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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
That would mean life is worse. And we can measure how much worse in suicide rate deltas.
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.