Suicides Have Increased. Is This an Existential Crisis?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This strikes a chord for me.
Several years ago my wife and I baked holiday cookies, wrapped them up into clear gift bags with a bow, and went door to door at our townhome/condo complex knocking attempting to spread some holiday cheer.
We had 5 doors closed on us before we gave up.
The immigrant family next door invited us in for a chat, everyone else peaked through a cracked door and waved no thanks.
My mother knew the names of everyone on her block. But it was a different time, people moved into a house, stayed there, raised a family, their kids grew up, and came back to visit their parents. As a kid I went over to the house of the same neighbor my mother visited as a kid.
Now days? Everyone moves. A lot. Chasing jobs, dreams, hopes, and aspirations. We aren't in one place long enough to form a sense of being or community.
I'm actually tackling this with my startup (linked in profile), I'm personally sick and tired of wandering the streets of my city, not knowing the people I pass by.
It does get lonely. The big tech cities are worse to some extent. I'm in Seattle, widely considered to be one of the hardest to meet people in cities in the country. In the dozen years since I've graduated college, I have made 4 solid friends (3 moved away). Something needs to change, we can't all survive being left adrift through life.
What do you mean by this? Were they polite about it?
That also sucks that your friends have moved away. The past two cities I've moved to, I've found weekly meetup.com groups for one of my interests and I've made some great friends that way. Many of my friends in my last city also moved away. We've been in California for about 4 years now and nobody has moved away yet, although I'm sure it will happen.
I live in a nice neighborhood (single family homes around here are 7 figures), and I could see people wearing work badges showing that they were at the same company as me! The behavior I saw was just surreal.
Shortly before I moved in, my complex held a potluck. No one came!
But yes, it gets sad. Not wanting to buy the cookies is not an excuse to not saying hi casually.
I don’t charge my elderly neighbour when I have her around for drinks, I don’t charge when I mow next door’s lawn because I’m doing mine and I may as well. They don’t charge me when they look after my cats while I’m away, and just as I don’t charge them for apples from my trees they don’t charge me for cherries from theirs.
Not everything in life is mercenary, nor should it be.
You see people with packages knocking at your door you think they're selling them and you close the door before they have a chance to explain themselves.
"No thanks", closed door.
People used to do something very similar to my grandma a lot, say they are there for something neighbourly and then put pressure on her to buy something when she interacted with them for a bit. It worked on her too, even though she never actually wanted to buy something.
I would have said no thanks and closed the door too and I don't have a problem associating with my neighbors at all! In fact, throughout the years I've shared with neighbors baked goods and beers, let them borrow tools, helped shovel snow, invited the young single one to "Friendsgiving dinner"[1] to make sure he had somewhere to go, offered help with various tasks, etc.
Most people want to have a bit of a rapport with someone before they are cool with unsolicited baked goods at 8 at night. Especially when you're knocking on people's doors, it can be very unsettling to be interrupted from what you are doing like that. At 8pm people with younger children are in the middle of putting them to bed, it's not like they have the energy to deal with potential scammers at the front door at that point.
What would have been appreciated is if you put the bags in a basket in the hallway with a sign "Merry Christmas from Joe Bob and Sally Doe in unit xxxx!"
[1] This is Thanksgiving dinner except with friends instead of family.
Well, you do that. I open my door to my neighbours, and don’t assume they’re paid schills. What a sad world you must live in.
Perhaps if you opened the door once in a while you might meet people, find new experiences, live a little - but if you assume that everyone is out to “get” you, then the only person diminishing your life is you.
And yes, I’ve ended up chatting to pushy door to door salesmen. I don’t buy their shit, and politely tell them that if they do come back, I’ll waste their time again.
In both Portland and San Francisco my wife and I make an effort to regularly invite people over for BBQs, and introduce ourselves to new faces we meet on the street.
Don't get me wrong though we had someone close the blinds on us and not answer the door while handing out cookies when we moved in to SF. But, it was a 1/10 experience. Most folks were warm and welcoming.
Moving around a lot as a kid I I have experienced this lack of neighborliness in one out of the four houses I lived in. It was a large planned cookie-cutter suburb where there were no parks reachable by a >10m walk, and no stores reachable by >15m walk. The outcome was that you loaded into the car in the garage and drove to your destination rarely running into people.
Seattle is weird enough that there is a dedicated Wikipedia article about it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Freeze
It is hard to explain this in a way that is believable.
As an example of how this works, my wife and I have tickets to go to an event with another couple. We need to discuss the logistics of transportation and timing, so 3 weeks in advance I send out a text asking if we can come over to chat about things (we live close by). He says sure, but they are driving home right now, he'll text us when he gets home and we can come over. No text is ever sent.
A few days later, I send another message, asking if it is a good time to come over. "Sure, we're not busy, come on over anytime!"
This couple is not especially flaky, for Seattle this is normal behavior.
It is how Seattle works. Planning the smallest of things is an exercise in frustration. If I am with a group of more than 4 people and a decision needs to be made on food, I just make it by fiat, because otherwise there is a non-trivial chance that restaurants will closed before people ever decide on where to go. (After the second time of not getting to eat, I just started doing the dictator thing.)
This is not just my experience, I have multiple friends (mostly from out of town), who report the same thing. Getting plans here nailed down is impossible.
(Plug: My startup aims solves this problem!)
2017: https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/12/power-to-the-people/
2013: https://qbix.com/blog/2013/04/23/a-new-kind-of-platform/
Low cost of living, a great engineering town, and a small(er) town feel.
I have no sense of neighborhood in the bay area and stories like this make me want to move even more.
I wrote a lot more than this. Erased it. Wrote again. Erased.
I don't know if what you're talking about existed other than a short time in the last century. Really just two or three generations had that kind of life. What was life like before that? What can we do to change it? Is changing it for the better?
I'm a technologist at heart, so the answer is always more technology! :)
I think I have a unique take on the problem and how to solve it, inverting the existing model for how the online->offline meeting of people works.
All in all, I'm hoping that the work I do can make people happier!
I've also been discouraged because it seems like very many people simply do not want to meet the people around them. For instance, check out this recent thread on the SeattleWA subreddit about talking on the bus [1]. I was kind of flabbergasted by how much people hate it when a stranger talks to them.
It's like there are just too many people and no one has time to connect with any of them in an unplanned fashion.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/8stzn9/featuring...
Before smart phones it was different. Now an interruption is a distraction from our magic dopamine granting machines.
As someone who worked on early smartphones, I feel a twinge of guilt[0]. The addictive nature of the technology really has destroyed any semblance of mental down time that used to exist.
[0] I'd feel more, but Windows Phone didn't turn into a raging success, so I'll let the Android and iOS engineers contemplate the philosophical implications of their code!
When walking (pay attention to the traffic!). When riding the bus. When doing pretty much anything.
It does get boring after a while, to me at least. And looking at nature or other stuff is good.
But no, some people want to stay plugged 100% of the time in some silly freemium game.
Not for me. Crippling social anxiety means that anyone unknown talking to me causes panic. Especially on a bus in London which are reknowned for their, uh, "colourful" characters who may well be a harmless eccentric but could equally well be Stabby McStabberson or Robber McFeralYoot.
But I think one can reasonably ask whether suicide rates have in tracked isolation and alienation overall. Isolation and atomization are a fairly old story, after and while, I wouldn't object to claims they've increased, it's hard to see suicide as a good proxy for these things.
Wikipedia's statistics seem suicides now as significantly greater than the early 2000's but still less than the 1970s. Can we really say anything specific about that?
None of this is saying you're on the wrong track. I simply would like to see better measures for these phenomena.
I spent more time than I care to think about in the sort of town where everyone who knew you had known you forever. And probably your family. And probably had opinions about your church. I'm absolutely certain that many of them loved living there, and that plenty of people would. For my own part, I found it stifling.
After that, living in a place where my community is something I assemble myself from the people I choose is amazing. I have a sense of belonging. I have a home and a community. It's just not defined by the archaic assumptions around immediate physical proximity.
Also, Americans have always been a footloose lot. If anything, we collectively move a lot less now - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189...
I'm absolutely sure that the narrative of how people are moving now like never before feels true. It carries with it all the right emotions. It just could be more congruent with facts.
I'd rather not get Talked About so staying anonymous is better.
Of course, I'm sure my current neighbours Talk About me sometimes, about how I don't really do much besides leave and get home every day.
Decade later I found myself in situation opposite to that.
* Be in new area, knowing few people.
* Find things you like that are at least moderately social.
* Do said things, both to enjoy them and to meet people.
* Having made some friends, either attend or organize events to turn a collection of friends into a social circle.
Now you have a nascent community. If it works, it will tend to grow over time. It can take time and be error-prone, but also sometimes you get lucky and stumble into an existing social circle that fits you.
It's worked out OK for me in a half-dozen places over the past ten years since college.
I have no interest in meeting my neighbors. Having them come over unannounced would literally ruin my day.
It's not about you. It's about me wanting to choose when, where, and who to socially interact with.
You aren’t prepared for normal life and need help.
Of course, whether or not that is a healthy skill to have is a separate problem (I think it is). In this case your response is too extreme though.
My father grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Virginia that had a very tight-knit community. Kids running around, everyone knew each other, etc. My grandparents (who've since passed) when I'd see them would talk about how it didn't feel like a community anymore. There weren't really kids and families anymore, just old people.
I grew up 5 minutes away and never felt much of a sense of community in my own neighborhood. My neighbors were mostly old people and I probably wouldn't have even recognized them.
The two places I've lived where I felt a strong sense of community were the college town I went to college in, and rural Japan where I'd spend a month out of my summers as a child living with my grandparents and attending school. In the latter the school went out of their way to make sure I had friends since I was the only foreigner there (eg. I remember a teacher literally telling the kids in class to hang out with me and invite me over to play. In America that would never happen). All the kids in each neighborhood walk to school together every morning so that helps as well. So does being able to bike/walk everywhere and not being dependent on a parent to drive you.
It's definitely tougher to meet people after you graduate school. I think a lot of people close themselves off once they enter the "real world". It's a shame.
No, This is just factually incorrect.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189...
>NOV. 16, 2016 —The percentage of Americans moving over a one-year period fell to an all time low in the United States to 11.2 percent in 2016, according to tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.... “People in the United States are still moving, just not to the same extent as they did in the past,” David Ihrke said, a survey statistician in the Journey-to-Work and Migration Statistics Branch.
Is it growing? Shrinking? The data you link says nothing, since it is just YoY mobility data. People moving in that year was at an all-time low. But this does not preclude, e.g. average five-year mobility for simultaneously being at an all-time high.
This isn’t a problem, except that you so assuredly state that the parent comment is “factually incorrect” while not actually providing data that would back up that claim.
Its also so to some extent capitalism. You tend to worry about yourself above everything else there is.
(One of the many reasons I’d consider a move.)
I recently hired for a temporary junior position and the applicants blew me away. It’s the first time I’ve truest vitnessed the product of the competitive state, these 22-24 year olds were spending all of their time trying to prepare for the job market, not because they seemed to want to, but because they didn’t want to fall behind their peers, as one of them said bluntly when I asked why she never seemed to take time off.
I can’t imagine how terrible that constant performance pressure must be. Especially if you’re not in the top 80%.
Ironically I can’t really think of a time where things were really better than they are now. So I’m not entirely sure where this pessimism and performance anxiety comes from. Rising inequality is a problem though, if left unchecked it almost always leads to violent instability.
How can you consider human history up to this point when such details are almost certainly lost to time? Did the fall of the (western) Roman empire, for example, really not spawn generations of pessimism? Or maybe it did but those folks unable to document it? I bet a large portion of Europe was pessimistic during WW2.
We don’t have a very good view on how the mood was in the Roman Empire, as most information on commoners come from a few lines of text on their burial pottery, so it’s hard to say much about that. It probably wasn’t fun to be poor though.
I can’t remeber either of those periods, and I was making a statement from my own world view, which is obviously anecdotal and may be flawed.
Your urban existential chrisis is simply alien to your average Italian farmer who lives in a neighborhood which hasn't changed much in the past two centuries.
Not in recent history. In US history, you have to go back to about 1880 to see such wealth concentration. And that was a time of much greater general economic growth.
What's discouraging today is that a lot of long-term trends that haven't declined in a century are headed down. Even population is dropping in much of the developed world. In the US and UK, the new generation is doing worse than its predecessors. That's very unusual without a war.
We have more productive capacity than we know what to do with, and no clue how to organize a society to use it effectively.
Do you really get existential anxiety from the knowledge that others' lives are improving faster than yours? Would it help if they did it in secret? Perhaps it is the activists yammering on about wealth inequality who are causing the actual problem here.
I found that social media let me to regularly compare myself with friends, and feel like I was also being evaluated... after explaining why I shut down my accounts, I learned many of my friends felt similarly.
It doesn't help that everyone's social lives are a clixk-away. When someone's feeling down, they can passively scroll through "evidence" supporting those emotions - compared to talking to people, or even imagining their lives (actively thinking).
I still use it to follow and connect to people I don't know in fields I'm interested in.
How about literally all of history?
I think you mean top 20%? Top 80% means you're not in the lowest 20%.
The cutest response that kind of summarized the attitude I feel I get we lately heard from a school intern on his last day, age 14 in our company-wide slack:"I loved being surrounded by so many nice people... ...if I ever have to work, I would like to work for a company like yours." He was an exception though and very diligent trying to help wherever he could, but It caused quite some chuckles.
I interviewed for two jobs there and then gave up on Frankfurt.
Management still does not realize or don't want to acknowledge how expensive this city is.
If I would keep going to interviews you can bet your ass my first question would be about money. Because after the answer I know if you are living in reality or living in a dream world and we can end it there.
A lot of other people are poor. I promise.
There are EU citizens in their mid-twenties born during the war.
If (and that's a giant "if" considering its fragile state of the moment) Serbia becomes the next EU member (optimistic estimate is 2025), the most recent conflict will shift to late 90s, and you will again have people in their mid-twenties born during the conflict.
That's really not that long.
Then an interesting tidbit would be if people are struggling mentally as much as they do in north EU or US?
I believe what OP is referring to is that people think in relatives such that they compare how their life is to others/the past. With no bad wars in most countries recently to compare against horrific times, everyone is comparing themselves to everyone else's life hence making them unhappy despite the good times we actually are having nowadays. This also somewhat aligns with the many studies showing some of the downsides of social media.
"It always works out" seems to be enough for many people (typically, those for whom it has worked out), but for those who know that, actually, no, it doesn't "always work out", an actually plausible reason is often required. And for others, even that isn't enough.
This seems a bit coarse. Working hard to move from the lower class to solidly middle class is not guaranteed, so the pursuit of that is based on both hope and knowledge. However, if the statistical likelihood of this move begins decreasing, and simultaneously the rates of people moving in the opposite direction is also rising, one could argue that a natural response would be for "hope" levels to decrease.
My life is amazing. If it gets really horrible, I think I can handle it because I see so many examples of other people handling it. I saw some comments of people's attempts on the web to follow super-cheap diets as an experiment. Other people wrote comments about how those people were wasting money by buying organic eggs, not buying and pre-soaking beans instead of buying canned beans, etc. Yeah, if necessary, I think I can do that. I lived a whole summer on instant noodles once. I think I can do it again.
OK, move to the next level. I see people making less than $1000 USD per month in China and still able to raise a kid. They eat rice and veggies every day, living costs can be low if you want them to be. Yeah, I think I can do that. My wife prefers to be mostly vegetarian, so I'm halfway there. Most dinners, we literally only eat some leafy greens and cabbage, and maybe some rice.
OK, move to the next level, I volunteered in villages where living standards are super low. Sanitation can suck. But they make it work. If they can do it, why can't I? I've done it for a short-term period before. Can I do it for a long-term period? If I'm forced to, why not?
OK, move to the next level. War, genocide, torture, the works. Many people don't survive that stuff. Some do. How the heck do I look at what they go through and think that my life sucks and there's no hope for the future? I am endowed with a great education, a job that pays my bills, and self-confidence that I can make it in any situation and any environment, no matter how bad it gets.
So two things here. First, everything is a matter of perspective. I don't know why people think I'm an idiot for thinking my life would be great even if I was forced to take a crap in a hole in the dirt where there's no plumbing. If they can do it and still be able to laugh and be happy, why can't I?
Second, I think the environment thing is huge. I can understand why people who are stuck in certain environments can never get the mindset necessary to escape it. Inner city gang problems, extreme poverty, etc, etc. There is some systemic crap in society that really stops people from realizing their potential and getting the confidence to even step outside their comfort zone. I don't know the answer to that, and smarter minds than me have tried to figure it out.
Loneliness is a thing too. How the heck did we get from the place where it's great to know your neighbours to neighbours don't want to know each other, as others are commenting? Why is it so hard for people to make friends, mate, etc? I get there are hard issues in our society that people haven't been able to figure out.
BUT... I've always thought to myself, "eh, could be worse" and I've always joked with other people, "hey, I'm still alive!" And people think I'm an idiot for considering that I'd be OK taking a crap in a hole in the dirt with no plumbing. In the meantime, I get really annoyed when people talk about their first world problems. Yes, I can be hypocritical about this too, of course. I have my own first world problems like wishing I could find a job I enjoy more. Life goes on.
On some level, humans thrive under hardship. Social cohesion goes up, meaning and purpose comes easy. People who lose their job become less happy, and do not recover until they get a job again. Bill Gates wakes up and goes to his job, not because he needs money but because he needs to matter.
This worries me about AI and automation, universal basic income is needed, but doesn't solve people's need for having a purpose.
This is just scratching the surface. Why do people that lose their job become less happy?
I think it's much more likely a combination of stigmatization, uncertain access to basic needs, and social isolation (friends and family are probably working after all). That the job itself is the sole, or even the main, purpose provider doesn't seem to hold up imo. I think that furthering the skin deep idea of job = purpose isn't helpful in societies obsessed with work.
Some thing that might be possible is to provide training to police so that they don't kill people who are mentally distressed.
It's a bit worrying that this article doesn't mention any definitions or differences in counting over years.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170308114709.h...
Google "gut brain axis"
As Nietzsche observed, "he who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
IMO that's exactly it. At certain point I decided that I will work both harder and smarter because I like money and the peace of mind and freedom they enable... but in the end all my aspirations for changing the world for the better won't ever materialize, I am pretty sure of it.
So in the end it turns out that a happy philosophy would be something like in the "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy":
"Just do what makes you happy and don't worry about the world."
Even that is pretty hard nowadays because we constantly get bombarded with comparisons. The media REALLY loves turning people on each other.
It's short and very inspiring.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl-ebo...
He has also been a frequent podcast guest asked of his opinions on the recent school shooting trend.
While Junger is not a classically trained psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist he is a keen observer of human group behaviour.
His argument is that people need meaning, people need purpose, and most importantly people need to belong.
I would agree 100%
Secondly, there is so much more entertainment now than there used to be. When I was a kid, there was maybe one night/week where something was on TV that I actually wanted to watch. Movies were rented once/week max. So, the rest of the time was mostly spent playing with kids on our block... and our parents would have a beer with the other parents at the same time. It was cheap, fun, and more importantly for our context... there wasn't anything better to do anyway. It was plain simple truthful fun. It was real.
Fucking too. I think people fucked more back then.
Our transition to the mass consumption of entertainment that we have now, including hacker news to some degree, presents an even bigger problem... lies. Plain simple truthful fun is much harder to come by now. The Joneses (or Kardashians) are on your TV all the time on every channel. Mostly unobtainable celebrity lifestyles stream to your pocket in real time. And if nothing good is on in real time then you can consume every night of your next two months streaming 7 seasons of a new show. I know my wife and I definitely have less sex because Game of Thrones and other TV shows are better than most movies. I hate to admit it because it sounds sad, but it's also our choice, we have less sex than we would if TV wasn't so damn good. It's not better than sex, but it's easier to do. You can drink wine while you're doing it. At the end of a long day, you can wind down instead of winding up. It doesn't take any effort, and everything else worthwhile, like talking to your neighbors, is harder than winding down. It is work. You have to think. It shouldn't be that way, but it's just not as relaxing as watching TV or reading hacker news.
Nobody leaves their house anymore. When I was a kid, there were people outside constantly. Nobody in my neighborhood even mows their grass anymore, it's all lawn care services. Nobody does shit that they don't have to do. Kids too. My kids are young, but if I let them start the day watching TV they never want to stop and go outside. I rarely see other kids outside playing anymore. My friends with teenagers say their kids have no desire to get their drivers license, they like being at home, watching youtube, playing video games and texting with friends. Even the number of teens having sex is way down. Even horny teenagers aren't fucking as much anymore!
That's because the entertainment itself is part of the problem. It's good. It's really good. "Binge watching" sounds like an unhealthy disorder because it is an unhealthy disorder. Even "reality tv" isn't real. What? The things they market as real aren't real! Then the lie takes a break to pay the bills through advertising and it's even more lies. Now, don't get me wrong, I've worked in Advertising and there's no grand conspiracy to try and control people, everyone in that industry is just working their ass off to do the best job they can like everyone else in every other industry. If you go to the gym, the girl with the nice boobs -- they might be fake, or that guy with the muscles you want -- he might be doped up. Everything is out of control.
So, it's no wonder people can't find purpose and are killing themselves -- they can't make sense of this world and that is one of the few things they can do that they know is real. They feel out of control and taking their own life is one thing they can do, it's the final and ultimate way to beat this world and prove that they really do have some control.
I used a lot of hyperbole and generalizations but I think this one is true: we need to spend less time with our screens and more time outside with our friends and family. Good luck convincing them.
Find or start a weekly meetup.com group for something you're interested in. Go every week. Within months you'll have friends. I've done it in a couple cities now and it works great. Any adults who are new to your city are in the same boat -- it's hard to make friends, but this plan works.
It raises a good point though; and I don't want to entirely blame individual things; but I do wonder how much of our psychology is pushed to limits with social media. From what I’ve seen on social media platforms you have intensely powerful echo chambers (twitter) telling you everything is hopeless, or making you vitriolic and angry at the world. With instagram we get a curated view of someone’s life. Perfectly packaged and polished which leads to envy and eventually bitterness. Similar story with facebook and the way that you may perceive attention being lavished on other potentially “more deserving” people.
Personally I feel a little less hope in the world from knowing that I will likely never own my own home. Or have the time to start a family. At the same time there are those having swathes of children without being able to provide for them economically. So the burden goes to everyone.
I think people are more secluded now, it’s a world where you google on your phone instead of asking a stranger or have a discussion with friends. The younger generation is getting robbed with students loans for degrees most don’t even need and could just do apprenticeship or internship for a year to prove themselves. A lot of social media exists now showing social status with wealth, traveling and stuff that isn’t important but creates envi. The mental health «professionals» are not great and just drug pushers filling a capitalist needed role for pharmaceutical companies. Society is approaching the bottom of the barrel where nobody cares to confront anything face to face.
"I find this essay to be incredibly simplistic.
You blame the increased suicide rate on the diminished role of religion in our lives and a lack of “neighborliness” with our neighbors? Really?
Just off the top of my head, here are a short list of factors you did not consider:
- The worst income inequality our country’s seen in a CENTURY.
- Most Americans — and statistics back this up — dislike or literally hate their jobs... Which they find meaningless.
- Millions are working 2 and even 3 jobs on starvation wages.
- Millions of Americans are overwhelmed with student debt.
- Our country has no guaranteed paid parental leave.
- Our for-profit health care system leaves millions uncovered — and millions more “covered,” but unable to afford to actually use their coverage.
- Unlike all other major countries in the world, we have ZERO guaranteed paid vacation.
- We work too much — we work longer hours than almost any other industrialized country.
- Because of this sad fact, what time we have left over for leisure and spending time with family and friends is severely limited.
- We have a deeply corrupt political system in which all of us recognize that it’s only the super-rich and corporations who get what they want — decade in and decade out. - We live in the Wild, Wild West of “anything goes” for corporations — including raping our environment and monopolizing... resulting in higher bills for us, less innovation, little to no competition and so forth.
Need I go on?"
-income inequality is higher but so is standard of living. Moreover, suicidality is pretty strongly inversely correlated with poverty and privilege. If the hypothesis is that people are killing themselves because "wah someone has more numbers than me" the argument crumbles immediately.
-most jobs have always been shit and meaningless. Nothing new here expect maybe a generation that was told they were special when they are not.
- "2 or 3 jobs" but how many hours? Also, starvation wages? Come on. Nobody in America with a job is poor enough to be hungry. To suggest starvation wage in America devalues actual food scarcity globally. Also, again, poverty and suicidality are inversely correlated
- you can thank federally guaranteed student loans and useless majors for driving up the cost and driving down the value of college. Still, having 40k-200k of loans contributing to suicidality... I'd like to see the study. Could be right.
- guaranteed parental leave would help reduce suicides? I mean, we didn't have that in the past. So why does the status quo cause higher suicide rates?
- the medical services coverage is a strange argument with respect to suicidality. We understand and treat depression way better than we did 50 years ago, so why is it worse now? Plentiful mental health clinics even operate on a "pay what you can" model
-paid vacation, see paid parental leave
- why wasn't suicide higher when we worked more hours in the past? In the last 50 years as hours worked hasn't really changed, why is suicidality up now and not then?
- I mean... Leisure time is still a good 6 hours a workday plus weekends and hasn't really gone down. Why don't people who work more for less commit suicide more often?
- this last one doesn't even deserve a response.
Please go on. Maybe you'll get a single reason if you do.
That's an absurdly out-of-touch statement.
If you compare that to countries where people actually starve you should be able to see the difference
Calories alone is a pretty limited view of nutrition. Sure, I could drink vegetable oil or eat donuts for every meal...
Besides, there's a lot of "jobs" out there right now where minimum wage does not apply - the service industry (where it has to be filled by tips, which are voluntary, but if you don't tip you're both 'stealing' people's wages and will get shit treatment), the "gig economy", etcetera.
Increased wealth inequality has been shown to negatively impact happiness, whether rational or not. Sure average standard of living may be higher, but that does not negate the negative effects of increased inequality.
> most jobs have always been shit and meaningless.
I disagree, I think jobs have clearly gotten more meaningless. In the past most people were employed in fields like agriculture and manufacturing, which have a clear sense of meaning (even if they're not pleasant). Now with the service sector being the main source of employment and increases in specialization and bureaucracy, it's gotten harder to feel a sense of meaning than it was in the past.
> poverty and suicidality are inversely correlated
I'm doubtful of this. I would imagine there is probably a positive correlation between increased debt (relative to income/wealth), losing one's job / inability to find work, and general lack of money for essential things (eg. medical bills) and increased rates of depression and suicide.
> guaranteed parental leave would help reduce suicides? I mean, we didn't have that in the past.
Women also didn't have to work in the past and could be stay-at-home mothers.
Regarding vacation, there is definitely increased competitiveness in the workforce now. Sure vacation law has not changed, but with increased competitiveness in the labor market companies can demand more (eg. less vacation) and people can be more afraid to take vacations out of fear of losing their jobs and not being able to find another one.
- Historically low religious belief and church attendance.
- Low rates of marriage, high rates of divorce.
- High incidence and tolerance of deviant sexuality, low respect for tradition and traditional gender roles.
- Decline of corporal punishment in parenting and education, erosion of fear and respect for authorities and institutions in general.
- Influx of outsiders destroying social trust and cohesion.
- Lack of personal responsibility.
Point is, it's easy to give a laundry list of societal trends which could conceivably affect people's mood, sense of purpose, sense of belonging, etc. But just offering the ones that happen to be your party's platform is not good-faith participation in an effort to actually understand or fix this particular problem. It's just using it as a venue to repeat your ideology.
For instance, you have pointed out several things that are "bad", but haven't necessarily changed or are better overall than they have ever been (hate for meaningless jobs, parental leave, working too much) but you are sometimes comparing current US against other countries, not looking at the fact that these are still on generally positive trends historically.
Some things that might be less-or-irrelevant include: -Inequality: Yes this is true, but the poorest people are better off and there are fewer of them than there have been historically. Many people considered poor these days have cell phones, can afford nutritious meals (even if they don't eat them) and have access to welfare and disability that wasn't available 100 years ago. -Leisure time: On average, people are spending 20+ less hours a week working than they did 100 years ago, and spend far less time doing household chores.
While there is certainly cause for concern and much more progress to be made, overall things are on a positive trend, and most of your arguments only compare against other countries at the current time -- I don't get a sense that this is a major cause of suicide increases.
I also would like to learn more about how the statistics were derived. Are they using the same definition of suicide? Are there other factors? For instance, if someone overdoses on opiates and dies from it, is that considered suicide according to these statistics?
I'm not flat-out disagreeing with you, but rather I would like to better understand which factors are most influential and also what exactly it is they are reporting -- the source material didn't seem to specify whether they were reporting % increases as an absolute number or number of suicides per 100k people, etc.
Steven Pinker's newest book, Enlightenment Now, touches on this topic, and explores statistics and some considerations for what may or may not be influential factors for recent trends in suicide, as well as pretty much every bullet point you provided.
Inequality certainly plays a role in happiness, whether rational or not. Inequality in the U.S. has been on the uptrend. Sure welfare didn't exist 100 years ago, but 22 years ago welfare was reformed to put time limits and require work eligibility. Certainly not what I would consider an uptrend from then.
Better off than when? A decade ago? Two, three, or four decades ago?
Poverty wages have stagnated for almost half of a century. Cost of living has gone up, inflation has gone up and the ability to afford healthcare has left with them. Bankruptcy rates in states that didn't expand Medicaid are soaring.
I was raised on a low income and it was tough, then. Looking back on people who are still living where I came from, they are struggling. They're working multiple jobs, whereas one was enough to live on 20 years ago.
Truthfully, I don't know how they're making ends meet without being in a ton of debt and I don't know who would continue to lend to them in that situation.
Constant housing, health and income insecurity is soul crushing and I find it strange that it's so easily dismissed.
This is completely the genius of capitalism. The reality is there are millions of people out there who cannot meaningfully contribute to the modern global economy. You can see this very clearly in the rapidly declining labor force [1]. All of this excess labor has to go. We need to get rid these people as fast as possible because they are literally a huge drag (on growth) and they are making us all poorer.
But how?
The free market to the rescue! No need for government thugs or complicated, expensive social engineering campaigns. The free market can precisely target this excess labor and liquidate it with just the right price signals. The results speak for themselves: suicides are up 30%, birth rates are the lowest they've been in 30 years [2] and we are finally seeing significant declines in life expectancy [3]. All of this is happening while corporate profits are soaring to new heights and the economy is actually growing! [4]
You think politicians could be this effective?
[1] https://www.kansascityfed.org/~/media/files/publicat/econrev...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44151642
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/life-expe...
[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/corporate-profits-highest-in...
I’m so scared to even say that under my normal account because people will take issue with it and try to get me fired from my job.
Some impact is that women are completely able to take care of their self now. They do not need a man and can date who they want or nobody at all (that’s a good thing). This has left women able to pick the top men, studies have shown that they are much more selective than men — and they are in much higher demand than men. This has left a lot of men unable to find love or start a family. Men would get meaning from life having a family, now some men are completely denied the opportunity. Women date up. Men date whatever they can get and women are increasingly more educated and doing better than men. If not for foreign women in the US many many would never have a chance with a woman.
With women entering the workforce, basically doubling it, wages have been impacted, a lot of men struggle (though not us in tech).
This is just something we have to adjust to.
I certainly don't get the date up part though. I'm kind of a loser (monetarily speaking) and only average looking, but it hasn't been that hard to get a date.
And that it changed from 10 women having sex with 8 men to 8 women having sex with the two best looking and most famous guys.
Aka more selective.
So I fall to see what that has to do with what the GP is saying, which is men are being denied opportunities to have a family en mass.
Which is kinda silly, honestly, I see unappealing men dating and getting married, having kids, all the time. Like the GP said, as long as you aren't hideous or have a hygene problem dating isn't particularly difficult for men if you're 1) pleasant and outgoing, 2) put some effort into it, and 3) not absurdly picky.
Read this https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2013/02/The-Mate-Switc...
I experience that myself... But I wonder how that works. Isn't the ratio of women to men 50:50 more or less? Are multiple women all in a relationship with the same few men? I don't see how that would work for serious relationships. That must mean women are also not starting families anymore?
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/18/the-u...
Most american men are boring (generally speaking).
NOTE: I'm saying this as an american man.
Pretty loaded statement there that should probably be accompanied with supporting evidence.
Would we be able to talk all night about interesting stuff? Would i stay up way past my bedtime because I don't wanna put the phone (or whatever communication) down?
I also have to ask: how many friends do you have that are women?
It's been my experience that women are more likely to settle down with a less traditionally conventional partner, nowadays, than in the past. Money, power and looks are less important qualities than they traditionally were. Contrary to your belief, I believe this is because woman are able to find economic independence now, and marriage is no longer their one door of opportunity to a better life.
Sure, there are some women who 'date up', but they aren't the majority and aren't in anyway representative of an overall trend. Shallow people exist on both sides.
Due to the Werther Effect, does discussing this influence the behavior? Isn't it why all discussions of the topic are banned in certain country's news... not for embarrassment or to hide trauma, but to prevent it from becoming a memetic epidemic?
You can't forbid discussion. You can ask that media doesn't report details of method, or location, or speculate on reasons. We know from interviews from survivors that each of these increase risk.
I hope the hospitalisation goes well! (I know very very little about hospitals outside England.)
Sure you can forbid discussion. In fact, there are some things you legally can't say: state secrets (i.e., agents in harm's way), shout "fire" in a crowded theater, slander or be Geraldo Rivera discussing troops-in-contact battle-plans.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/teen-copycat-suicides-are-a-re...
Also "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini
So, nytimes should know very well that this is not an existential crisis, it's the result of something they supported for a very long time.
This is not a thing that exists. First, immigration into the US, from poor countries or otherwise is not uncontrolled by any stretch of the imagination. Notably, immigration rates are far far from their historical heights. Second, bringing crime is a bold-face lie: immigrants commit crimes both petty and violent at lower rates than native born Americans. And, of course, crime rates are also at or near historical lows no matter what stat one looks at. Third, "social distrust" is pretty odd thing to try to pin on immigration: while there is some research that indicates that a non-assimilated minority undermines social trust, the US as a whole certainly doesn't have a migration rate of non-assimilated minorities at anywhere close to those rates, those migration rates have not increased, and the demographic "Bowling Alone" type studies indicate that the non-dynamic communities where immigrants aren't settling are the ones having issues.
As for "people moving around like cattle", internal migration rates (people moving out of state/county) have fallen steadily over the last thirty years or so. And since when is the movement of people towards opportunity a bad thing? What if towns in which it's "impossible to create good economies" have simply outlived their usefulness as going concerns?
Predictably, this comment rules out moving to opportunity or a social safety net or investment (collective action to solve problems such as "few companies [with] a lot of bargaining power" is spooky) and believes that a well-connected society can only happen when "good economies in towns" are first brought into being by magic as opposed to anything that can actually work.
And, of course, the NYTimes isn't doing all that much to promote policies or politicians aiming to "destroy socities [sic]". Come on now.
That's bullshit, sorry. Given same demographics, refugees bring about the same levels of crime as "native Germans" do (e.g. https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2016-06/bunde...). The "rise" that is sometimes perceived is largely based on the fact that young, poor-ish males tend to be the social group with the most crime issues.
As for "social distrust", you are certainly correct in the symptom, but not the cause. The cause is not "uncontrolled immigration", but politicians having totally screwed up social security systems and protection laws. For example, fair and equal minimum wage laws and especially actual enforcement of these would prevent the common notion of "the migrants are taking away our jobs because they're cheaper".
> Laws that give sociopaths the ability to bring functioning human being in courts for stupid reasons and win, making people not trusting their neighbors.
Laws usually have a reason why they got enacted. Yeah, it's sometimes a mess (especially when it comes to HOAs, per countless debates here and on reddit), but in general, stuff is pretty okay.
> Divorce laws that destroy families.
Care to explain how, other than (in the US!) everything being on the public record and snatched up on the Internet for everyone to see?
> Anti-family propaganda that pushes people to destroy their family at the first difficulties.
What? And even if that were true: sorry, but a family/environment where there is constant arguing between the parents is not healthy for the kids!
Wait a minute....if you're calling bullshit, why do you lead your disproof with a limiting qualifier?
Does the specific immigration the grandparent comment references arrive with the same demographics, or not?
> As for "social distrust", you are certainly correct in the symptom, but not the cause. The cause is not "uncontrolled immigration", but politicians having totally screwed up social security systems and protection laws. For example, fair and equal minimum wage laws and especially actual enforcement of these would prevent the common notion of "the migrants are taking away our jobs because they're cheaper".
Again, I would ask, is this a theory or is it a fact? I'm under the impression that social distrust rises as diversity rises (the underlying reason, and whether it is fact-based or not is irrelevant) - is this belief false?
I actually kind of don't agree with your last two points either, but those are more opinion-based so fairly pointless to argue one way or the other.
ideology > facts