The Age of Distracti-Pression
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> If you’re wondering which pills and how many of them Americans have relied upon to make ourselves feel better since Covid-19 arrived, the answer, in short, is yes.
Yeah I don't think I'm the target audience for this. Am I becoming an old man or has the NYTimes writing really dove off a cliff since ~2020?
They seem to use a pattern of introducing an idea with an anecdote and then providing more objective information that supports the idea. It makes the article longer and gives a human touch while still remaining factual. I don't see the issue.
"Two words to describe the WH response to the financial crisis: EPIC FAIL."
Sure, in the 2020s answering 'yes' to a question of quantity is a cheeky way to suggest hyperbole, but I feel like in 5 years it's just going to seem lame and dated.
Not an expert on media writing[1] (or writing/language in general), but I observed this to be true in at least a couple of languages. Dunno about the time spans involved, though. But I know that stuff from 90s and 80s sounds a bit "dated" to me (I'm a 90ies kid). This is true for at least English and a few Slavic languages[2].
I don't read a lot of media writing (helps with my mental health), but I do read a lot of fiction. And to me it feels like here's usually a bit of the author's era's "personality" (or memes, if you will) that inevitably bleeds through in writing (even in fiction). I mean, it's a core part of our day-to-day expression.
Going back to the time spans: I think that this is probably something that will keep happening more and more frequently. I guess a few factors contribute to this, but I think it just boils down increasing globalisation and speed at which information (incl [sub]cultures, memes) travels
[1]: By media writing I mean stuff written for magazines, blogs, news, etc.
[2]: Slavic languages are similar so most speakers have a degree of cross-understanding. FWIW, it feels to me the languages had sometimes different and sometimes similar trends in the 80-90s and they do today. These are just layman observations though
Edit: Some wordsmithing/formatting
“Then pick a worthy goal”
As a comment it’s a distraction not unlike the very thing it’s criticizing. Seems hypocritical and self-congratulatory; but again, that’s just me.
No, I didn't.
"Benny, which of the girls would you take on a date?"
Benny - "Yes!"
At the end of the day Shakespeare was the first to table a meeting and that must have sounded novel and too out there back then. Not everything will age well, but I would rather we try new things.
This is contingent on the capacity of a society to weather any bad outcomes from the new things. which given as they new, their outcomes are unknown.
I'm trying to get to how freedom is related to some kind of background wealth.
If people are (or feel?) wealthy, they're willing to accept risky behavior. Using a example:
"oh, there they go the village idiots burning down a barn..."
--"oh well, at least there's still enough of everything for winter, no problem."
In contrast with: "[...] now we're fucked. time to ration our provisions".
Enter global warming; and with it the rise of autocracies, tyrannies, and so on.
Because this article is an ad for Prozac.
(disclaimer: this comment is not an ad for Prozac)
My pet, conspiracy?, theory is that the always online culture is perhaps to blame. We have a lot of anger, and depression out there and very little except for medication seems to be helping.
There have always been anger and depression in society of course but the rate of increase in extreme outcomes from those is definitely rising. Mass shooting, teen suicide, online or real world mobs are all up everywhere. Something seems anecdotally to have shifted. The pandemic was an external stressor of course but it exacerbated something that seemed to already be building.
I have resources and method to address this stuff for myself but I don't have any ideas to address it societally.
Whereas those under-35? takes things online a bit more at face value, rather than what it tends to be - the loudest voices and most extreme ideas being amplified.
I see a lot of people around 35+ remembering how things were better before social media. Things were better because they were kids, or adolescents. It's youth they're nostalgic about.
My father, who is in his 70s, always talks about how his peers always talk about how the 60s were amazing, and how they associate its being great with the things that existed then or didn't exist then. But he always concludes with this: it's not that that we miss. We miss being young.
Social media surely stirred things up, and I personally am for just getting rid of the whole thing anyway. But we have to take the whole "things were better before social media" with a grain of salt.
I think theres just another layer added on by social media in the always-online age.
The people who boomeranged back to their parents basement after college (or after dropping out) are not posting as much as the guy who made $10M on his startup at 25.
Further, especially in HCOL areas, you are often adjacent to exponentially more wealth than you have.. which social media now shows.
Pre social media I wouldn't have known much about my neighbors who are friends with a billionaire family / famous musician / etc and go to various exclusive resorts on their dime a few times a year...
So for some, their basis for comparison becomes too wide and they end up always feeling "behind" when they baseline against infinite wealth.
I think the youth angle has some validity, but it also misses something else. I realized in my late 20s that I was already making more nuanced analysis of 'life' for myself than I did a few years prior. "Experience" isn't an end all/be all, but it does carry some occasionally useful benefits, that if you foster can only improve with age. I like hanging out with people my own age (40s) but also younger and older, because I get different useful/interesting things from doing so, and I incorporate it into the lens I use to make a go of life. THAT only comes from age and experience by and large.
Social media is tooling, which can (and sadly is) leveraged in any number of ways (regardless of age group)...all of which we as a society have allowed. We need to make choices about whether that should proceed as is, or if changes are required.
I'll give one 'hot take': women have gone to work, now both women and men are miserable.
It used to be that a man would go to work, sure work oftentimes isn't great, but you'd come home to a wife and kids who don't know that world, whom you've protected from the 101 harsh realities of life.
There'd be a balance. Man works hard, comes home, gets the reward, everyday. Woman works hard at home, gets to not be exposed to 101 harsh realities of life, feels fulfilled, seeing her children grow up.
Not anymore.
We're going extinct folks - because who the fuck wants to do anything after a few years in corporate America, knowing you're stuck for the next 40 years, without a heaven (religion is done), a peaceful home, a better future for your kids, a community to be a part of?
We've paperclip maximized our humanity in favor of more stuff, so much so that we now optimize stuff to be worse, so that it breaks, so that we buy it again, so that we get to make and sell more paperclips, increasing GDP. Oh my god, you people are fucking nuts!
Famously, before women could vote and work, they never experienced emotion. Very hot and enlightened take from someone who clearly knows a lot about women.
'harsh realities of life' is - working at an office? Sitting at your computer reading HN? Your view of harsh realities is pretty off-base. Your view of harsh realities is especially off-base if you think that housewives are happily innocent of them.
The most horrific harsh realities happen in homes, the abuses and assaults and neglects. Do you truly imagine that women weren't aware of what was going on in their neighborhoods, with their friends, with the kids?
You bring up a valid point. So does OP. But you’re coming from such different angles that neither of you probably feels like the other really “gets” your point of view. Or if there is an understanding, there’s still a lack of any real sense of motive and context.
Every single possible direction you might want to go in life or opinion or dream you might have has someone from a completely different context piping in and telling you to go the complete opposite direction for perfectly valid reasons.
Online forums are simply too big, too impersonal, and too varied to give people that sense of connectedness they’re craving. They remove essential shared context and make most people feel unheard, which has bad mental health effects.
The "terminally online" criticism of society maybe has some water, but it is a minor blip in comparison to the above explanation. Like... barely anybody my age is having children and the ones who do have this look on them when I have a real conversation with them where they are vulnerable that they love their kids more than anything but that having kids is destroying what little quality of life they could scrape by with before. Having kids has always been hard I imagine but the look on people's faces... it says a lot about how cruel society is that it grinds people down so much that having kids hurts them like that (even when they have good jobs and stable relationships and "should" be able to handle it).
Society is broken because we have been worshipping the rich and most people's quality of life is tanking at least in the US.
Like... barely anybody my age is having children and the ones who do have
this look on them when I have a real conversation with them where they are
vulnerable that they love their kids more than anything but that having kids
is destroying what little quality of life they could scrape by with before.
Having kids has always been hard I imagine but the look on people's faces...
it says a lot about how cruel society is that it grinds people down so much
that having kids hurts them like that (even when they have good jobs and
stable relationships and "should" be able to handle it).
I'm not saying it's great that there are people who have to go through the same things I went through. Nor am I saying that I'm amazing for having survived and made a solid career for myself. But I am saying that given the realities we have it's a really sad that more people aren't as equipped as I was and that seems like something worth fixing as well as all the other stuff.
This is such a casually violent thing to say. You know why the most resilient people you know came from rough-and-tumble upbringings? Because they had to or their life would have spiralled out of control... and guess what there are innumerable people who's lives did spiral out of control and they aren't there for you to meet and judge. They are dead or shoved into one of societies ditches somewhere as an ignored homeless person who has no social connections with housed people because they essentially have pariah status. Do you think that is ok?
It is called survivorship bias and it is honestly a little embarassing that you aren't cognizant of that even while it shapes your broad outlook on others
Your anecdotal experience of your life is just that, anecdotal. If you look at the numbers things are genuinely getting much worse for people (well there has been a blip up in workers organizing in some industries for better treatment, but compared to 30 years of careful dissassembly of the social safety net in the US it is still just that.. a blip.).
You HAVE relatives that had the capacity to house you and your kids!?!? Is your survivorship bias really stunting your empathy that much that you can't see how much worse it would be if you had literally no one to turn to? One mistep and stumble leads quickly to another too, if you were unhoused it would have been far harder to convince a landlord to allow you to rent then being able to say you were staying with relatives, no you have been branded with "homeless" and society deems you as deserving to be homeless because you must have done something to cause it.
You gotta work on your empathy bud
A lot of the support structures for people appear to have disappeared and broken down. That's on us as a society not on the individual. I have a lot of empathy. I've since done the same thing for others that my relatives did for me. I've taken in people who had no place to go and gave them a place to get back on their feet.
It feels a little bit like you and I are in violent agreement.
Sad
At this point though I'm not sure where the right balance is - the US healthcare model (you are a customer) probably drives excessive medication as much as cultural pressures, but at the same time the UK model (you are a patient, but not a paying customer) drives resistance to prescribing medication where it might actually be beneficial.
Probably somewhere between zero and a negative impact. I tried this briefly some years ago after hearing so much about productivity gains, then tried again once or twice after that. I quickly realized that while in the initial afternoon of the first use you may see some benefits, this come at the expense of later productivity. I'd say it is not too different from the impact of caffeine on sleep in this regard.
People just like taking these meds, they like the high it gives and the chemical induced "feeling productive" rush makes it easy to tell yourself a nice story about why you're taking them and what they're doing for you, but I don't think they're actually producing any real productivity gains.
Take a look at the generic name for desoxyn. I mean, if I can get it from a doctor, I'll give it a shot.
Unless you're actually arguing in favor of taking performance enhancing drugs for the purpose of boosting productivity, which based on your reaction I'd guess that you are.
The ultimate problem is that our current levels of medical knowledge simply aren't good enough, so the US approach often does more harm than good - and I would gently suggest that that shows up very clearly in US life expectancy figures.
It gets even worse when you drill into northern cities in the UK - Glasgow clocks in at a shocking 54.
You're likely confusing life expectancy with "healthy life expectancy", which is a different metric that measures the number of years a person can be expected to live in good health.
[1] https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect
Pretty sure that's our terrible diet and dangerous and slothful car culture.
Can you clarify - do you mean that the types of drugs used to treat ADHD make US tech workers more productive, or do you mean that it they increase the use of SV-style tech products? Somewhat contentious take either way.
Looking at the rates of ADHD diagnosis worldwide, it is clear that someone is getting it wrong - but that brings us to the deeper discussion of how far capitalism should be allowed to dominate; i.e. whether having large numbers of drugged-up but productive citizens is actually an OK situation for a country to be in.
I've heard about it, but it seemed more anecdotal, and it's not uncommon for drug users to rationalize their consumption in some way, eg based on their first experience.
U.S. Air Force, being tasked with a somewhat similar job, came to similar conclusions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7661838/
I don't have a study, but the answer is yes, it definitely can boost productivity. But overall, a huge number of people take it for the high.
It's a sad state of affairs because people genuinely suffer for it and we don't have the foggiest what's going on, despite ever ramping research funding. Curing it could bring back billions to the economy.
It was first described (written down) in the late 1700s. Medicine is using very blunt tools (amphetamines, ect) out of necessity to treat problems which need far better understanding.
We really need better, cheaper and more accessible medical tech. A non-theranos, steve jobs style medical tech revolution would do a lot of good for a lot of people and put cured patients to useful work, who would otherwise suffer.
Isn't the usual answer something like:
"People with ADHD-like characteristics are restless and impulsive, therefore more likely to decide to strike out on big new adventures. Like emigrating to an exciting new country. So the U.S. has been an ADHD magnet since before its founding, leading to a much higher prevalence / diagnosis than most other parts of the world. And since ADHD is hereditary, it gets passed down the generations, sustaining the imbalance with the rest of the world. And/or maybe there is an amplification effect where in most populations the ADHD genes stay diluted in the gene pool, since it is not a common occurrence, and people with ADHD generally had kids with non-ADHD people. But at certain base rates, the ADHD people start having children with each other, intensify the effects."
Today, psychoactive stimulants are marketed as "Provigil" and regularly used by US troops, which is made responsible for more than one friendly fire incident.
1 Congress relaxed rules on the Ryan Haight Act to allow online prescription of ADHD meds,
2 Telehealth Apps like Cerebral began to spend 10s of millions of dollars advertising on TikTok and instagram.
3 The apps would write new amphetamine prescriptions after 1/2 hour assessments, and from whistleblower data we know they didn't do any sort of identity verification and would write the same person multiple prescriptions.
This has all the markings of another profit driven prescription drug boom, similar to Xanax and oxycontin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-03-11/cerebral-...