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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to get good data on this stuff but the perception you get when doing a little digging is that we have somehow managed to produce a lot of mental health issues over the last decade.

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.

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I would probably point to the fact that younger (and unlucky older people) are getting crushed under the boot of the ultrarich of the world and the falling power of the working class has reached a critical point where the rich are just pulling off their masks and basically openly murdering/destroying peoples lives with zero consequences? Also climate change... turns out it doesnt make people happy.

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).

See this is part of my disconnect right here. I have 5 kids. For much of their childhood I was working day labor at minimum wage. I scraped by and sometimes had to live with relatives because I couldn't afford to put a roof over their heads. It was definitely hard and stressful but I had the necessary mental tools to avoid going postal or killing myself. I guess part of what I lament is that we have somehow reduced the number of people with those mental tools.

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.

Look, I am sure your life was very hard, it sounds like you worked your ass off... but things can get much worse. Also you could have health complications or get hit by a car getting to work one day and have everything come crashing apart at the snap of a finger for no fault of your own. That doesn't mean you had it easy or that there werent other people around you that you succeeded over because you worked harder.

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

I'm very much calling out that my experience is different. But you are also making assumptions that may not be what you expect. Most wouldn't have said that my relatives had capacity to house my family. They did it any way. This is in part what I think might be different.

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.

My wild guess is that it's paradoxically due to life being more comfortable for people than ever before. The most resilient people I know came from rough-and-tumble upbringings like you describe.

"The most resilient people I know came from rough-and-tumble upbringings like you describe."

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I don't think this is at all correct. I am resilient not because I had a rough patch. I'm resilient because I had a safety net when that rough patch hit. Without that safety net the story would have been much much worse.

I think people under, say, 35? remember a time not being online.. and think of the world as "real world" and "online".

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.

We sort of filter out bad memories and every time we reminisce about the past, it's always in a nostalgic and lighter note.

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'm over 35 and I don't think things were "better" before social media, but I do think there are aspects that aren't improving with being digitized/VR'd/monetized. And they are things that I suspect people will 'rediscover' over time, without the need to make it part of their personal branding or PR self-promotion campaign.

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.

Agreed there's always a rose-tinted "life was better in my teens/20s" view by each generation.

I think theres just another layer added on by social media in the always-online age.

I think there was just much less "keeping up with the Jones" mentality then. Sure, people could see houses and cars, but they didn't have a real time feed of everyone's "happy" moments on social media. No one felt bad that they weren't doing x y or z that their "friends" were doing because they never saw it. They had the people they were close with and not some massive cadre of people they've met throughout their entire lifespan that are in their social media feeds. Also, social media rarely portrays someone's real life. It's their highlight reel and the younger generations don't necessarily know that there's a difference I'd think.

Yup someone had commented about social media FOMO that 1) you only see the good stuff and 2) class divisions are more apparent when your friend's friend who had a trust fund or struck it big posts stuff you wouldn't have been exposed to directly & locally pre-social media.

Social media more directly exposes you to your friend-of-a-friend networks inner lives, through a glossy filter, that you'd never ever have imagined 10-20 years ago.

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 assume you meant "over" then "under" here.

yes, oops!

Nobody can form their own argument or opinion that is longer than a tweet.

Even if/when you can get longer than that, the majority of the intended audience probably doesn't have the patience for it.

People don't want a comprehensive report, they want a headline. Then they become the most dangerous voter and consumer there is: the master of headlines, blind to all context and significance, swayed entirely by the people writing headlines.

> I have resources and method to address this stuff for myself but I don't have any ideas to address it societally.

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!

> Woman works hard at home, gets to not be exposed to 101 harsh realities of life, feels fulfilled, seeing her children grow up.

'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?

I think these types of comments are the root cause of unhappiness more than anything else.

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.

>I'll give one 'hot take': women have gone to work, now both women and men are miserable.

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.

Eh my wife largely agrees with the take and she worked in tech. I have female friends in tech who are trying to exit the workplace too.

Your wife would prefer to live in blissful ignorance? That's extraordinary.

Cut it out with the sarcasm. It’s not about blissful ignorance, it’s about avoiding an unhealthy environment.

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