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Comment by sircastor | Hacker News Reader

I recall seeing commentary recently from mental health specialists that noted that young people are increasingly facing a sense of existential dread over climate change - that there's nothing they can do to stop it, and will feel the impact more heavily than previous generations.

I wouldn't discount social media and related issues out of hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a contributing factor. I understand there was a similar sentiment in the 70s and 80s where there was a certainty that nuclear war was going to happen.

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now imagine spamming their phones with tik tok videos about the end of the world due to ____________. In your example, it's climate change. Maybe it's that, but it could also be that we can now mainline hours and hours of highly provocative content directly into a growing brain.

We grew up with the threat of nuclear destruction, as well as global warming, in the 1980s.

We did, but we didn't have endless short videos to scroll through.

Yeah, instead we had our teachers reassure us that if we saw a nuclear explosion that we should hid under our desks and that would protect us. We ran drills practicing this, as if it were expected to happen any moment now.

I agree with you that it's worse these days. Now, the kids practice active shooter drills. It turns out the USSR never did launch the missiles, but kids shooting up their school is so common it barely makes the news anymore.

The example you're referencing was mentioned in the article, and I think is part of the reason Haidt took the time to prove that this phenomenon is _not_ isolated to the US, and that US specific issues (like school shootings) are unlikely to have an effect elsewhere.

> And it certainly can’t be caused by the most popular theory we hear in the USA: school shootings and other stress-inducing events. Why would school shootings or active shooter drills implemented only in the USA lead to an immediate epidemic across the entire English-speaking world?

Drills at least give you an action to do and a hope it will work out.

Meanwhile global warming propaganda does neither. There's no easy to do action and no realistic hope it will be fixed.

It surprises me that folks (presumably technical) regress to the "same thing as the old thing" logic. I'm not downplaying the end-of-times drama every generation surely went through, but whatever drill you can think of, it ended, and kids went home, and they most likely played outside. At worst they sat in front of the news which didn't have to compete with the Internet and YouTube thus was very different.

Now? They go through a drill, leave, check their phone 4,000 times between that drill and dinner time which gives them a constant stream of a) the world is terrible, b) the other side is evil, c) your peers are all better looking, smarter, richer, and more popular than you.

Nuclear destruction wasn't the same in key ways:

- It was only a possibility. You also knew the nukes might not launch, the world might not end.

- If the nukes did launch, it wouldn't be due to a moral failure of your own.

- Although you may sometimes have felt scared or depressed about the USSR and MAD, you weren't being constantly told by your society that optimism was illegitimate thoughtcrime.

Climate doomerism is pretty much ideal for creating mental health issues. It tells adherents that they have no future outside of some hellscape, that it's all their own fault or maybe their parents fault, the root cause is moral failure, that maybe it can be stopped except SURPRISE no it can't really, and that any deviation from any of these beliefs makes you utterly evil and depraved, absolutely worth of immediate and total ex-communication from your friendship groups.

Personally I think it's more likely to be the phones, but there are enough anecdotes about real young people whose thought processes around the future have been totally broken by climate propaganda, that it's worth taking seriously.

I have no idea what you mean by "climate propaganda".

I just lived in a place that experienced 8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area and which will destroy the regional economic livelihood.

A totally unprecedented event, which we know with quite a bit of certainty will begin to occur frequently.

I have no idea how you expect polite society to accept that without distress.

When people don't even realize it exists, that's the mark of truly successful propaganda!

"8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area"

Yeah, where is this? I doubt it's actually true. For sure it was reported as true, but one of the many reasons to call it climate propaganda is that that reporting of "records" doesn't mean what you think it means. Government agencies and other parts of the climate lobby continually adjust past historical data such that records become made and unmade without anything actually happening. They also like to change definitions and seriously truncate datasets at convenient places to create the appearance of endless trends when longer term data exists showing otherwise. This is so dishonest people think it can never happen, but it does.

Here's an example. Retraction Watch is a blog that follows retractions and bad scientific publishing:

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-hottest...

"NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet"

In this way they get to announce "record breaking temperatures" that were lower than previously announced temperatures.

You also have to watch out for lots of other problems and tricks, unfortunately. Even if they aren't doing that specific trick here, there can be others, even simple things like asserting patterns and trends in noise.

You have absolutely no idea about climatology and are just parroting garbage.

You're not a climate scientist, you have no idea how scientists reach the conclusions they have, you don't understand the evidentiary lineages that have brought us to the current understanding of the climate. You cite a single paper yet conveniently ignore the entirety of the research being carried out throughout the globe, by agencies and institutions with no relationship to each other, all reaching the same conclusions.

You haven't even the slightest understanding about the climate yet you claim "propaganda".

"You cite a single paper"

It's not a paper, so this makes me think you didn't read the cited document.

"by agencies and institutions with no relationship to each other"

They're all closely related to each other and tend to rely on the same small number of data sources to draw conclusions, which is why the fact that these data sources are subject to continuous retroactive editing is a problem.

> We grew up with the threat of nuclear destruction

The difference is that nuclear destruction required some sort of action. Climate catastrophe just requires inaction. "Do nothing and we're OK" vs. "do nothing and we're toast" is a pretty big difference psychologically. The idea that it might be too late for any action to change the outcome only makes it worse.

> as well as global warming

I was old enough to be aware at the time, and the level of concern about global warming then is practically nothing compared to what it is now. People were at least as concerned about a nuclear winter.

Responding to others' concerns with "big deal, I had it worse" is almost never helpful. Regardless of whether those concerns are objectively valid or among those you personally share, an empathetic and curious response would be to understand why those concerns loom so large and what can be done to allay them.

Existential dread over climate change is a symptom, not a cause of mental health problems.

Why would this be? It is obvious the existentially complicated things create anxiety.

Is that obvious? Or do the immediate, simple things - I have to see everyone at school tomorrow and they all think [something bad about me] - create anxiety more? I think it's probably easier to distract yourself from "ice is going to melt into the ocean and kill a bunch of people eventually" than from "people are having fun and didn't invite me RIGHT NOW"

Learned helplessness is a thing that leads to depression, and depression in turns demotivates and deepens sense of helplessness. They do mutually reinforce, and either could be the starting point.

No you read that from a "some experts are saying" article.

The evolutionary purpose of dread is to motivate people to leave dangerous situations. When you hear about people surviving dangerous animal encounters, they tend to notice that something is "off" before they actually spot the hungry bear or mountain lion. Feeling dread for something you can't control is completely irrational, however. It's inevitable that you'll succumb to age related illness, so it's logical to be concerned about it to a certain extent, and it can be good to channel that into motivating you to be healthy. However, the fear of death is motivating you to doomscroll WebMD and causing pain in your daily life, you have a psychological problem. The same goes for human climate change. Unless if you live in a place like Micronesia, climate doomerism is a product of social media more than actual climate change.

Coming to the conclusion that there is nothing you can do serves no evolutionary purpose either. You should continue looking for an out as long as any possibility remains, no matter how remote.

What gave you the impression that I think nothing can be done? You can drive less, eat less meat, vote for certain politicians etc. What's a waste of mental energy is worrying that everyone else is going to do the same thing. This is often counterproductive to the problem it's trying to solve, like Greta Thunberg inspiring millions of kids to skip school in the name of "raising awareness."

What do you think mental energy is for? If none of those things seems like solutions to the existential threat, which, let's be honest, they don't. Then the problem is not yet solved.

In any robust system, components are responsible for more than just their own personal contribution to failure. There needs to be a certain amount of redundancy.

Convincing other people to care more about climate change, and to be more willing to force society into common sacrifices for aggregate benefit takes a lot of footwork. It is not mental illness to participate in this process.

> Convincing other people to care more about climate change, and to be more willing to force society into common sacrifices for aggregate benefit takes a lot of footwork.

If they actually worked to make progress on this aspect, they would feel a sense of purpose rather than dread. Instead, what you're mostly seeing is virtue signalling that targets their own in-group and then being disappointed when that doesn't accomplish anything.

Climate activists can learn a lot by looking at the Civil Rights movement in the past. Before the big wins, there were voting drives, legal challenges, and organized carpools to encourage participation in the bus protests. This costs a lot more energy than telling people to skip school on social media, but participation is also significantly more fulfilling.

And all of the things you just listed, do absolutely nothing compared to demonstrating against using oil and coal. Instead they just make your life worse, much more than it helps the environment. Virtue signaling if you will.

>And all of the things you just listed, do absolutely nothing compared to demonstrating against using oil and coal

Says who? What's the marginal reduction of CO2 for skipping a day of school in the name of climate change awareness?

Probably nothing compared to actually working on replacing oil.

You don't just develop existential dread about climate change out of nowhere. First comes awareness, in this case the younger generation grew up being educated about climate change. Then you get exacerbation/increased attention - in this case social media and traditional media which have fuelled doomsday rhetoric and alarmism in general. Not to say that it isn't a big issue, it's massive; but doesn't help that we're feeding young minds with constant negative stimuli about how we're all going to die and there's nothing we can do about the problem.

I care more about hypergamy and dying alone than climate change as a young person.

There is a big divide between the young who think the world is over climate and the older who know better

Where do you live where young people give a damn about the climate? I find this amazing.

I'm a college professor in VT. They care a lot around here, anyway.

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