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Comment by llIIllIIllIIl | Hacker News Reader

It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.

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Most urban spaces these days are incredibly depressing. No points of interest within walking distance. Lots of large and difficult to cross roads. Combined with the very real danger of cycling in many places. As well as the loss of small businesses that used to be interspersed in residential areas.

You say urban, but this applies to suburban and rural areas as well. If anything, urban areas are the places that have probably resisted these factors the most effectively. For everyone else: "You get a stroad, and you get a stroad, everybody gets a stroad!"

A thing not mentioned on urbanist Twitter as much:

Teens are not allowed in malls and a lot of other (effectively) public places now.

How is that possible? The goal of a mall is to attract shoppers and sell stuff to them. Why would they turn away a shopper due to age?

Especially these days, with malls dying all over the place, it seems quite peculiar that they would turn away any shopper!

troubled teens happened, once upon a time a mall cop was scary enough to force teen to behave a little.

Groups of teens hanging out at the mall buying a few small things are now considered a nuisance. They're not spending enough money to be welcome there.

I went to college in area where its absolutely car-dependent, the road sucks for the cars too. Not only it's very hard to walk to anywhere, there's just very little amount of free public spaces, like park for example..

It's very depressing. I wish my country doesn't follow US' style of building a city.

Those urban characteristics are not found in Europe typically, and yet the problem seems to be global.

As has the former abundance of youth-centric spaces. Many such as malls and arcades don’t exist like they used to. Physical game stores (like for Magic: The Gathering) are also drying up as it increasingly becomes harder to sell enough product as maintenance costs rise. And perhaps it’s just me, but after a certain age parks became rather boring even with a friend group.

Personally, I feel we need more library awareness and “recreational areas” within libraries. They tend to have a large variance of media, and are typically a safe place to be. However all the libraries in my area tend to lack anywhere to hang out, which I understand due to budgeting constraints, but it’s a shame it’s not easier to provide areas for the more “interesting” media available.

…partly (mostly?) because of social media addiction.

My son sometimes has a hard time trying to get his friends to spend time outside, because they’d rather be on their phone on TikTok or Snap.

But did it go down dramatically in particular in the early 2010’s? Because the data seems to suggest that the teen mental health situation accelerated dramatically in that time frame.

One thing that comes to mind is that during my lifetime, and it’s difficult to pin down a specific time frame, the stigma surrounding mental illness faded pretty dramatically it seems. Now I don’t know if that change inflected dramatically in the early 2010’s—I would think that that process would be more gradual, but perhaps not? Is it possible that an existing problem has simply become dramatically more visible to us?

> Is it possible that an existing problem has simply become dramatically more visible to us?

I believe that this is a much larger component of the issue than many may realize. Never has it been as easy for young people to discuss what they’re going through, and that’s no doubt led to realizations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

This effect likely extends well beyond teenagers, in my opinion. Across the board it’s become more socially acceptable to speak up when facing difficulties, which means a lot of things that used to get swept under the rug suddenly aren’t. It’s no longer required to keep up the appearance that all is well when it isn’t, and I think that’s probably a good thing.

I believe the rebuttal to this argument is partially done in the article by showing hospital admittance statistics. And if this was a factor, I trust that the authors would absolutely delve into this idea. They call out that self-reporting mental stat is not an accurate enough indicator, and choose to couple that with other statistics.

in no small part "thanks" to social media, no? like yeah in the us and anglosphere it's no small part car centricity, but like the blog post points out, this is a trend that's visible even places that don't have school shootings and car centricity, so it kind of has to be social media. (actually proving it is hard but, like, at this point, i don't see how it can even be disputed by any reasonable person, only pedants)

I’m also inclined towards this explanation because I think the world would be better off without it.

But I’m not certain if it is possible to put that cat back in the bag.

There are so many alternative explanations to go through before it "has" to be social media. Already mentioned was time spent outside. For instance, video games are (also) a huge drain on time spent outside.

Gen X and Millenials also had video games (including online ones that didn't require you to be playing physically together) and it didn't have the same effect - the mental health decline became prominent and accelerated during the rise of social media, not video games.

Video games are very different today. There are far more social and gambling features built-in to addict users than in the old mostly-single-player days. I'm not convinced you've disproved video games as being part of the problem.

doesn't that just mean games are also a form social media? The line is super blurry for roblox and similar systems.

I look at my ability to free roam as a young teen and even late single digits with appreciation and also recognition of the danger. But then I look at the amount of traffic on the streets I crossed on bicycle compared to when I was younger, it makes sense. Even residential streets are less safe from cars.

But I know those aren’t the reasons kids don’t play outside anymore.

It’s not just that. It’s that teens are ALSO less likely to drive. When I was 14 and 15, my friends group included someone with a car, and we had a very wide range. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/02/13/...

“Car culture is killing us!” But it’s worse than that; we don’t even have car culture! We have a culture of NO.

No pedestrians. No biking without a helmet! No biking on the sidewalk! No driving!

I think this is a huge part of it. Kids need to be able socialize and spend time in their environment without constant supervision. It's not just kids either. What ever happened to parents taking their young children to the local playground? Part of it was for kids, but it was also an avenue for meeting other parents and socializing with them. I think dog parks serve more of a social role than playgrounds these days, and that's pretty sad.

Parents definitely still take young children to the local playground - at least where I am in the UK!

But not suddenly, 15 years ago.

You can't roam in a car ridden cityhole.

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