor in the teen mental illness, nowadays parents don't want their children to do risky stuff outside and wanted their children to stay indoor. It will surely lock-in their freedom to do many stuff and they have nothing to do but to surf on the social media.
This means although the children are less exposed to the external threats, they also have less experience to the outside world, which caused an asymmetric information flowing around in social media when they are surprised by some crazy act of their peers -- including flexing off with money, doing impossible stunts, and even pregnancy.
Keep in mind what you see on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok are shared globally, that means a 12 years old lad from Texas could be seeing another 12 years old do some crazy stuff on SF, but what I want to say is about kids should be interacting with their local peers more than the global ones. This way you won't taint the kids POV to be among the globals, or be the best of the best. Focus on the local community and parents should not be that paranoid to overprotect their children. If they need to get hurt, just let them get hurt in a controlled way. Just, let, them, be.
Overprotectionism implies controlling freedom, and the lack of freedom means lack of innovation and reflections, and will easily create a death spiral, that one of them descend into mental illness, and eventually many other horrible things.
Also, I think the core reason for any mental illness, at least from my own POV, is always about getting asymmetric information, which caused mental imbalances from within. But how do we get rid of asymmetric information or mental imbalances? No, I don't think you can...but if you could accept this fact, and you would be free from the mental illness hell.
Most of the West lost its traditional values. If there are no values to build upon, if you have no reference, if everything and everyone is the same, if right and wrong, good and evil are confused, if you have no compass, then it's very easy to get lost and become mentally ill.
Define "traditional" - do you mean USA in the 50s? What is traditional and what isn't changes with each generation - particularly in the western world and the USA, which are both on the forefronts of technological, intellectual, cultural and philosophical changes in the past 200-300 years.
The USA in particular, changes pretty radically with every generation as a different group of immigrants comes and changes the culture
lol, ok, never mind all the countless people the absence of these "values" are driving their childhoods, adolescence and lives into the ground or worse
edit:
Right, sorry, that was quite a reactive response on my side. I'll try to be constructive and foster conversation instead of just resorting to sarcasm: what's your point? are you seriously implying marriage and family are overall negative values?
words like "marriage" and "family" when wielded like this are effectively clubs and weasel words meant to induce an image of something akin to 50's propaganda posters of the happy american family living out their american dream, and imply that the people pointing out that's problematic are just being cynical nitpicky amoral misanthropes when really it's the people wielding them in this manner who are very selective about what people they mean to include, and very disingenuous about the many people they deliberately do not mean to include (and just their general agenda)
i understand you might perceive bad or hidden intentions, and i agree there's plenty of that around, but in this particular case, for myself, i'm just trying to communicate that i think marriage and family are good values that have been unfortunately very distorted and corrupted, and this having overall negative outcomes for society in general.
and definitely, most definitely no need to include or limit this to anything "american" whatsoever.
I first blame firstly parenting. People give their child an iPad and walk away.
I second blame introductions to education as a toddler. When you are a toddler and inspired to learn you grow and don't stop.
I third blame the use of social and personal ideals over community and connectivity.
I fourth blame the lack of independence given to a child to make mistakes and learn.
I fifth blame the lack of analogue input in a child's life. Interacting with physical objects can not be replaced with pads a person swipes on.
I sixth blame short form media. It is addicting way to consume information. It is also unfortunately a very unproductive way to consume information.
I seventh blame the lack of censorship information has on the web to dictate whether or not something provided is informative or brain mush. Like the difference between Smarter Every Day vs some stuff Logan Paul posts. I am not opposed to free speech but it is obvious that giving youth the ability to listen to factually incorrect people is bad.
I eighth blame social media it isn't as bad as the rest. It used be terrible, however parental controls in place very safe.
> Again , what changed since 2008? Why is this worse now?
Because of 16 more years of a downwards trend.
> were parents any better 50 years ago?
Probably not, but they didn't have iPads to give. They were probably as bad as now, but maybe pointing to better or higher standards. Since we're using generalisations here, I'd risk saying that generally speaking (in my view of South-Western Europe), a few decades ago it was less possible/socially accepted to become a 30-year-old useless bum. Nowadays I'm no longer surprised about having a conversation with a 20-something-year-old and finding out he doesn't quite understand the idea of the need to work in order to survive, let alone provide.
Of course, these are generalisations, but I'm afraid they are increasingly becoming indicatives of how things are.
Better in the sense that you didn’t learn to just passively consume from a screen and learned to be independent. I’m not convinced that parents becoming involved to the extent they are is actually a net positive. Kids don’t learn to be on their own, to think without a computer or their parents, and have every minute of their day mapped out.
> Kids don’t learn to be on their own, to think without a computer or their parents, and have every minute of their day mapped out.
I get what point you're trying to make, but while (especially) the lack of a father seems logically good for independence, overall the increase of absent fathers has had disastrous effects.
I definitely think kids need fathers around (I am a father myself and still debating the level of involvement that is useful or not). I’m just talking about the somewhat unavailable father of the 50s vs. parents of today who flip flop between micromanaging and having their kid stare at a video of Ms.Rachel instead of letting them have downtime and play on their own outside of a very protected area, not sure which is really worse developmentally
causes are a mix: smartphones, social media, doomscrolling habits, carbon climate crisis (and its dire implications). and the rise of the so-called Woke/DEI propaganda cult in academia. all add up
There could be a much easier explanation. Life in the past wasn't much easier, in fact, it was much harder and crazier. But no one really cared measuring the problem and it appeared it did not exist.
Life may have been harder and crazier, but the challenges people faced were far more local and solvable. One's community truly needed the upcoming generation of children to step up and help out with their sweat, blood, and tears to keep everything together. That infused purpose and meaning into the struggles.
Now a young person is hyper-aware of how large the world is, how small they are in relation to it, and how all of the big problems that command so much attention are completely beyond the scope of their influence (and are likely to be that way for their entire lives, outside of some astronomically unlikely events).
There's also a somewhat related argument to be made that with the homogenization and erosion of culture in the modern world. We've almost completely lost coming-of-age rituals where adults and elders in local communities induct children into the world of adulthood. Whether by design or by accident, this leaves more and more young adults feeling disconnected, purposeless, and adrift in the world. Which tends to leave many holes to be filled by consumerism and other potentially harmful tenets of modern society, which now includes social media addiction.
Durkheim, the founder of sociology, famously showed that Protestants, whose life was "easier" as they had fewer restrictions and norms to follow than Catholics, committed more suicides than Catholics. Similarly, suicide rates fell during times of war.
It greatly expands the diagnostic criteria associated with "self-harm" and will increase monitoring and diagnosis of these phenomena. Note that the suicide rate does not show this inflection, either in the US or internationally. An omission that makes this article intrinsically suspect.
Refinement and definition of diagnostic criteria change over time. A major change in the diagnostic criteria will result in a change in the profile of the diagnoses made against a population.
No malign intent nor conspiracy is required; we changed how we defined certain mental illnesses, and as a result the number and kind of diagnoses for those mental illness (and for mental health) change as professionals adopt the new standards.
It's not that there's an increase or a change in the actual mental health, but just that the numbers before and after are simply not comparable.
People pretend like this is a new startling development. But we are not even close to the youth suicides numbers of the 1880s. Luckily now we are talking about how we feel and try to get better, compared to the rest of human history. To me there is obviously no new epidemic, but just finally an acknowledgement of issues that has always been present.
> But we are not even close to the youth suicides numbers of the 1880s … To me there is obviously no new epidemic
Do we have any reason to believe that the suicide numbers in the 1880s are at all correlated with systemic factors that still persist? i.e. were people committing suicide for the same reasons people are today?
Without this answer, it seems very difficult to support the conclusion that there is “obviously no new epidemic”.
It’s also worth noting that:
1. The mental health epidemic people are increasingly concerned about isn’t just about suicide rates
2. Regardless of centuries past, current concerns are based on local trends, indicating that something is indeed changing
Yes, we’re talking more about mental health now more than ever. But this is not enough to account for recent trends.
I’d be curious to learn more about the time period you’re referencing and how you’re comparing the systemic factors to reach the conclusion that these are the same issues we’ve always faced.
At a minimum, it must be acknowledged that the context has completely changed, and even if we’re dealing with the same underlying psychological factors, the world context in which they’re surfacing must affect people in new ways that were not possible in the 1880s.
another thing to look at is mental health medicine that has came on market around 2010 or so. If 50 different pills all started getting marketed to everyone for anything remotely not flowers and sunshine then that could be a contributing factor too.
The answer you're looking for is that woke culture arrived. Your God is not dead, you've just abandoned him (again). Social media is obviously a catalyst for patterns of communicated harm that have always been around. The communists have been unraveling the nucleus of family and faith, to be replaced with isolated rage and hate, with government to provide 'proxy support', whereas once was family. We've been divided into us vs them teams on issues that used to bring harmony and coherence.
Damn, maybe there is just too many people now? and we're all connected all the time. The brain can only handle so much (much less than I think we admit).
partly ;) I do seriously wonder if our brains are just overloaded, the rest was various conspiracies I come across (what gave it away, the communists?)
After removing "woke" and "communist" as specific agents, would you still really mean all that as just a joke? You don't think there's at least a bit of it that's pretty close to the truth?
I don't think the problems are intentional, rather they are the unforeseen outcomes of rapid technological and societal evolution, of man leaving faith behind and discovering themselves insufficient. This only seems to be accelerating.
Likely due to algorithmic trash being pushed on them constantly. No surprise many of them think ai is intelligent or are obsessed with animal porn and anime.
Hyper-individualism in all spheres of life, magnified by anti-social technology. They are depressed because current life-form is depressing. Capitalism is pathologically tautological.
I agree that hyper-individualism is a big part of the problem. People need friendship and connection to be happy. If everyone is "doing their own thing" and looking after their own needs first, its a barrier to that. If you're depressed, going and helping someone else who is in need is often a good way to snap out of that depression (assuming its situational more than clinical depression). Even if the other person isn't obviously grateful, simply seeing that you made their life a bit better can put things in perspective, give yourself a purpose etc. Its often really low effort, e:g just actually bother to talk to someone , give them a cup of tea whatever. But people often fail to see this option that can make 2 people happy, because individualism gets in the way. People are almost embarrassed to offer or receive help and friendship, particularly in the US I feel ...
I know you're mud-slinging at capitalism, so I should recalibrate my expectations, but this is even worse than usual. What's "pathologically tautological"? So intrinsically tautological it's like a disease?"
I think it's the opposite of individualism. Individualism accepts some responsibility for risk, but we seem to be in a system where no risk is tolerable, and the government has to fix everything. It gives rise to learned helplessness.
I don't see social media as a technology for individualists either, because it's all about approval and homogenization. Individualism is actually antisocial at it's core, because it's about being yourself regardless of what anybody else thinks. It only seems like we have an individualist system because everything is on blast 24/7, but that's really just the shuffle of collectivists patting each other on the back in the public eye so that others can align their virtues with the current zeitgeist.
We don't have public places anymore where people can just be people away from the gaze of social media. Individualism requires learning who you really are, which means making mistakes, and that's difficult when a video on social media could make you a pariah outside of the confines of your local community.
Not a big fan of Heidt. Way too much political, unsubstantiated and handwavy rhetoric from him. And his track record has been entirely unconvincing.
The only reasonable way I can interpret his work is that of a ideologically driven puritan, trying to make the data fit his perception. In doing so, he often misses the forest for the trees.
In particular, this interpretation of teenage mental illness is predicated on data. But the data sucks. Why should we assume we have accurate data on mental illness? It's ridiculous when you consider our society's terrible history in dealing with this stigma. Sexist notions like female hysteria, gross misuse of sedatives and psychoactive drugs by medical charlatans, repression of discussion about mental illness, bias/inexperience/abuse by governmental and health care institutions, horrible conditions at sanitoriums, the list goes on. Give it another 100 years and maybe we can draw some better patterns.
In no particular order, here are some highlights on medical data and institutions in history...
1. The consensus on normal heart rate is still erroneously assumed to be 60-100 bpm. For over 100 years, this myth was predicated on poor data and grossly misinterpreted literature. Our current, best consensus based on better data is 50-90 bpm, though virtually all textbooks and educational programs have failed to update themselves. If we can't even get statistics on heart rates right, how are we supposed to get statistics on mental illness correct?
2. There is no consensus on average breaths per minute. Textbooks often contradict themselves, quoting different fabricated ranges for respiratory rates within the same page. Data in this area is sparse and and lacks adjustment for demographics. The most comprehensive data is from a study done in 1846... We just don't know because we haven't put in the rigorous effort to definitively identify this range. Again, this basic measurement is much easier than mental illness, and we haven't done it yet.
3. The most established field of medicine is considered to be Obstetrics. That is to say, this is the medical field with the oldest depth of knowledge that we consider to be accurate or useful. Which makes sense given the significance of managing childbirth for societies. And yet there are still severe deficiencies in this field. We have a long way to go in the most mature field of medical science, and an even longer way to go in every other field. In comparison, mental health was not even mentioned in writing until 1946.
4. Prior to the gross misuse of opioids perpetuated by the Sackler family, was the gross misuse of benzodiazepines (Xanax, Valium). Prior was of Barbiturates. Prior to that was alcohol. And countless more medications in between those broad categories. Humanity has abused substances to numb itself from crippling anxiety for centuries, and in the modern sense has almost always sought to mass market these drugs before careful consideration of their appropriate use. Each medication was so abused that each generation has their own idioms and memes regarding their misuse.
I'm certain that we can do better. It's just going to take time, and Heidt's work just seems like reading tea leaves and putting people in arbitrary pigeon holes.
There's that, there's also a better understanding of mental illness, so less if it goes unrecognized, undiagnosed, and unrated.
Growing up, I was an intelligent kid (if a bit shy) who just needed to be more organized.
Today, I'm an AuDHD[1] adult who just needs to have others to have different expectations in some cases, and just benefits from having access to Adderall for some of the others.
In college, I was just a sad kid who thought fantasizing about near-death scenarios were something everyone does.
Today, I am certainly not doing that, in no small part thanks to Sertraline, 100mg, and therapy.
The author presents a good case that this time, there's something different than before. An increase in understanding and rates of reporting does not account for increase in suicide rates, for example.
But the bucket mental illness epidemic in the title (and things like the "TikTok autism/ADHD" epidemic) are partially attributed to that.
Then, there's the COVID pandemic lockdowns which pushed many people to their limits, and resulted in a higher rate of both diagnosis/treatment and consequences of mental illness (or unwellness, if I may).
Then, there's the simple fact that kids in the US are growing up in a world with huge economic uncertainty, little chance of making enough money to become homeowners, the potential of nuclear war being discussed in the media, the potential for civil war being nonzero, ballooning healthcare and education costs, climate chnage not being addressed, and...
And after accounting for all that, we may come to the conclusion that it's not that there's anything wrong with the kids or the modern way of life (with the Internet, cell phones, and all that), but that our entire society is fucked in very traditional ways.
The proper comparison should be to the US circa Great Depression, and even then, the possibility of planetwide environmental collapse or nuclear war was not on the minds of anyone.
Now both are a factor (between Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk, we have pretty much the entire world covered), which is giving an extra push to people who aren't well to begin with.
As a Ukrainian-American Jew, I can absolutely say that the war in Ukraine and Israel has affected every aspect of my life in a major way (helping MIL evacuate from Kyiv being the most direct one, survivor's guilt being one of the hardest ones to deal with).
But I guess that I'm not the only one by far.
And I believe we should not be talking about the "Teen Mental Health Epidemic", but rather about how our fucked up world is fucking up the kids.
It's on us to fix the world, rather than the kids (as the word "epidemic" may suggest).
By most of every possible measure, the world was far more messed up in the past. You speak of things like nuclear war causing anxiety, yet 70 years ago kids would regularly have nuclear attack drills (akin to our fire drills) while watching videos about how to respond to nuclear attacks, and people building nuclear shelters may have been eccentric, but nothing beyond that. Go further back and we get WW2, WW1, Great Depression, Civil War, and so on endlessly. These are all events that make any of our big-event concerns today look trivial.
Basically, I don't think you can attribute the skyrocketing rate of various forms of mental illness to better diagnoses. And if big-event stressors (as opposed to things like internet) were the main cause, we should be having far better outcomes than in the past.
>70 years ago kids would regularly have nuclear attack drills (akin to our fire drills)
Yes, but the economy was doing better.
>Go further back and we get WW2
Before the war, most people were not expecting an apocalypse-level event that it was, and there were no nukes.
>These are all events that make any of our big-event concerns today look trivial.
You either underestimate today's threats and concerns, aren't affected by them, or both.
>Basically, I don't think you can attribute the skyrocketing rate of various forms of mental illness to better diagnoses.
That's what I said too. But it is a factor that must be accounted for, especially when comparing to the past when the statistics on mental health were not collected the way they are now.
Suicide statistics in particular.
>And if big-event stressors (as opposed to things like internet) were the main cause, we should be having far better outcomes than in the past.
This doesn't seem to follow from anything you said.
Maybe it's because with corporate Capitalism, we've given up all our freedoms for comfort and safety. Comfort and safety are nice and all, but when we are no longer free to exist in reality, with other people, we get depressed.
Our technological overlords (Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Epic Games) have engineered digital life for young people to be as "engaging" as possible for their own benefit. We spread out to the suburbs and there's no where to go without the automobile overlords. Privatization of everything means teens have no where to go, except to buy shit at the mall. And who wants to spend life buying shit? The life of distraction and engagement makes companies billions of dollars, forces people to conform to their frameworks (because guess what, everyone else is doing it, and if you don't join in you're even more bored and lonely than everyone else), and kills all freedom.
Life in the west is materially very comfortable. But the premise of playing in real life, of hanging out, isn't cool because no teen is doing that. They're trapped by potent digital media wasting all their time. Life is somehow more boring than it used to be. Maybe because seeing crazy videos or playing super fun video games makes everything else seem boring. It makes reality seem boring.
We're losing our freedom to giant corporations. I think Capitalism is a good system, but corporate Capitalism kills freedom. Oppression by Corporatocracy is killing people.
As a teen, I see this struggle. Hopefully, what I'm working on can fix this exact, specific issue. I'll launch to HN in about a week.
https://jaredmantell.com/blog/1
> I think Capitalism is a good system, but corporate Capitalism kills freedom.
How do you picture capitalism operating such that corporations don't emerge? In my mind I can't separate the accumulation of capital from corporate capitalism, at least given sufficient time.
I mean corporations in the multi-billion to trillion dollar definition rather than a small mom-and-pop "corporation". For one I think antitrust legislation should be more thoroughly prosecuted - most notably I think network effects beyond a certain threshold should not be legal. For example, Hacker News has some kind of network effect - network effects are invariably going to happen in society.
But the network effect that Instagram/Facebook/Discord/Twitter/etc. has reaches so far that any teen or young person that wants to be part of digital life must use these corporate ran companies. Having a stronger world wide web and a weaker app based internet would water down some of these network effects.
Automobile companies have network effects because of their historical lobbying that made teen life in the suburbs nearly impossible without a car. I'd like to remove money from politics to remove a lot of these incentives big corporations have to protect their bottom line.
Now... what about a regular company like Nike or Proctor and Gamble or UPS? I think the way you don't create mega corps like those is to prevent globalization with these companies. Keeping supply chains within their own countries would help, for example. Keeping companies like Meta operating within the US or even within California only would create much more competition, and make many smaller companies much wealthier. An Instagram like app operating in only New York would make it much easier for social media competition within New York because there would be limits to how large that app can get. Trying to compete as a new social media company with Instagram is nearly impossible when you're up against a multi billion dollar company with a billion users.
These are all just random theories from some guy (me) on the internet, who knows if any of these would actually work. But I guess the point is I believe in more smaller markets rather than fewer, larger markets.
Jon Haidt's best correlation for social media was roughly 15%. Practically saying it's not social media, but he challenges those to figure out a better answer.
>not just the rise in depression and anxiety, but also the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.”
Social media is helping the situation, not making it worse. Though also depends on which social media, there's a bit of a censorship problem with some of them.
I look at the previous generation, how did they socialize? Considering my local city.
Arcades basically don't exist anymore.
Bars are in steep decline because of >100% alcohol taxes and drunk driving laws. $9 beers are the cheap brands and the police park themselves outside bars and pull over you because you might be drunk driving.
Church is non-existent. government shut down many churches in violation of freedom of religion. Church attendance is at record lows. Someone is burning down churches, government doesn't care to investigate.
Clubs were mostly shutdown by the government because vice laws, sexism, etc. Illegal to operate a gentlemans club these day. Strip clubs basically dont exist anymore because of the government. Cannabis clubs are illegal.
Libraries and community centres aren't welcoming to people like me. I cant even go with my 4 year old daughter? I literally do IT work for these libraries but I'm accused of being a child predator and must identify myself and let them record my ID or I must leave? So I leave?
Malls literally have anti-socializing laws. How dare you 'loiter' aka socialize.
Parks now have a huge list of government laws restricting their use. Pretty rare to see other people at parks.
Hell I look at how I socialized, I had a road hockey game going practically all the time. Random boys would be walking by, we'd ask them if they wanted to join. They'd run home and get a stick and come back.
That's illegal now, it's unsafe for kids to play road hockey... I literally haven't seen kids playing road hockey in ages.
Skatepark? They literally built them and then fenced them off because of the hooligan kids... then stopped building them.
So you want to go for a bike ride? But you legally must have a bell/horn, helmets, and kids even legally are required to have knee and elbow pads. Oh and you're limited to 10km/h. Virtually everyone ignores these laws. I did 800km this summer. My daughter got to play at so many empty parks all summer.
Want to walk your dog, you have to keep them on a leash, pick up their poo, dog must be muzzled, only certain breeds are allowed to be outside, you're not allowed to play fetch, or chase or anything like that, on certain hot days you must legally carry water and a dish for your dog, and your dog can't bark too much or that's excessive noise law. So what do you do instead? You stay at home.
Government has basically outlawed in person social interaction. But humans require in person social interaction. Social media is where they are going to get some social interaction, not that it's fulfilling.
I believe the big 2016 bump is due to Trump. Does that have international impact? Since I'm German and still had daily news about his behavior I say yes. As far I can remember we never had so many news about any other US president. I mean Trump was very active on social media and was very attention seeking, much more than other presidents.
Why would Trump cause depression? First of all he basically said all the things young people care about (climate change, environment, social justice etc.) are nonsense. Secondly his "diplomacy" was pretty aggressive. None of us non-US citizens wants to get drawn into a (possibly nuclear) war. Thirdly he caused a very big divide, not only in the US population but worldwide. Everything has become black and white. You're (as seen from the proponents of the other side) either a weak woke justice warrior soy boy snowflake or an old white racist Nazi hillbilly sociopath. There is no "gray" zone.
In addition to that the divide, his "free speech" approach made many topics that were previously taboo (also outside the US) daily topics again. Extreme nationalists but also extreme antifascists dared to speak out loudly again worldwide. Their extreme plans cause anxiety and stress.
Or we can say that the massmedia landscape is shaping a generation of people incapable of handling dissenting opinions in a constructive way, everything is becoming emotionally charged and taboo to question; in an era of unlimited access to knowledge we are relegating ourself in more and more extremist cults, wheter reactionary or progressive
I see it both ways. If you are the type of person Trump targeted with his insults and attacks, which is a lot of people in the US, and you're young and don't really 'get' the political situation, that could cause some significant psychological distress. Imagine you're 17 and the president says "Mersenne and people like them are destroying our country".
So first time poster. Couldn't flicking believe thath Haidt, who I wrote about in my Phil masters is continuing this line of simplicity.
The pressure children especially teen girls especially is super cultural. Invention of social media didn't make girls more depressed but allowed new manifestations of all the toxic shite in our society.
The solution is to change our fricking societies not to let assholes and racists to expound stupid theories on campuses, or to take girls phones away and keep them more pure.
Yup, noticed this part too and realized the whole post is a joke. It's hard to take someone seriously when they show their ulterior motive in the first paragraphs.
Does anyone know of any studies that look at rates of cigarette smoking, or activation of indoor smoking bans with respect to the data on mental illness? Most of the west banned indoor smoking around 2006-2008, roughly around when smartphone usage started to explode. AFAIK you can still smoke indoors in China--do they show the same trends? What about Nevada? Did any jurisdictions ban indoor smoking a few years before or after the rest of the west and show a graph shifted on the x axis?
This isn't a joke post--cigarette smoking promotes social bonding and nicotine is a mood stabilizer. It's irresponsible to not consider the effects of smoking bans on mental health.
Of course there are many health and aesthetic downsides to cigarette smoking but we should look at the data.
I don't think Haidt has a political agenda. I've been following his work on this since he published his book on it a decade ago. He has a whole theory about why teen mental health went off a cliff in the last decade, and the theory is basically about technological change and really isn't anything political.
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.