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Comment by amilios | Hacker News Reader

(Seemingly) Inevitable climate change and ecological destruction, growing income inequality and falling standards of living, a deathly pandemic that's still killing people while we pretend everything is back to normal (+ long covid probably bringing about a disability crisis in 3-5 years), increasing tensions between various nuclear-capable states (Russia, China) and the West, changes in the age distribution in most western states meaning that most young people will probably work until they die (retirement? lol) etc. etc.

This is a multi-faceted issue and let's face it, part of the problem is that the world is just getting depressing as hell for young people who see less and less of a future for themselves.

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Or the world has always had issues and the lense through which we now view the world is an everpresent fear coaster.

Step away from the news & social media for a few months. You can't effect the outcome anyway and you might find you're happier.

Ignorance is indeed bliss, right up until they’re at your door. I like to have advance warning.

So you can? (serious question not sarcastic)

to contribute to the architecture of solutions is hard indeed... However, to contribute small everyone in most countries can, simply by choosing what and how to consume and by voting, wherever that is possible

Well, if you had completely ignored the news circa Feb 2020, you would have had an unpleasant shock when you ran out of toilet paper and tried to buy more.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Funny, because I mostly heard about the state of store shelves by my friends and neighbors who visited those stores, rather than national news outlets trumpeting a bunch of irrelevant crap.

Isn't it the opposite? For all those topics with even a bit of research they are not even close to as concerning as the media presents it as. If people were more informed they'd have less issue it's this weird in-between state where they know about the issue but don't know enough to understand it's not really that big of a deal.

Agreed the world has always had problems, but it feels more like a megaphone than a lens these days (found not only online, but also at work, school, and among friends). These problems also eventually reach people's doorsteps where they cannot be ignored by disconnecting from social media or socially isolating.

This is really easy to say for someone who doesn't experience these issues firsthand. Not reading the news isn't going to make your existential anxiety go away if you or your parents give it to you, either by helicoptering or living paycheck to paycheck.

Also, you really don't think that, in between building aqueducts and nuclear missiles, nothing has changed? You really think we have the same problems today as we did N years ago?

Relative, not an absence.

History and geography.

We can look back at history and say that there are times that are worse than now. For example, the second world war was worse than now. Cuban missile crisis also.

We can look at other countries and see that being in Syria or Ukraine right now is worse than in my more peaceful country.

By looking this way we literally gain new perspectives. Perhaps part of today's crisis is one of perspective maybe the internet narrows our vision.

I don't know which reductionist framework you're working with to make these comparisons, but they're wrong, because they're reductionist. Some people like war, maybe things were awesome for them? Not to mention that humans are very social creatures. You can't just say 'medicine is better', 'crime is down' and neglect the erosion/transmogrification of every single social institution that has been around for XYZ decades just because there isn't a number or well-defined historical analysis associated with it.

I'll put it this way. We know exactly what happens when wars are started. We know very little about the effects of having an attention economy. For every thing you can give me that we know has changed for the better, I can give you another thing that's changed probably for the worse but we really have no clue. If people are living longer, more miserable lives, is that really an improvement?

> less and less of a future

Everything is relative. My grandfather's biggest dream was to live in a city, that's it. Now young people dream (and envy) of way more.

So I'd say there's more and more future for youth. They can afford, at least once in one's life: travel abroad, snow skiing, parachuting, going to a restaurant. It's just baseline jumped.

The disconnect might be wasting young peoples lives having them spend hours looking at influencers, reminding them of all the ways they might die from things, and keeping them busy scrolling and up on the latest trends of today.

When you stop paying attention to the deluge of alerts and articles, you can focus on your own tasks and get to experience some neat stuff and wonderful people in this world.

My grandparent's traveled the world and the US. Bought a big house and well obviously had a family.

Living in a cosmopolitan city is a pretty unrealistic dream for many people now that housing prices have gone off the charts.

Relatively speaking...

Cultural optimism is likely to follow periods of growth and abundance, like buying a property in the 1970s for $5K and selling it in the 2000s for $2M. The last couple of decades have seen a reversal of this effect, so I don't think it's unreasonable that more people are feeling pessimistic about the future and their place in it.

World events and economy aside, there are also clear trends with teenagers (and people as a whole) having fewer close friends than ever - loneliness is more common than ever. Our culture and society as a whole is declining in its ability to foster community and friendship, which really is deadly in its own way.

Imagine that: a culture that promotes individualism and the pursuit of profit over all else leads to a generation of people with few close friends and lots of loneliness and stress.

Yes, switching to capitalism in 2012 was clearly a mistake.

The increasing lonliness trend has been going on much longer than that, things are just coming to a head as it becomes more and more obvious that kids were sold a future that isn't going to happen. Real wages continue to fall while corporations make record profits and get bailed out when they fuck up, a college education just saddles you with debt and a job as a barista, housing prices are completely insane, and the consistent messaging is that this is all your fault for not working hard enough somehow.

> ... loneliness is more common than ever.

But it's also very profitable if you're the advertising delivery system, or somewhere sucking money off that pipeline, because you can convince lonely people to spend money to buy things that might help with that!

The whole "isolated, atomic person, only interfacing with the world through a screen, with every interaction intermediated by for-profit tech companies providing a service for a fee" model is very profitable. It's just horrid for everyone who's nothing more than a wallet and set of eyeballs to be tapped for as much as they're worth, then given loans to keep consuming.

I utterly hate the characterization of people as "consumers" these days - I'm trying to be more deliberate about using "citizen" or something along those lines. There's more to life than consuming as many "consumer goods" as possible.

Unfortunately, the wealthy end of the tech industry makes their money from this sort of social destruction, and so I don't expect many changes while people are still willing to pay for the chains of their cell phone. Fortunately, I think that's changing.

> the world is just getting depressing as hell for young people who see less and less of a future for themselves

I heard exactly the same thing in the 1970s.

Compare housing costs in the 1970s vs now.

Compare the threat of global nuclear annihilation in the 1970s vs now.

Compare the threat of being drafted and dying uselessly in Vietnam vs now.

Compare the gas lines in the 1970s vs today.

Compare the cost of an iPhone in the 1970s vs today.

Lol, really, a long covid disability crisis in 3 years? Gee, I wonder where the kids are getting all this unrealistic doom and gloom from.

How do we fix this complete disconnect from reality? I guess in the same vein how did they get such a incorrect view of the world state in the first place?

Teenagers are impressionable and exist in an environment where they aren't allowed to seriously disagree with their teachers. They're also under huge pressure to conform to what seems popular.

A lot of unrealistic climate doomerism is however created by adults. Even climatologists are now realizing they've badly overdone it, but of course the monster they created just turns on them when they try to restrain it. See the fun Zeke Hausfather has been having lately with being called a climate denier.

For teenagers to get restored perspective and realize the future isn't going to end, and will in fact be pretty awesome, it is required first that their parents give up the doomer beliefs too. And that in turn requires people to get skeptical, to start seriously pushing back on those who tell people to never think for themselves. It's a hard social problem that goes well beyond teenagers.

If long covid was real it would have happened already. I had covid a year and a half ago, and am fine as is everyone I know (who have almost all had it at some point). At some point it's the flip side of the vaccine side effects that antivaxxers keep insisting will emerge at some point

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