Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities.
The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace.
In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter)
I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.
> Stanford, MIT
I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best.
MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives us 2,500 seats. Let's round up to 3,000 just for fun.
Last year, around 3 million students graduated from 20,469 high schools. That's 20,469 valedictorians for 3,000 spots.
Last year, 1.7 million students took the SAT. That's 17,000 in the top percentile for 3,000 spots.
The set of valedictorians and set of SAT 99th percentile students probably mostly overlap. (And to the extent that they don't overlap, it's often because valedictorian is a weird game; eg, at both the high school I attended and the high school in my current community it's basically mathematically impossible to win the valedictorian game if you participate in band/orchestra because they aren't honors courses for the first 3 semesters... but, of course, any sane admissions department knows this and will weigh significant involvement in music over two additional honors courses.)
So there are at least 10K students who meet at least your son's (high) bar, all competing for less than 3,000 seats at MIT/Stanford. And that's a conservative estimate. You can add in another 5-10 top schools and the arithmetic is still either impossible for extremely challenging, even if you limit yourself to grades and test scores. And that's with extremely generous assumptions.
But, of course, they competition is far stiffer because a lot of those seats will go to kids who didn't get 4.0s and weren't valedictorians and didn't get 99th percentile SAT scores. But that's because they were spending too much time doing far more impressive things than running up their scores in those categories. Eg doing well at a national science fair, doing well at a national debate or mock trial tournament, winning a major mathematics competition, winning a major writing or art award, doing well nationally in a competitive sport, performing a musical instrument at a very high level, etc.
And those are just the color-inside-the-lines youth competition things. A step up from the "grades and tests" nonsense but still very sand boxy. High school students do a lot of impressive real world stuff as well -- significant open source contributions, significant community development work, publishing peer reviewed scientific articles, etc. Read George Hotz's wiki page -- kids with those sorts of accomplishments apply to places like MIT and Stanford every year. Perfect grades and test scores were criteria that didn't matter much until a candidate was already second or third tier; the difference between 3.8 or even 3.5 and 4.0 just doesn't matter when a seventeen year old already has career accomplishments on their resume that I'd be proud to have at 30. That's just computing. There are wunderkids like that in every field. Lots of them.
And even after all of that we still haven't left the borders of the USA (at MIT, about 10% of undergraduates are international).
> It wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the 80's.
Fewer students went to college. More importantly, systemic barriers to entry -- both informational and cultural -- remained extremely high for most people without WASPy coastal and/or upper-middle-class-suburb backgrounds. The internet eroded a lot of those informational and cultural barriers. Democratizing access to knowledge dramatically increased the efficiency of this market, and that has resulted in much stiffer competition.
> if getting everything nearly perfect isn't enough, what hope does everybody else have?
I really hope that my kids aren't going to aim for elite universities. Having spent a lot of time at both of the institutions you mentioned, I know they can get a great education and almost certainly live a better life without that kind of pressure.
Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.
I'm sure there's some weird pompous elitist corporation out there that only pulls from those schools but no one NEEDS to work at those places.
If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very closed off, extremely wealthy area.
Either that or a middle income/upper middle income immigrant community. Often the intersection of the two.
But, yeah. Having worked at several and in the orbit of basically of them: I'm an extreme skeptic of undergraduate prestige factories.
Go to a school with decent resources. That's a MUCH better way to think about it than "decent school", which could mean anything. Want does that mean? Depends on your major.
Once there, be curious. Be voracious. Advocate for yourself. Major it whatever you want. But also make sure at least one of your majors has a lower-risk career track to fall back on. Never, ever accept "prestige" in lieu of either opportunities to grow or earn cold hard $$$. Always remember you live in a capital-ist society. People and institutions say they value a lot of things -- knowledge, God, country. But in a Capital-ism, power and comfort flow from people who have access to capital to whomever those people please.
If you're goal is to be in the top echelons of elitist society I guess that's where you've got to be. If your aim is be gainfully employed and make a good living then those schools aren't necessary for anything.
You realized CEO's make that much money after a long career where they were busting their asses as juniors.
You basically made the same argument the grandparent is criticizing.
I have no problem with CEOs making lots of money. I have a problem with them making 100x more than their median employee; especially when their poorest employees aren't making a living wage.
But that's true for any job, not just CEOs. Plenty of people bust their ass and never make $250,000 like many FAANG employees. Should we cap the pay of FAANG employees to the lowest paid tech worker?
I have a problem with them making 100x more than their median employee
Why? What should the maximum multiple be? Should a CEO only make 20x the median employee? What if the company only has 10 employees? What if it has 200,000 employees, should it still be 20x?
I'm not sure I understand why a CEO's pay should be solely linked to the median wage of the employees. What's the logic behind it?
- so is CEO of Google
- CEO of Apple comes from working/lower-middle class family
- CEO of Johnson and Johnson (12th largest SP500 company) is an immigrant from Spain, coming from middle class family
etc etc etc
Middle class people aren’t the secretary to the prime minister.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/satya-nadela-microsoft...
> so is CEO of Google
“His father also had a manufacturing plant that produced electrical components”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai
You’re buying the propaganda.
That sounds quite normal, actually.
But the middle class (the petit bourgeoisie) is a small, economically elite class. It is in the middle between the working class that makes up the vast majority and the even narrower haut borgeoisie — the major capitalists whose relation to the economy centers on control of capital to which rented labor is applied.
Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class with the middle income segment of the working class, which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is often deliberately exploited.)
> That sounds quite normal, actually.
?!?!
> Unfortunately, people sometimes confuse the middle class with the middle income segment of the working class, which is a very different thing. (And that confusion is often deliberately exploited.)
Oh, I see. This doesn't seem particularly helpful. People don't "sometimes" confuse those two things. The de facto agreed upon meaning of "middle class" has been "middle income segment of the working class" for at least a century at this point.
And, in any case, serving on the Planning Commission seems much closer to "Ruling Class" than "Middle Class" unless you literally believe in the illuminati.
> The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day.
I think you make a good distinction here. We always seems to lump "social media" into one big blob when talking about it but like you said I think there is some nuance here. I see Reddit/Twitter as a different kind of social media than Facebook/Instagram. On Instagram/FB it's all about the "real you", I have an account with my name on it and photos of me. Reddit (and to a lesser degree Twitter) on the other hand is all about being anonymous and interacting with strangers (as opposed to your friends) on the internet.
There's a time and place for both types of interactions but I feel like the "anonymous stranger internet" is what's really driving most of the negatives we see in social media.
Or god forbid Hacker News!
While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite likely lead to lower in-person socialization (I do think it's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about this a bit).
To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other parts of the social/political/economic system.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
If it's spanning this many different trends, I think there ought to be some larger thing driving it, but I can't put my finger on what it is.
I mean, to me, the larger thing is probably "capitalism", in which increasing amounts of social life are turned into things that can produce profit for a business. Our particular capitalism built on racism doesn't help either, with it's legacy of "we don't want public amenities because we don't want to fund them for THOSE people" and "we're scared to go outside because a lot of people have a lot of reason to wish us harm." (that we built for cars instead of walkable cities or public transit actually has a LOT to do with racism)
But people don't love talking about this here. Or rather, they do and they don't. :)
In the general socciety, decline of social interaction has probably been a topic of discussion since Robert Putman's 2000 book "Bowling Alone". http://bowlingalone.com/
Overall, it’s difficult to have much hope for the future. We’re in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between the West and, I guess, East. That’s wildly different than 2008 when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and taking some more democratic stances.
What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware and software. Let’s hope those things will continue improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.
The fact that social media has us all connected and capable of measuring relative to others?
Or the fact it's weaponized by an entire industry of "influencers" subsidized by actors just trying to maximize the consumption factor of economic activity?
Or the fact that the system is fundamentally governed by network effect induced power laws, leading to massive inequality, that can end up being a stressor on average?
Just trying to tease out the right thread here, is all.
Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently bad. It's the end that it is applied to that is.
I’m not so sure this is the case. Seems like we are testing the limits of our social programming when exposed to networks _vastly_ beyond our capabilities historically, and we’re seeing the various ways that our social behaviors break down naturally. That there is a profit motive in encouraging and accelerating this breakdown might be orthogonal to the idea that it isn’t meant to exist at this scale in the first place.
Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock.
As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and depressing.
I have a couple of boys, 5 and 8. They have tablets and computers, and they love them. Some days we don't use them, some days they spend far too much time on them. Life goes on, we do what we can. I played an entire metric crap ton of video games at those ages, and I turned out okay, I think.
I keep hearing "screen time." That is the enemy. I'm not so sure it's just the screens. Of course it's not playing outside in a field, but you can't let them wander too far, somebody will call the cops.
A lot of the modern stuff (TV shows, movies, games) seems to overstimulate them way quicker compared to something like playing a day's worth of Super Mario World. Like it was designed to lure them in and enrage them or something.
I'm imagining social media is the same, but we're not there yet. I don't do a lot of social media myself, so hopefully they will see the example.
It’s being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst ecological mess any dying generation has left behind.
It’s being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare… etc
It’s teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a bunch of leches.
And, the worst part, it’s the apathetic public following orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all the white collar workers who can’t provide anything real for themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that?
This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.
Wealth inequality has an increased a lot in the last four decades. I’d start there when looking for a source for mental health issues.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
Inside the US, this sounds wrong both anecdotally and from the data. I'd argue the cost of "living" has gone up quite substantially. Since 1980 rent has risen 140% and incomes 20%[0].
Anecdotally, in the 1970s it was entirely possible to live in an acceptable city or suburb on part-time work, and you could have your own apartment on minimum wage. You might not have nice things but I know many people who spent their 20s very comfortably like this not worrying about how to afford living. (having a family on this budget was not feasible, but that's another thing)
Conversely today I don't know anyone making less than less than 40k/yr who is not constantly stressing about food costs and how they'll make rent.
[0] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/
The days of providing new products to the eager market are gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy (communications, housing, transportation, food).