No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse
nymag.com
nymag.com
Arguing that life is objectively better because you are going to make a better salary than in the fifties is plain gaslighting, but I don't believe there are a lot of people who will still fall for this trick.
That would mean life is worse. And we can measure how much worse in suicide rate deltas.
To anyone who disagrees with me, ask yourself. What is the most important thing in your life? I can with certainty say that it doesn't have a "price" associated with it.
If you can comprehend that then you can accept the premise that life can get worse as material conditions improve, especially when the marginal utility of those increasing material conditions is already low. Are touchscreens really a 10x improvement in quality of life when penicillin has been invented?
This shows one of the wrinkles.
Some people will be able to put a very specific price on that most important thing, straight from their health/insurance bills, because they would be dead without types of care that existed even in the 50s.
We should be happy we've improved potential material conditions for people, but unhappy that it's distributed so poorly and that we've also introduced other technologies that rub those differences in people's faces.
The headline is ludicrous because what the fuck does "objectively worse" even mean about quality of life. Humans have emotions, not just objective material sensor evaluators.
Security - food, transportation, housing. All have huge price tags associated with them.
My wife being able to follow her passion - taking care of her family. Which means I have to make enough to account for her lost income for all the above.
Our material gains are only true quality of life improvements when they increase the access to things that are "meaningful" like relationships. GDP increase could mean you are capable of producing one extra Jurassic Park sequel each year, while people's ability to start a family stagnates.
But to address this individually, yes, they are required for any kind of a family - single or married or with 55 children. And it's harder to do than it has been for the hundreds of thousands of years before now - it's not something you just "get" for working, for being part of a community, anymore.
In other words, being hale and working all of the sunlit hours week is no longer sufficient to provide for a family. Something relatively new in human history.
EDIT: $7.25 (US federal minimum wage) * 8 hours * 365 days/year puts you right at the poverty line for a 3 person household. A quality of life which may theoretically be better than that of a caveman, but hardly what I'd call "providing" for your family.
> Whatever caused young people in the U.S. to develop higher rates of mental illness over the past two decades, it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security.
What numbers or objective data can you put forward to refute it?
Imagine a short story where a man gets a diagnosis of an incurable, terminal disease certain to inflict much suffering before death. He kills himself. And then the doctor discovers there was an error in the test, and the man did not have the disease after all.
It's possible that for young people today, life is not objectively worse than for previous generations. But with catastrophic pronouncements on blast from social media to a greater extent than ever before, lack of in person support and friendships, a general discourse of partisanship and hate and unrelenting negativity, it's plausible more people are killing themselves due to the perception of reality, moreso than reality itself.
In other words, maybe we should stop telling people life is hopeless, the world is doomed, and it's impossible for it to get better.
There are plenty of distopian SF societies that are wonderful from an economic basis, but horrific from another basis (Brave New World is the most famous, but by far not the only example).
I think the biggest issue here is the normal headline/article disagreement.
Edit to add:
As for "objective data":
Social: The collapse of friendships and group activities. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a...
Environmental: Things have improved in some respects compared to the smog and burning rivers of the 60s. But in other respects we now have historic droughts, historic wildfires, increasing frequency of cyclones, sea-level increases, decreases in green spaces, climate change, and still a variety of pollution events (which get more airplay than in previous years).
Sexual: Incel communities. Breakups by text and ghosting. Finding partners online balanced out by not having the support of shared communities with sexual partners.
This is just conveniently redefining what most people mean when they talk about objective factors.
I tend to agree that this ability to broadcast doom is an explanatory factor and it makes life worse, but to claim this is an objective explanatory factor is problematic I think, at least without drawing a distinction between this factor and those traditionally considered "objective".
But setting aside arguments about semantics, I think the deep seated stigmas around mental health that have only recently started to fade are a huge factor in the language we use to describe these issues, and I would argue seem to influence many people's perception of the importance of "subjective" factors (i.e. they deprioritize these factors or think they are not as "real" as objective factors).
People tend to think of issues that impact mental health as somehow less objective, because mental health is itself subjective. While it's objectively true that if I do not have enough money to buy food and don't find some other way to acquire it, I will die, it is not objectively true that two people experiencing the same social media environment will be impacted by it the same way, and yet this is an experience that can also lead to death.
But even if we accept that subjective factors are the primary issue, we can still trace those back to objective causes, it's just that we cannot use the same mental models of understanding "objective quality of life". We could find that social media is objectively the cause of degraded mental health (and studies are confirming this), but the impact itself is still subjective, unlike traditional economic indicators.
In other words, subjective experience could be just as critical to understand and explore as objective factors, and that subjectivity does not in any way reduce the importance or validity of such exploration.
I disagree. People have complained about the increase in television channels and shows leading to a breakdown in the cohesiveness of society. Broadcast technologies (along with the related rabbit-hole and bubble effects) are definitely an aspect of "objective factors" that people talk about.
> People tend to think of issues that impact mental health as somehow less objective, because mental health is itself subjective.
Personal mental health is subjective in much the same way that personal ability to find a place to sleep (from couch surfing to buying a mansion) is subjective (and becoming harder due to demographics and new construction deficits).
Social mental health (sociology) is an objectively measurable criterion. As indicated by the link in my edit to the post you are responding to.
(Pardon the tense disagreement in the third sentence.)
Is it possible that dividing GDP by population isn't a good indicator of whether "life got objectively worse" for people living in conditions of increasing inequality?
Perhaps the prospect of juggling three gig jobs that can disappear in an instant, while still not being able to pay for rent and healthcare, isn't an ideal "employment prospect".
Or perhaps the data cited in the article isn't granular enough to point at root causes. Yes, young people are depressed and anxious. But when we understand that persistent sadness and hopelessness is far more prevalent among teen girls than teen boys, now we can look at what's different for girls than boys.
One hint is that among teens, the vast majority of minutes spent on Instagram are by girls, not boys. Boys are online a lot too, but gaming is a different social and behavioral animal.
And most studies looking for correlations between social media usage and mental health are flawed, because they are typically dose-response studies. If individuals who consume 15 meals a week of fast food have greater rates of diabetes than individuals who never eat fast food, then that's a good correlation (though not necessarily causation)!
But that method fails for social media, because social media is a collective activity. Girls who spend five hours a day on Instagram are mediating relationships through the app and neglecting in-person social activity, and we know that's unhealthy.
But girls who stay off social media are out of the loop, socially isolated, probably ostracized for being weird, because their friends are still on it for five hours a day.
High rates of social media usage damage both frequent users and infrequent users, so it's hard to see that in dose-response correlations.
My second thought is that we have weaker homes today than we did in times past. No, I don't think our ancestors were perfect. I could go on and on about how we've improved so much on many things. But homes were more stable in the past -- and that too is factually correct. I also think this weakens a teenagers support system and overall sense of love and security.
My third thought is that even if someone comes from a good home, great parents, and well-off, today -- we have social media. Anyone can recognize the mental struggle this has catapulted humanity into. That too is factual. And for teens, they probably have it worse than anyone because the need and desire for acceptance is at the absolute strongest during these years. And being excluded or bullied is a harsh reality for many teens; not to mention being in relationships, introducing social media, and combining that with a lack of real education, experience, and emotional maturity.
I don't have the answer, but if teens are offing themselves, something is wrong. And those of us who have already passed through that age should reach out and help.
Of course, all the evidence it has is that suicide trends are not correlated with short term noise on general measurements of the economy. Or, in other words, it's bullshit. But the hypothesis itself is valid and worth looking at.
Let's say a service is written Go, but it's inefficient. Some engineers are diagnosing the problem. It's not helpful to deny their work by proclaiming that Go is shit, and any solution that doesn't involve rewriting the service in Rust is counterproductive, especially when you know that very few people would agree with you.
It could be an indicator that there is a perception that life is worse, which may drive action regardless of whether it is objectively true - and social media may be the primary vector for spreading that perception.
Let’s face it, “life is better/worse” is an absurdly one-dimensional judgement given how complex everyone’s lives are. Even if there was a way of measuring an accurate quality of life trend, I expect it is far more likely that people’s perceptions are shaped by their media inputs than by reviewing actual data.
Look at the occurrences of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. When newspapers talked about it, it spiked. They made a pact not to talk about it, it tanked.
https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abus...
Every single study on social media use shows how destructive it is for the psyche but we're supposed to pretend that's not related to the increases in depression and suicide? Why?
This is why I think culture is more important than policy. Lorenz’s point is obviously non-sensical. She mentions the “safety net.” But Medicaid didn’t exist in the 1950s. There were no federal student loans. There were no food stamps. Almost nobody went to college. Etc.
But it’s a mistake to say Lorenz is wrong on the facts and leave it at that. She sincerely believes that young people today are worse off than young people in the 1950s. It’s a common refrain expressed by young people.
So what has changed since the 1950s? Culture. We have made massive changes to how society is structured. We have changed what we tell young people about the meaning and purpose of life. We have eliminated social roles and duties and obligations that used to apply to young people. In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems. And maybe those changes aren’t all conducive to the well being of young people.
Trajectory of how well off average American will be in x years?
A teenager in 1950s would be 40-50 when the productivity-wage breakdown happened [1]. Their generation not only benefited, they caused that for juiced returns on their stocks.
A teenager today was born an entire generation after that decoupling — and has only known a world where their parents were exploited by 1950s teenagers.
I don’t think it’s surprising that a generation where hard work was rewarded was more optimistic than one born to parents for whom that didn’t apply.
How much did college cost? How necessary was a college degree for success?
Separately, my father built a 2k square-foot house on 5 acres of land for $10k in the 70's (about $100k adjusted for inflation). He did this on a telephone lineman's budget without a degree.
1960: The Master Plan for Higher Education in California maintains that tuition at University of California and state colleges should be free, but that fees are necessary to help cover non-instructional costs. “The two governing boards reaffirm the long established principle that state colleges and the University of California shall be free to all residents of the state.”
1966: Ronald Reagan assumed office of Governor of California and changed the course of the state’s higher education system. In his eight years, he cut state funding for college and universities and laid the foundation for a tuition-based system.
According to a New York Times article from 1982, during his eight years as governor, “Reagan fought hard in the legislature to impose tuition at four-year colleges. He lost the battle to lobbyists for the university, … However, the Legislature agreed to increase student registration fees.”
[0]https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/what-happened-to-ca...
Ascribing the resulting unhappiness to departing from some sort of communal idyll where young people 'knew their place' is rather regressive I'd suggest.
The evidence just doesn't support this. There are analyses that purport to, but they look at wages rather than total compensation (including benefits)
[0] 2020-2021 prices from a previous employer's details
The internet, social media, higher living standards, globalization, etc. all of these things have moved people out of their local bubble and into a global worldview. It's much easier to be depressed when your expectations are 10x those of your parents or grandparents because you are now growing up in a more stable time and have more exposure to what is possible.
There will be exceptions but talk to older boomers or ideally the silent gen then talk to a recent college grad. I'm not playing "whose suffering is the greatest" or "greater suffering invalidates lesser suffering" but there is a massive difference in perspective and expectations.
I fall into the expectations trap myself and talking to older family members helps me get grounded, avoid doom-spiraling, and appreciate the freedom and opportunities that exist today.
Likewise, capital’s share of GDP is flat since the 1950s and if you factor out real estate, has declined from 25% to under 20%. https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...
I would also posit that moving far away from grandma and not being forced to socialize with mixed-age communities at church had a much greater impact on ordinary people than whether capital has 20% or 25% share of GDP.
> There were no federal student loans.
True -- but by the same token, it was possible to "work your way through college". This is largely impossible now.
It can be done, if you are willing to do Community College and then head to a state university to finish up. We asked our friend's daughter, who was choosing which college to attend about going to a local state university. She replied, "what do I tell my friends?" as in it was beneath her. Which was funny as both her parents went to state universities.
The cost of education across the board has risen to an insane level, well above the rate of inflation.
This is a hilarious one to include on your list because it shows you are missing the forest for the trees. Federal student loans didn't exist because they didn't need to exist as college was cheaper, living a middle class life didn't require college, and low paying jobs still paid a high enough percentage of living costs to allow people to pay their way through college by working. Today college is more of a requirement, most young people and families can't afford tuition so they need to take out loans, and low paying jobs do not pay enough to get out in front of that loan debt. The current situation is objectively worse.
As a slight tangent, student loans and grants tend to be the least efficient form of subsidy for higher education because they incentivize colleges to increase tuitions to make them more resort-like.
Working for my university's housing and dining services (a major employer of students), I would make $8.50/hr my first year, with potential $0.25-$0.50 raises each year. At $8.50/hr, it would take 1350 hours to pay for my tuition alone before taxes. Full time employees work 2080 hours/yr but also get paid vacation while student employees do not.
So I would argue that state school tuition is a bit much in the grand scheme of things.
I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're depressed.
[Edit] I was standard college undergrad class of 2018, and right on the cutoff for gen Z. Our high school and college class was clearly more studious than class of 2016, and clearly less than class of 2020. I was also right there when childhood became virtual, starting with the iPhone and Facebook in middle school.
You’re assuming a level of insight into people’s meta-knowledge of their own mental state that I don’t think is warranted. Maybe they’re not thinking of social security, but maybe there’s mental health benefits to caring for elderly grandparents at home that people don’t appreciate.
As to leisure—in the 1950s, half of 16-19 year olds had jobs. Today it’s around 30%. Maybe having a real, if menial job is more fulfilling than playing video games or doing bullshit box checking exercises for college applications? That’s a cultural change too.
I'm guessing fewer 16-19yo have jobs mainly because school is more important now. College attendance is way up. But more importantly, the whole phone / social media thing is life-sucking even for kids who don't actively engage in it.
If we're going to make random stabs in the dark and bring in our own bargain basement personal opinions into this, I can tell you at least that interacting with my abusive family much less has only been fantastic for my mental health. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but maybe that's not important and I should just universalize this viewpoint like you, right?
To be clear, Taylor Lorenz is the one pining about the 1950s. She’s the one saying “things are worse now” and arguing that changes since then are making young people unhappy.
TFA rejects Lorenz’s premise by pointing out that the economically, young people aren’t worse off. I’m simply pointing out that, unless you want to dismiss Lorenz’s (quite common) view altogether, it’s worth looking at what other things have changed.
Wait, are you trying to say that kids these days don't work hard enough?
Income inequality has increased greatly from it's low in the 1950s. This means more people make less than X% of the median wage.
Housing has become much more expensive versus average wages.
Minimum wage has not increased with inflation.
Fallback jobs that require little training and can be done by most people have become fewer and fewer. The remaining jobs have less of a path upwards.
The top Federal tax bracket was 90% in the 1950s and it's under 40% now.
Etc. etc.
No medicaid; but also health care was far simpler and cheaper. That meant some died, yes, but less of a constant weight of "because I don't have a better job I won't be protected like those higher income people are."
No student loans; less need for them. Almost nobody went to college - but they got jobs anyway.
Not having to take out a bunch of debt to go to college to do a job that doesn't require specialized knowledge is a materially better prospect even in a pure economic sense than having to do a bunch more work to get a mostly-unrelated credential for squarely-lower-middle-to-middle-class-jobs. It's simply lower personal cost.
You had much lower costs because the frontier was much more accessible and growing cheaply, too. Fewer people in the country. More un- or barely-developed land in growing areas. Less competition for more resources = lower personal cost. Materially better.
We also have new forms of peer-to-peer mass communication so any relative advantage someone has today is magnified and amplified. None of your old buddies were hopping on private jets and traveling across the world doing influencer stuff and able to shove it in your face constantly back then. We've coupled increasing inequality with increasing visibility of that inequality. I don't think you have to pull in broad cultural things beyond just (failing) keeping up with the Joneses.
I think that a major component of the overall mental health crisis for young people is the fact that more and more teens understand mental illness, are able to identify their struggles, and getting a diagnosis for things like anxiety and depression is easy enough- but the situation for treatment, at least in the US, is absolutely abysmal. I was diagnosed with a few learning disabilities at 8, anxiety later on so have been seeing psychologists and psychiatrists for a very long time now. I can afford top-tier care out-of-pocket and am very experienced at navigating this landscape, and at 32, I still struggle to find competent psychiatrists. It's a very complicated field which requires a certain nuance in practice but I usually come across mental health professionals entrenched in pop psychology, not science, so I just have a great therapist and have neurologists handle my meds now. This scenario becomes even more difficult for adolescents because many psychiatrists and psychiatrists do not see adolescents, and even fewer will see children.
tldr; adolescents are more aware of their mental health struggles than they were just 10 years ago but access to proper mental health care has not improved, and finding a psychiatrist or psychologist who is taking new patients is twice as hard as it was before covid
The GI Bill from WW2 and Korea led to an explosion in college students. Before that, college was simply too expensive for anyone but the very rich to attend, and then...you get lots of people going on the military's dime.
Culture always changes. That's expected.
What wasn't expected is the near-total collapse of the middle class and the redistribution of wealth to the rich. That's more of a punch in the gut than the most baroquely decorated food made in a jello mold (50s culture).
Therefore, (American) culture has changed with the decline of religion in a very unfortunate way. Religion created communities and communities supported families and people in emotional, physical, and economic terms. That support system is eroding at an increasing rate. Then beyond that at an individual level, meaning and contentment now rely on the individual creating meaning or deriving it from some worldly source instead of coming from a higher power. Then when that source lets down the person, nihilism becomes attractive. So what is someone to do? In American politics you can only rely on the government less than half the time. Even the best non-profit and civic organizations are prone to corruption. If the person looks inward what happens when they let themselves down? Like it or not, religious modalities play a fundamental part in Western psychology - in other words, people need "a bigger reason" than themselves. Anecdotally the young people in my church (as far as I know) are the happiest young people I know - much happier than many of the children at my kids' school and friends' kids.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/wp-content/uploads/site...
[2] https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-decline-of-...
There are some secular community groups and activities but nothing that really replaces organized religion. Especially in the way that a church community cuts through a cross-section of society while most other communities are organized around more specific subsets and interests.
>Lorenz isn’t wrong to suggest that economic conditions can influence the prevalence of mental distress. Unemployment and poverty are both major risk factors for depression. Recessions are associated with elevated rates of suicide. And there is some evidence that robust social-welfare states improve mental health by reducing material insecurity. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that America’s relatively stingy social safety net and elevated level of child poverty are implicated in its youth mental-health crisis.
lmao he agrees with her main point and then goes on to just shrug his shoulders in the next paragraph.
>Thus it is possible that the social pathologies cited by Lorenz are preconditions for today’s mental-health crisis.
and
>It’s possible that Lorenz’s general intuitions may someday be validated.
and
>What we can say with confidence is that we do not know and that we owe it to those suffering in our mental-health crisis to be honest about that fact.
It’s clickbait meant to congratulate people that disagreed with Lorenz before they clicked on the article. Its substance is considerably less strong or confident than the headline assigned by the editor.
And the evidence for that case seems to grow stronger by the day.
Beyond that, it’s simply good writing style to address the strong points of the argument you want to rebut, before rebutting it. You seem to be set on finding on something more nefarious than that going on here.
If I were to write an article about how I think [person a] could possibly be right or wrong about [topic x] for understandably valid reasons in either direction, I wouldn’t title it “No, [opinion of person a on topic x] is wrong” because that would be stupid.
This is not the claim.
The word “objective” does a lot of important heavy lifting here, and there are strong arguments to be made that subjective experience has gotten significantly worse, while most “objective” factors have continued to improve as the world modernizes.
The trouble is that evolutionary psychology is such that the major changes to how humans live and communicate leave us in an environment that looks less and less like the environment we evolved in.
This is why there is so much interest in the impact of social media. There is evidence that even among those who are in an objectively “good” circumstance when defining “good” based on safety, financial security and other commons measures, individuals are just as susceptible to the negativity and distorted reality that dominates modern social life.
And I find it odd that the objective criteria the author chooses ("it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security.") are mostly not applicable to teens, but to adults.
And to the extent they are applicable to teens, well teen employment has dropped quite a bit since the Great Recession, and is just now returning to what is was in 2007: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/21/after-dropp...
The percent of children living in "poverty" also increased by a few percentage points (about 1/4 to 1/3 in relative percent) after the Great Recession, and didn't fall back to trend until around 2017. This would have affected today's teens during formative times in their childhood: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/43-children-in-po...
Right around the time social media garbage bloomed. Weird coincidence.
How many teens had to watch their parent come home and announce that they got laid off from their job and that this year there wasn't going to be a yearly family trip?
Poverty and unemployment continue to exist in other places around the globe, often in places with very low suicide rates.
I realize that there are many life stories here and this may not be reflective of everybody's expectations, but when I was young (pre-9/11) it felt like part of the zeitgeist that "every generation has it a little better than the last" (at least, in the material sense). Now there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that for the first time in living memory people's conditions in the aggregate are trending downward rather than upwards.
What I’m talking about is a sudden change in normalcy - since you were a kid every year there was a trip. Now there’s not a trip.
If I put you in a loincloth with a club in the wilderness, you might be pretty upset at that. But literally millions (billions?) of our cro magnon ancestors did it just fine.
Rich kid problems.
This is the first time I've heard of this argument. What kinds of things are you referring to?
A few years back when political derangement was seemingly at its peak, my 14-year-old cousins were feverously arguing politics and social issues with adults at family functions. It was astounding to me, not because I was shocked that they had an opinion on any of it, but because they wasted their precious youth on stupid adult issues when they have their entire adulthood ahead of them to worry about it. This is an incredible weight to bare for adults, let alone children.
As a parent of a teen a huge part of this comes from the experienced shared by their friends. When a kiddo shares that they're struggling with a life-altering decision with a parent they're taking a risk they will be disowned, kicked out, or that the decision isn't theirs to make and that their parent is the sole-authority on their decision making.
When they share it with a teacher in confidence, the risk of the above occurring are less. Kiddos aren't dumb; they're minimaxing[1] - reducing the possibility of worse case outcomes.
When they share it with their friends, they absolutely pass around stories of the kiddo that went to their parents and now has to live with an aunt or grandparent now because that other kid made the decision to confide in their parents.
Let's be frank, there are certain lines folks have, which if their kiddo came to them for support in those cases, they would tell them wasn't metaphysically possible.
We would all like to believe that parents have infinite grace with their kids, but there are real life case that get shared amongst kids, that serve as living counter-examples.
Everyone's lives has problems, but find a way to thread them together that frames them under a unified message, and you've done a lot more to advance a message. What's not going to work is telling people their lives are actually ok, and the alternative messages, "The problem is actually you," or "That other group is making your life worse," either turn the problem inward which doesn't do anything to help suicide rates, or foments identity tensions which teens find unpalatable.
If you want teen suicide rate to fall, out-message the most powerful message. Or I mean, actually abolish capitalism and prove them wrong, or right.
Life may not have gotten much worse. The expectations of what the world is like may have been dumbed down during prior childhood.
Maybe, just maybe, the answer is multi-faceted. Maybe we should take the things kids say at face value if we want to pretend that we are being intellectually honest. Sure, humans are notoriously bad at describing their own qualia and reasons for why they feel the things they do, but listening should surely be our starting point, right?
Furthermore, why is it that capitalism can't both increase our material quality of life, while also alienating us from things that our ancestors enjoyed in abundance? Relationships, the family, simple and fulfilling labor that had an immediate impact on your surroundings, connection with nature, more leisure time, etc. There's no conversion ratio of semiconductor chips to time spent with loved ones. Guess which of the two humans can't live without?
Maybe instead of having a knee-jerk reaction to anti-capitalism, we should objectively look at neoliberal capitalism and see what the negative externalities are of a system that assumes the driving force between human interactions to be economic (one of which is the commodification of everything including relationships).
This article should be titled "picking a fight with Taylor Lorenz" and nothing else.
The huge rise in material standard of living from the 1850s to 1970s in the US made a dramatic improvement in people’s real quality of life.
But since the 70s the improvements are very marginal. I speculate that’s because most of the consumer improvements are in the domain of status consumption goods, which by definition is zero sum. Material abundance beyond a certain point is in and of itself corrosive because it’s just status seeking / competitive signaling.
The relationship between working people and let's say "capital" used to be more tenuous. This had ramifications for political stability in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but by the middle of the century we had a decent balance of power between laborers and companies, mediated by the government.
Union membership + secret societies were a huge building block of everyday life. If you haven't ever walked through a graveyard, I encourage you to do so. Look at the headstones of people who died before the 1980s. A huge number belong to a secret society or trade union group (for the sake of simplicity let's ignore the uncomfortable racial aspects many of these organizations may have had, they were still pillars of community even if they were racist pillars of community)
Contrasted with up until very recently where the norm was about bragging how hard you work (for someone else). Rugged individualism, not collectivism, is what some would consider to be the highest virtue today. Not to say this is a root cause, but just an example of change that can be analyzed in some weighted equation.
The internet itself is just a method of getting information, most of which is garbage.
To use an analogy, let's say the telephone just got invented. Hey I can call my brother in Tampa, this rocks! But now you get spam calls every day, every time you try to use your phone you have to listen to an ad to call your brother. People call you at random times of the night telling you they are going to kill you.
Hyperbole, but you can see how a QOL of life improvement can also just be another vector for the bullshit you already have to put up with every day.
There's certainly a lot more bullshit to deal with today than there was in the past, and I can respect how leads to some level of existential angst and mental health issues, but I can't agree that it has overall made life worse.
Someone who goes from making $600 to $8000 a month will see their stress levels reduced but the $8000 will quickly become just a number for them.
To use another analogy, programmers will always quickly squander the gains made by the chips. I bitch and moan about webpack and React because I've never written a GUI in C, the intermittent gains are invisible to me.
Now for kids born after the internet's invention, they don't even understand the benefits of having the internet. Those are invisible. The negative effects are crystal clear though.
In my example, I am not saying webpack made life worse, but that it's easy to see what's wrong with it and hard to see what's right.
1. Humans seem to do best in social groups of ~50 people. Connecting everyone to everyone doesn’t seem to be working very well from a societal standpoint.
2. https://www.theonion.com/report-90-of-waking-hours-spent-sta...
Does the internet make us more productive? Sure. Does this improve the human condition? Not clear. Will the sum total gains eventually outweigh the costs? Maybe. But then again, it may also destroy civilization. Generative AI distributed over the internet has the capability to unravel everything.
1: https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-d...
Would appreciate reading recommendations in this area if anyone has any.
Absolutely agreed. We've gone from a community-based culture where you took care of your neighbors because it's the right thing to do to "rugged individualism" where things like healthcare are "privileges" you have to _earn_ through labor.
I think we need to stop making the assumption that all the systems we have today are the best and take a long hard look at what upholds society, piece by piece.
Taking care of a neighbor is none of my business because other peoples' lives are none of my business.
Being a good neighbor and taking care of a neighbor are two very different things.
The fundamental argument between jackson1442, Dalewyn, and giraffe_lady is this argument as to whether a "good neighbor" can exist if a community does not exist. Dalewyn is saying "yes", jackson1442 and giraffe_lady are saying "no".
You're stating that "community" encompasses both. And by stating that you're effectively ignoring the definition of the term that giraffe_lady and jackson1442 are using. If ignoring this distinction was not your intent, then your original comment needed to be more verbose.
I used the same pattern to further weaken it to "X is not A of type B" (which, logically, must be true if giraffe's statement is true).
They've said it's not 'A.' My statement was COMPATIBLE in fact with their original statement being true, it just leaves open the door that it may not be. It's certainly possible something could be both not a community and not the community they envision, and in fact if it weren't a community it couldn't possibly be the one they envision. Nothing I said necessarily conflicts with their definition.
Given that the comment I responded to and my comment used very similar patterns with mine only weakening the 'not' possibilities I'm really struggling to understand why my comment suddenly crossed the line to you. It didn't even assert the previous comment or definition was incorrect.
1) I've seen the "arguments over definitions don't add to HN" morale stated here before and decided to try it out when it seemed pertinent.
2) I wasn't too on board with giraffe_lady either, and yours was just the figurative last straw. Also if I'm going to try to interject in what I think is a non-productive back and forth I figured I'd do so at the end of the chain, not with multiple comments throughout the chain.
"Good neighbor" and "taking care of your neighbor" are simply figures of speech. If someone is taking them to literally mean a neighbor and subsequently literally a neighborhood, they are demonstrating a gross lack of understanding in the subject matter.
Being a "good neighbor" means being a man of good character. What is a man of good character? Treating others with kindness and professionalism, respecting property and privacy, reciprocating generosity and respect, and protecting the weak and helping those truly in need. None of this is mutually exclusive with individualism.
"Taking care of your neighbor" means to proactively involve yourself in the lives of others, which may or may not be appreciated depending on the recipient (anecdata: I know many people who don't) and is either way none of your business to initiate.
I am making this distinction between "a good neighbor" and "taking care of your neighbor" in my original comment because the two are very different things, and the commenter I replied to was conflating the latter with the former.
It often means this given the type of person most likely to "take care of their neighbor", but it doesn't have to. Rare people can make it known that they are willing to help with anything a neighbor may ask for help with without actively butting in. It's difficult to do without making it seem like you're sincere and not just saying a platitude, but I am sure that it can be done, and has been done.
I'm neither community or neighbor oriented, so I don't have a horse in this race.(1) I just thought I'd comment on this particular statement of yours.
(1) - To the extent I butted into the conversation with my comment toward notch898a it was mostly an experiment.
For a lot of human history this was simply not the case. I am not saying that this level of social cohesion is better or worse for mental health, but you can't use your own cultural viewpoints to debunk the previous commenter's claim. You have this view because you have been conditioned to have it in our current society.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depre...
A study was conducted examining exactly this question. It turns out the bias is even worse: Not only are the 'wrong' questions unlikely to be asked, studies get rejected if they get the wrong results:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
It's a very thought-provoking article and one that deserves more time than just might lunch break to ponder. In particular, this quote at the end of the article articulates an increasing discomfort I've been feeling around conversations about harm:
> I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.
Framed another way, it looks like the language of harm is winning in the marketplace of ideas and the language of "those aren't actually that bad," is losing.
It's trivial to find a counter example to the argument expressed literally. I can't change the laws of physics. Therefore the language used to express the laws of physics is less important. The conclusion doesn't make any sense because the argument doesn't make any sense.
This third language is the language of "I don't like the status quo, or a change to the status quo. How do I deal with this?" You can deal with it through:
- Changing your point of view.
- Changing your circumstances.
- Tackling it head on to stop it.
- Team with others to address it.
That's all that I meant. The first two options kind of go with the "it's not so bad" language, and the last three with the "language of harm" (yes, option 2 kind of belongs to both). So it's really not an alternative to either, but the means of moving on from the other two.
Conservatives have a vision of the doomed future, built around walls and hoarding resources against impending scarcity. But liberals don't really have a good answer outside of "bring the super-rich to heel and use their resources to invest in mitigations," a view which is anathema to politicians who depend on the super-rich to continue holding power.
People are depressed because there doesn't seem to be a future.
Surprise, people's feelings are based on how things feel and regardless of what numbers say the world feels worse than it used to. We've optimized the hopefulness out of our changes.
Any time the word "objectively" is bandied around, you should be extremely skeptical. Very often, it is used to impose a values system pre-emptively on the conversation, and then make its argument from illusorily high ground. A true discussion on the subject would of course start with "what are the values we are trying to encourage in a healthy society, and how does that view differ between teens and other people?" which NY Mag doesn't seem interested in examining.
I suspect this is because the imposition of an external values system itself is what's killing teens. You will have to take me at my word that I have personal experience with this question among people who are in this demographic.
To me, teen suicide is making my life worse. It's making your life worse, too. If we want to play this game of counterfactuals, let's take it to its logical ends: how much will we miss these potential future inventors, stewards of good will, and powerhouses of industry when they are gone?
Also, objective measures are pointless when suicide is and only ever will be a subjective experience motivated by subjective viewpoints. If the point is "look how great everything is out here, outside of your little poisoned head!" then we can expect a spike, not a reduction, in suicides.
I didn't even have high hopes for this article but wow, this is an astonishingly out-of-touch take. Shame on the author, truly, for this.
Especially this part:
> It seems possible that the story of the teen-suicide crisis will come to resemble that of the opioid epidemic. Perhaps in a few years, we will find the U.S. economy’s structural inequities had less to do with American adolescents’ declining mental health than did the sudden introduction of a highly addictive (digital) technology.
Come on! There has been vigorous debate over exactly these things, and where they fit into our society (incentive structures for doctors and pharma companies to push their products on vulnerable populations, incentive structures for social media companies to promote or demote certain kinds of potentially harmful content) precisely because this is a question of societal values! The question "Do we subject unwitting populations to things we know will harm them?" can be answered in different ways. In our current society, we've decided that permitting companies to act in these ways is in our best interest in order to legitimize this method of organizing capital markets (the profit motive) and refusing to apply different rules for different companies or industries on the basis of appeals to "free market" principles.
I will note that, without access to the internal research of e.g. Meta or e.g. Purdue Pharma, the "consumers" of such "technologies" are literally, legally incapable of consenting to the set of possible outcomes that may result from their use. Furthermore, especially in the case of opioids, the people making the decision to accept such products are by definition under duress, as opioids are typically prescribed for constant and unbearable pain.
Just last week an article that rising number of teens (girls and boys) are being sextorted, or sexually coerced.
More and more girls are getting raped before adulthood, let alone the rising likelihood that an attractive single woman will get raped in a major metropolitan.
America has several converging cultural epidemics.
It’s all in the meme stream.