Why American Teens Are So Sad | Hacker News Reader

Why American Teens Are So Sad

theatlantic.com

9 pointsrobg5 comments

I was homeschooled as a teenager due to health problems.

One thing that I saw drive a lot of unpleasantness amongst my non-homeschooled peers when I was a teenager was lack of sleep. Teenagers need sleep. If you need to go to school around 7:00, and you have after-school activities that go til 20:00 or later most days, as well as homework, you can’t possibly get enough sleep. The answer is always “just go to bed earlier” which most teens are notoriously bad at. I don’t think it’s necessarily gotten worse in recent years (I wasn’t really around to know), but if you want to make people less sad, it does help to stop torturing them.

I’m a counselor that works with young folks and teenagers. A lot of them are up late (1-2am)and some all night on their phone or playing video games. This naturally leads to fatigue, poor concentration, unstable or volatile moods, bad grades and avoidance. And it’s pretty normalized among kids. When parents restrict screen time we often see big improvements in behavior and mental health, even if they aren’t up all night. Screens and social media almost never turn off among many of this generation. I’ve seen four and five year olds with their own phones and I find it pretty worrying.

I remember feeling control over how much I could push my sleep time. I think it was one of the only things that I could play with that seemed to only affect me. Also at that age doing things differently seems cool too. Starting at 15 I’d go to bed at 6am and wake up at 10 or 11. My school hours were from 5pm to 10:30pm because my school was tiny and in high demand so there wasn’t enough room to put everyone in day shift. During the day I’d do small IT jobs or homework. I loved it, but I wonder now if my bad sleep is what pushed me to depression.

Everything is horrible, the world is going to end, there's nothing they can do about it, actual accomplishment is passe, and they can't even go out and get drunk and get laid to deal with it.

Sure weed's legal now but then Mom and Dad want a pull on the bong and that just fucks up the vibe.

These kids need dirtbikes.

I mean, the clinical definition of depression is a feeling of being powerless. The way they test mice for depression is by danging them by the tail- if the mouse just hangs there limply, giving up, without struggling, that's depression. Depression is really a logical coping strategy in a certain sense- when there is no hope in struggling, the smart move is to not even try, to just conserve energy and wait to be let go or be eaten.

With the world seemingly being run into the ground, climate change being completely ignored, college costs and housing costs and medical costs skyrocketing and wages stagnant, and with the world being thoroughly dominated by the boomer generation who have no incentive or desire to care at all about what teens are going through, it's easy to feel powerless. Because they are powerless. Totally powerless. They can't change anything and nobody cares about them. You'll notice that even the author of this article did not ask one single teen for their opinion on what's happening. Nobody asks them anything because nobody cares what they think.

So they just hang there.

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