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> the state of society is horrible and teens care about the world they'll be living in.

I grew up with (the after effects of) an oil crisis, an economic crisis and a cold war. If you needed more doom, you could read the The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome. We were called "the lost generation" because of the high unemployment rate. And I'd argue there have been situations which were considerably worse to grow up in. I've heard first-hand stories about growing up in the final days of the Soviet Union, which were tough to even listen to.

So no, that's not a change that can account for the effect.

I was on a course last year and one of my fellow pupils was a Russian man who'd moved to the UK a decade or so prior. When we were in the pub after one of the day's sessions he told me something that's stuck with me since:

> People in the UK vote like their lives couldn't get any worse, but as someone who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia in the 1990s things can get so much worse than you realise.

Half of my friends were born inside a city walled by a Warsaw-Pact state.

I myself was born in a military dictatorship and we knew some houses were locked because the people there "disappeared" a few years before.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like the 90s were an anomaly in history.

I remember a (Dutch) programme about teens in the 80s; the motto among the youth was "no future". Programme in question (in Dutch only): https://anderetijden.nl/aflevering/286/No-Future

TraumaZone ("What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy") is a pretty good film about the final days of the USSR and 90s Russia by the way.

Didn't these dark period also come with a pretty significant amount of diagnozed or not mental health issues, teen bullying and suicide, and overall deep impact on people ?

I also have elder relatives who lived a decent part of their life in a third world country during the cold war and their stories are sprinkled with people dying early.

I think that yes, the current generation probably doesn't have it the absolute worse (depending on where they live), but it's also not a contest. Which generation had it worse doesn't really matter much IMHO.

Well, if this generation has it better in absolute terms but feels worse we should look for reasons not related to the actual state of the world, no?

I hear you, but trying to evaluate if a generation feels worse while having it better in absolute terms feels like a pretty hard challenge.

For instance the article focuses on teen suicide rate raising with the uptake of modern smartphones, but of course there’s other peaks in the past, especially for males between 1980 and 1995 for instance.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm

Did these specific boys have it worse at that time ? I genuinely have no idea how we’d evaluate that, I wouldn’t be checking how much money they had to judge that, and it would be probably tough to compare to girls today.

It's not a contest, but it does mean that it shouldn't be seen as a dominant factor in the explanation of today's teens' mental health.

I hear you, but the solution to a flawed world isn't to push a negatively biased narrative (because let's admit it) down teen's throats until they are committing suicide. The article does go into this and doesn't assert what you say it does. In fact it suggests cultivating a sense of "optimistic determination" in response to the challenges we face in the world, which is clearly not the vibe one gets when doomscrolling.

Probably because the actions of those that have any power to change anything aren't exactly "optimistically determined".

We have some of the most powerful men in the world attempting to start either another Cold War or at worst WW3. Existential challenges facing humanity aren't given the time of day compared to "hurrr durrr spy balloon!1!". Mass shootings go by and all anyone sees is some variation of "thoughts and prayers" yet nothing changes.

When the people with the power show no willingness to improve a world which is on a downhill slope from the perspective of many young people I am not surprised that doomscrolling merely reflects reality back at you.

Optimism needs to start with leaders that have the power to actually change things.

I’d argue having people vocal about changing the narratives to discuss our issues would have a bigger impact than “optimistic determination”.

I’m thinking about for instance what happened during #metoo. The narrative wasn’t about optimism, but sharing that many understand the victims’ struggle, they aren’t alone, and can come to the front to tell their stories.

The same way telling people to not follow instagram has probably less impact than explaining how these photoshoots work, the money flow, the production staff behind, the eating disorders coming with these body styles etc.

I’m basically thinking that fighting poisonous narratives with “don’t look at them” or “be optimistic anyway” isn’t the best approach when facing kids who don’t have enough background to understand why the these narratives are wrong in the first place.

It's possible we're interpreting the phrase differently. To me, "having people vocal about changing the narratives to discuss our issues" _is_ optimistic determination, because it indicates both a desire to make things better and a belief that they can.

Because I agree with pretty much everything you're saying.

High school kids are only a few years away from being able to vote. Some of them already can. There's tremendous pressure on them to pick a tribe that will identify them politically and increasingly and sadly, limit their social interactions. For those who are trying to get near-future voters into their tribe, destroying teens isn't something that matters to them, they just want the teen's allegiance, hopefully lifelong. If some commit suicide, that's a lost vote, but all of the other votes the tribe gains is worth that death. Afterall, there's no consequence to the tribe itself beyond the lost potential voter.

> Sure phones make these issues more apparent, info flows faster, further. School shootings don't stay local news. Olympics Committee corruption is not burtied in the 20h news. Instagram pushes our esthetics stronger than previous media.

> Then can't the issue be that we're horrible and it's way more exposed than before?

Just because those problems are real, doesn't mean it's good or useful to have an endless stream of negativity and global problems mixed in with your everyday life. Either for you or for the world.

Learning, at some point, that the Olympics are a profoundly corrupt institution is a good thing to be aware of. Having every latest scandal slammed in your face by your Twitter feed at 7 AM and ruining your morning poop is not.

> The conclusion could have been to fix the world one step at a time, instead of going for the "close your eyes, shut your ears, hold your nose and you won't be bothered by the place you stand."

False dichotomy. Problems can be real and in need of fixing, and yet blasting them out 24/7 to everyone can be harmful. Especially since we're talking about teenagers here.

We're in agreement 24/7 manufactured outrage is a problem.

My point is that we should address that problem, and potentially create/help teens find content that is more nutritious than that, and guide them to the better places instead of telling them to lock their ohone because they're too young for the internet.

I'm basically advocating for better surfacing of the good parts of the net, and better moderation/flagging of the worst parts.

Ah, I thought your previous post meant "we should make the world less awful so that teenagers won't be exposed to that". Apologies.

> My point is that we should address that problem, and potentially create/help teens find content that is more nutritious than that, and guide them to the better places instead of telling them to lock their ohone because they're too young for the internet.

Those are just two ways of saying "teenagers shouldn't be given a raw twitter/reddit/tiktok feed, and should be spending their time on something more mentally healthy", aren't they?

Whether that requires active restrictions or not depends on whether you believe you can make the mentally healthy activities more captivating than the doomscrolling.

> we should make the world less awful so that teenagers won't be exposed to that

I also think that, but am way more pessimistic on this part. If there is a path forward, I’d assume it starts by reducing the amount of people hating the world as it is today and deciding to bail out eternally.

> Whether that requires active restrictions or not depends on whether you believe you can make the mentally healthy activities more captivating than the doomscrolling

My knee-jerk reaction would be “we should ban content targeted at hurting other people’s mental health”, but I don’t see it as a viable approach in so many ways, from how to define what is hurtful, what is intentional, and freedom of expression in the first place.

But the same way we can design cities that improve residents’ well-being, I wish we found better designs (and probably business models and incentives) for our social media landscapes.

I actually enjoyed a lot more the social media before facebook (even Instagram, before it got purchased…thinking about it, those were all available on our phones too) and I still see niches (mostly small sub-reddits) that work different from the other bigger networks. Not saying we should go back there, but there’s stuff that could be inspiring.

We're not that horrible.

The chronically online character overconsumes news, which is almost always bad news, as that grabs the attention. Complemented by hysterical, pessimistic social media grifters.

When you almost exclusively consume the above, your world view will be deeply corrupted.

The author fundamentally misunderstands depression. "You have it so great so why are you depressed?"

Depression is almost always future-oriented - you get depressed because you don't see anything good happening to you in the future. Most depressed people will say that they can't even imagine the future, let alone imagine something good happening to them.

If young people are depressed today, it likely means that they don't imagine good things - better jobs, family, health, relationships - coming their way in the future.