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Comment by ZoomerCretin | Hacker News Reader

What caused this? Or does anyone know?

While there’s likely more than one cause. There’s a bunch of research that shows rising smart phone adoption from roughly 2010 onwards correlates to rising levels of anxiety and depression in teenage girls especially.

This roughly aligns with when first and second gen iPhone owners started to upgrade and pass their older phones to their children, creating the first generation of smart phone owning teens.

iirc the 3GS was when I bought an iphone and shortly after they exploded in popularity in amsterdam. So that would also roughly line up (4 was 2010?)

Increasingly engrossing but alienating forms of digital interconnection: first the internet in general, then facebook, then instagram, now tiktok.

The standard "explanation" is some hand-waving about social media, but I suspect that the root causes are to be found in the profound cultural disintegration that started long before the Internet became a thing, and whose ultimate effects are only now beginning to manifest.

Bowling Alone was written before the year 2000.

These issues have been going on for a long time before social media took off.

Further atomisation of society, ongoing since the 80s and the digitalisation of the world only deepened it. Lack/disintegration of local communities into the digital world seems to be a common factor (even more given the timeline).

Might be completely anecdotal but in my lifetime I've experienced the transformation from local communities to online ones and how unhappy and unsatisfied it makes me in 2024. It was exciting in 2005 but I'm slowly clawing back a much more offline existence for the past 5 years and am much happier, even more after finding communities that are shielded away from internet dramas, the world is much nicer outside of it.

The internet nowadays is amazing for knowledge and learning, and terrible for social experiences, I made many more online friends (whom I met offline and I'm friends to this day) on BBSs and internet forums from the 90s-2000s than on anything branded "social" from the 2010s onwards.

Those of us who are older remember a life before digital communities. Many of these kids today don't know of such a life - there's nothing for them to claw back to. I think that's the real root of the problem.

Others above have noted we've been in social decline since the Reagan era, and being a teen starting high school at the time, I recall our teachers noting the rapid decline. They complained about our lack of school spirit, the fact we didn't have as many school dances, prom had become an extravaganza as opposed to an end of high school dance. I've talked with many other Gen X'ers and they all tell the same story. Something happened between the time we were born in the late 60's to the mid 80's that made us markedly different from the way the Boomers, the Silent Generation, and the Greatest Generation had been.

The older I get and reflect back I can come up with a panoply of causes:

- Watergate. Not only did we lose all our after school cartoons, but it's all the grown-ups talked about. In the end, we learned at a very tender age that the POTUS is a bad man. (Yet here we are in an even worse place with Trump).

- The Vietnam War. This was the first televised war. Guess who was watching? Gen X children. Remember, cable TV didn't exist yet and there were only 3 channels on TV and guess what they were all showing?

- Latchkey children. Gen X was the first (and essentially only) latchkey generation.

- The SALT treaties. By the time Gen X was going to school they had stopped atomic bomb drills as they were deemed as being useless. Of course the adults made sure we knew that. All-out nuclear war was a widely publicized threat.

- Iranian Hostages. After losing the Vietnam War we learned we couldn't even execute a mission to remove American hostages from the Iranian revolutionaries.

- Reagan and the rise of the Christian Right. We could see people supporting that were full of shit from day one.

That's why Gen X is so apathetic - our response to all this was fuck this shit. We knew we were watching a system in decline and failing and that it was all a bullshit show to pretend that it wasn't.

Now, who are Gen Z's parents? Gen X.

Kids are always interested in their parents and how the world was way back then. Shit. That's how the world was. Absolute shit. An oil embargo that resulted in long gas lines and people literally killing one another while waiting in lines wrapped around the block to get gas. Our schools shutting down because of a natural gas shortage that sent natural gas prices skyrocketing and school systems could no longer afford to keep their schools open in the winter. High inflation that made it so that many of our parents couldn't afford homes (mortgages were 12% to 15% back then) - yes, Gen X was America's first generation raised in apartments. The world was shit. Then Reagan came and did the unthinkable: he figured out how to make it orders of magnitudes worse.

Any rate, that's what Gen Z has been raised with. My own daughter pointed out that the United States had been at war since before she was born and noted that when she went to college, the United States had been at war for all her life. But it didn't seem like we were at war. Gen Z sees the rise of Trump and easily see he stands for the exact opposite of what America stands for. They see people arguing for gun rights and not giving a shit about kids being slaughtered while going to school. Gen Z knows they're getting fucked, and they're committing suicide as a result.

But sure, let's blame smartphones. Sure beats any introspection of where the hell our society went off the rails! The fact our children are killing themselves and lots of parents are killing their children before they're even born tells you there's something royally fucked with your society.

At this point it appears there's a huge swath of the population that have lost their minds and are no longer capable of seeing reality. Assuming the human race survives this mass madness, it'll be interesting to see what history has to say about this era.

What have I done to help my grown children (the oldest of Gen Z)? I've advised to hang in there as the demographics are changing. The Boomers are dying and the combination of Gen X and Gen Z make for the largest generation in America. We have the opportunity to right this ship. That's why the Republicans are terrified: they know this.

So, Gen Z - hang in there!

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