Teens are not sitting around sulking because they can't ride the train somewhere. They're all glued to their phones doomscrolling until they can't take it anymore
I was lucky to be able to walk to school as a kid in the 90s, and found that time to be a delicious moment of early freedom each day as kids from my neighborhood and I chose our route and cut through backyards and patches of woods to pick up other kids. I lived in a small town without wide or fast roads, so this was largely safe, but I understand why it's not possible in most suburbs today. I loved my ability to ride my bike to friends' houses and down to the town beach in the summer, without having to ask my parents for a ride.
I think I would have been a very unhappy kid growing up in the typical American suburb of today, shepherded between structured activities and constantly monitored by adults. Retreating to a private online world may be an unhealthy coping mechanism, but it makes sense.
^ http://guide.saferoutesinfo.org/introduction/the_decline_of_...
Pieces from the New York Post would prolly make parents not want their kids to take MUNI regularly.
It takes as a given the article's point that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism (IMO this is also right), but then it asks why? Why is youth culture so centered on devices and social media?
It wasn't phones or the contemporary version of social media for me (missed that by just under five years), but I already felt this when I was an adolescent. For me it was the late-90s wave of internet-connected video games, and the forums about the ones I played - absolutely a form of social media. And I very much relate to, "well what else would I be doing?". Everything else I could do required a parent to do it with me, and while they spent a huge amount of their time on involvement in fruitful things for me to do, in the form of things like sports and organized group activities (boy scouts, etc.), they also very reasonably had their own lives and couldn't just chaperone their kids all night every night and all day every weekend day. And then, what in the world else was I going to do? Where could I go to just hang out with friends, when I was 13, and what could we do on our own? Nowhere and nothing. My impression is that this has only gotten worse.
The respite from this was college, and I'm convinced this is why pretty much everyone fortunate enough to go to a residential college looks back on it very fondly. Colleges have everything their students need, within short walks, and like an infinite number of places for young people to just independently hang out with each other, without having to pay for anything. It's such a revelation! But you do that for just a few years, and then you discover that it only worked because it was absurdly subsidized, either by someone else - parents, taxpayers, wealthy scholarship / grant funders - or by your own future earnings. And out in the real world, all the gathering spaces - bars, coffee shops, restaurants - suddenly become impractically expensive, and all the distances between people become impractically large.
Do places in the US and other countries with good public transit or are walkable like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc somehow not have any of the problems the article is referring to? I kind of doubt it
There's plenty wrong with how car dependent we are in most of the US but it's both not new to the latest generation and not uniform across the entire country yet there IS something that is uniform across the entire country AND new for this generation. Spoiler alert: it's not suburban sprawl.
But your last paragraph seems to be once again missing the "takes as a given ... that the proximate cause of the issue is phone / social media centrism" part. Nobody in this thread has argued against that problem.
Having a bunch of friends within walking distance was nice, but I certainly wouldn't want to return to that lifestyle even if it was free. It was ultimately very limiting and insular.
I guess I think the common immediately post-college model of moving to a small apartment in a dense city with a mix of people smushed together is a better way to get out of a bubble.
But I wish it was more common to go back to more like the campus model for family-raising, with kids of all ages around each other with lots of common spaces they can walk and bike to, with shared lighter touch supervision by all the adults.
But I recognize that this is largely just utopian wishful thinking :)
Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence.
I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things:
If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.”
Community — “I have enough friends online.”
Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”
Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.”
Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.”
Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”And you certainly don't have to be a conservative to become dissatisfied with internet dating. It genuinely sucks for a lot of people who just want to find somebody who understands them. Getting your dick sucked is great but wanting something more than that doesn't intrinsically make you a conservative.
I think you're just seeing what you want to see. These are the kind of things anybody with liberal or progressive political opinions can find themselves feeling.
> Having [an] entire grab bag of [concerns] listed like this is undeniably conservative.
Ridiculous. Anybody who has multiple concerns in their life will have a list of concerns. Articulating this isn't a conservative trait, it's just basic self reflection. If you don't have a list of concerns with your own life then you're obviously doing very well. But just because you can't relate to people who's lives aren't as great as yours doesn't mean those people are conservative.
(You see I swapped out "the" with "an". Because that list is not The entire grab bag of characteristically conservative concerns. There's no mention of immigration, guns, abortion, voter IDs, crime rates, fear of carbon taxes and corporate regulations, drag-queen story hours, critical theory and progressive school teaches or really anything like any of that. It's clearly not "The" list of conservative concerns. You're characterizing it that way because that's what you want to see for some reason. Maybe you tripped over the mention of religion, but if you put stereotypes aside and look at public opinion polling, you will find that religion in America is largely bipartisan. Even the denominations that lean strongly one way still have millions of adherents who lean the other, e.g. 28% of evangelical protestants who lean Democrat. 55% of American Democrats report that their belief in God is absolutely certain and an additional 21% say their belief is fairly certain.)
I don't think you can give me a substantive response to this, but give it a shot. You could at least try.
There's only one person that I see in this branch of comments trying to lump Haidt in with the MAGA-hat-wearers. One can be a conservative without a red hat. To put it another way, what, you're going to argue that Haidt is progressive? It doesn't take much of a glance at the URL you listed to determine that just isn't the case.
I live in a low cost of living area, that's car dependent. Yes, houses are expensive because _everybody_ is moving to these areas and there's construction everywhere. House prices went up here because so many people started fleeing dense areas when remote opportunities became common. But even 2 miles from my current house you can get a big 3 bedroom apartment for about $900 / month in a good location. Get 2 roommates and your rent is $300 / month.
But the flip side of this should be cause and effect. If people are leaving other areas in higher numbers then there should be deals in those areas.
Only if people are leaving for reasons other than housing availability.
vs kids in Japan, Europe etc who are meaningfully independent from a far, far earlier age and have far, far more opportunities for socialization than kids in the US do
this is not to say they do not also have their own issues (in many cases device related), but yeah, let's not pretend like car-centrism has nothing to do with it, because it absolutely does
My kids aren't allowed to use social media and we are "the mean parents" now because of it since "everybody else's parents let them." Some of these kids were on Instagram in 4th grade. It took years of explaining what we were protecting them from before they started to really get it, seeing their friends at school who's entire life is on a 4 inch screen.
They understand now, but the pressure is very real.
I expect the vagueness doctrine would also present an obstacle. How could legislators even define social media in a sufficiently precise way? Is email or group chat social media?
(Technically it's not a complete ban because it has an exception for parental permission, but it's a de facto ban because companies don't want to deal with it.)
> Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back?
The answer is to give them somewhere else to go!
I had a medium-range breakfast the other day... waffles coffee and a mimosa with bacon on the side: $66. Jesus that's more than 4 hours with the local minimum wage before taxes. Realistically the take home from an entire shift -- for a standard breakfast.
If I go out to a bar, every drink is $10.
If I want to go visit a friend, there's no parking anywhere on a Friday night unless you live miles and miles away from the city center. And people keep getting shot/stabbed on public transit. You can laud it all you want but it feels unsafe for a tall dude in his 30s... a lot of young people aren't going to feel comfortable with the local public transit.
The rent is too high, there's nothing to do that's affordable. What the fuck else are young people supposed to do?
https://matduggan.com/developers-guide-to-moving-to-denmark/
I'm talking about waitresses, cashiers, shelf restockers, CNAs and whomever else on the bottom scale of pay not being able to afford anything but rent.
I also don't think orange juice with a little bit of cheap sparkling wine should be an unattainable luxury for anyone with a job.
I don't think my breakfast was worth a day's labor for a big chunk of the society I live in.
Any kind of wine at breakfast has always been considered a luxury reserved for special occasions.
No person is entitled to have others serving them on the cheap; if we want servers and cooks to be well paid, then restaurant food will have to cost a pretty penny.
By the way, you can make the very same breakfast at home for less than $10/person, including the mimosa, and barely $5/person without it.
hell, i'm in Canada in a big city with high COL and my quick in-and-out breakfast on Saturday was 15 bucks for a brekke and 3 for coffee. even with a tip i'm just over $20 for pancakes, bacon, and a couple of refils of diner coffee.
are you paying for the table of 4?