Is Economic Deprivation the Real Cause of the Adolescent Mental Health Crisis?
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I "blame" the sudden rise of social media and western society reorienting itself to highly addictive dopamine-hit loops. Before that, the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent weaponization of mass media. All without an accompanying evolution of cultural, social, moral norms (!= rules) to aid navigation in this brave new world.
100% agreed. Along these same lines, the endlessly demoralizing narrative around climate change is likely another big factor.
I think many more people need to read and internalize things like Hannah Ritchie's book "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet". Highly recommended.
We actually took steps and saved the Ozone layer.
Invented and made the solar panel economically viable.
Electric cars aren't exactly designed by the youngest generation either.
We / they have taken big steps to stop trade in tropic hardwoods.
The generation before us built the systems and societies that we today take for granted. To the best of their abilities, very many of them worked very hard to give something better to us than they got themselves.
Go further back and they actually stopped the most well oiled war machine that has ever existed, the nazis. Later they stopped the Soviet by outcompeting them.
Hindsight is 20/20.
But a little humility should be mandatory I think.
And ironically, we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load (and also several times less
Ask yourself why environmentalists succeeded in shutting down nuclear power, the one viable alternative to fossil fuels, when they failed at literally everything else. That might lead you to who was actually responsible.
And they did not fail at everything else.
They succeeded in a lot of cases.
For a rather large win, as I mentioned, the Ozone layer was saved. Another big one was banning of DDT and introduction of regulations on everything from new pesticides / herbicides to emissions (or fuel saving as we used to refer to it until recently).
All the sociopolitical difficulties that hinder solutions today were just as, if not more, insurmountable for all those generations.
And the technological landscape is much more promising today than at any point since this problem was identified. And people from all the generations you listed are strongly represented among the people who created and began scaling those technologies.
No generation has been better positioned to contribute to solving this problem than the one entering adulthood today. It will be a damn shame if most of them but into doomerism and let it keep them from taking their shot.
I tend to agree that the first order issue is that people seem to increasingly subscribe to "demoralizing narratives". But not just climate change. I see the same phenomenon, just with different narratives among my more "right wing" loved ones. Instead of the demoralizing narrative being climate change, it is that society is crumbling due to the decline of religion, or because men aren't manly enough and women aren't womanly enough, or because people like them are being censored into oblivion, etc.
But why is it that all these different kinds of doom narratives seem to be spreading so much and getting so much traction now, when they didn't seem to in the past? I have trouble seeing what else has changed significantly enough to cause this, if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media.
Basically: Climate doomerism is a problem, yes. But climate change is also a problem, one that our power structures seem completely unwilling to address. And in such an environment, Climate doomerism is kind of a logical outcome: we know there's an issue, scientists have known since the 70's, yet we do precious little about it and fundamentally our leaders seem content to ride out the collapse of the biosphere and cash their checks. Of course that's fucking depressing.
Demanding it is part of what "we'd do better if we put down our phones".
But it still is hard, I get it, it's either time consuming on top of a "normal" job, or likely to be less lucrative as a career than most things the HN audience can do.
But it's not true that there's nothing people can do, if they want to.
Energy = mass * acceleration * distance
You seem to be exhibiting the exact symptom you are complaining about.
I fully accept that climate change exists and is human caused, and will cause serious problems in the future.
Where I differ from you (probably) is that I think cutting emissions to a useful degree will also cause serious problems. Maybe even worse problems. Both problems have the real potential to cause total war across the globe, not seen since WWII. Many people think we're already in the early stages of WWIII, and a big part of that is basically due to an utterly trivial minor disruption in the politics/trade of fossil fuels when compared to what is required by mitigating climate change via emissions reductions.
My view is obviously no less doomer-ish I suppose, but, in your view, the problem is "people suck", "politicians suck", etc., and I think that makes people cynical and resentful of other people, politically unstable in general.
And I mean, you're basically conceding then that the doomerism has merit, even if we might disagree on the specifics of why. Then why judge these kids for being depressed? Irrespective of what you decide to park as the "real cause" of the problems, the problems remain and the power structure is either refusing to or is incapable of solving it.
> the power structure is either refusing to or is incapable of solving it
This is where I think the whole doomerism project goes astray. It seems to only notice difficulties and challenges and never pay even a tiny bit of lip service to the flip side of the coin.
Surely "the power structure" must include the executive administration and a majority of the members of both houses of the last US Congress? Those people coordinated the passage of a hugely beneficial package of mostly carrots but also some sticks targeted directly at this problem.
The criticism of this always boils down to "well sure, but that's too little and too late", but that is letting perfect be the enemy of good. People who care about this should be energized by this, both by the opportunities it has created to work on research and deployment of useful technologies, and by the relatively paltry political backlash to it, suggesting more political capital can be spent on this moving forward.
It's a way more exciting time to be involved in solving this problem than it has ever been, certainly in my adult life and I'd say ever. But despite that, the "discourse" on it among young people seems to be one of cynical nihilism. I don't know for sure why that is, but I struggle to believe it has nothing to do with social media echo chambers.
We're on track to not only surpass but pretty much blow away projections for CO2 emissions that will all but guarantee multiple degrees of heat gain over the next several decades, and all that entails: more super-storms, higher ocean levels, and a LOT more death in the developing world around the equator. That is definitionally too little too late. This isn't pessimism: scientists knew what we needed to do, and we have utterly failed to do it.
If your car was in an accident and couldn't be legally driven, and you requested your mechanic replace the control arms and called it job done, you'd rightly be called fucking insane. That's not letting perfect be the enemy of good, that's not doing what you need to do.
> People who care about this should be energized by this, both by the opportunities it has created to work on research and deployment of useful technologies
A ton of these technologies are greenwashing existing tech because there's federal grants to be had for attempting it. Others, like widely available solar, are complicated by the purveyors taking advantage of low-earners who've managed to get homes and fucking them into bankruptcy by adding money to their mortgage they can't possibly afford. Still others are things like EV's, which while better for the environment at point of use, are still highly damaging what with the incredible amounts of limited heavy metals required to build them, not to mention being shipped back and forth over the oceans because it's cheaper to build everything in Asia. And all of this is because things are done in our economy to make money and ONLY to make money, not to make the world better.
> and by the relatively paltry political backlash to it, suggesting more political capital can be spent on this moving forward.
You must be joking. The reactionaries are having a FIELD DAY with 15 minute cities, bug eating, what have you. And yes it's incredibly stupid shit utterly beneath engaging with, but it doesn't change the fact that tons of people believe it and parrot it.
> But despite that, the "discourse" on it among young people seems to be one of cynical nihilism. I don't know for sure why that is
Probably something to do with the fact that this discourse has been happening for half a century now and we're producing more CO2 than EVER and burning the rainforest down.
So a bunch of people are now hanging out the windows and strapped to the undercarriage trying to fix the thing while it's rolling, and a bunch of other people are sitting in the back seat typing on their phones about how there is no problem, or about what we coulda woulda shoulda done, or about how the people working on the fixes are doing the wrong things, or about how we should just crash the car and get it over with. And that's all fine, people can make their own choices, but I'd rather be trying to figure out how to be one of the people working on fixing the cracks, rather than just being along for the ride.
> That is definitionally too little too late.
Note that I didn't actually say it isn't too little too late. But this is exactly how "perfect is the enemy of good" works. "Good" is never good enough, but it's still good. I agree with you that it's too little and too late to avoid a whole slew of bad things like the ones you listed, and probably worse. But I don't think it's too late to avoid the existential risks to the species. I do think it's too little, but its success makes me more, rather than less, optimistic about more efforts to come. And I get it, you'll think, "oh great, so all these horrible things will happen, and now we want to pat ourselves on the back just because we may be on the path to avoid wiping out the whole species?". And yes, that is the way in which it is good, despite not being good enough.
> A ton of these technologies are greenwashing existing tech because there's federal grants to be had for attempting it.
Which things are "greenwashing", in your view? It is indeed mostly targeted at existing technologies, because we already have really good technologies, which if deployed far more widely will already go a very long way toward solving the problem. This is a very good thing! We do need to invent more things, but that's not the bottleneck yet, the current bottleneck is deployment of things we've already invented.
> Others, like widely available solar, are complicated by the purveyors taking advantage of low-earners who've managed to get homes and fucking them into bankruptcy by adding money to their mortgage they can't possibly afford.
Residential roof-top solar is indeed not the thing to be excited about with respect to solar deployment, which is why it is not a major focus of the provisions in the IRA.
> Still others are things like EV's, which while better for the environment at point of use, are still highly damaging what with the incredible amounts of limited heavy metals required to build them, ...
The metals thing is not a non-issue, but is also wildly overblown. Importantly, EVs do not burn those metals; they are akin to the fuel tank, not the fuel. This is an advantage that is not ignored, exactly, but is often underrated.
> not to mention being shipped back and forth over the oceans because it's cheaper to build everything in Asia.
The IRA included provisions aimed at localizing material sourcing and manufacturing. Again, if your argument is that this isn't good enough, then I agree, but if your argument is that "the power structure" has done nothing about the issues you're worried about, then I don't agree.
> You must be joking. The reactionaries are having a FIELD DAY with 15 minute cities, bug eating, what have you.
I'm not sure how old you are, but if you weren't around for it, it might be enlightening for you to read about the backlash to the ACA (Obamacare). That is what a political backlash looks like. A fringe of reactionaries throwing silly pot-shots online is not a political backlash. There have been no mass protests calling for a repeal of the IRA because of its climate provisions. The opposition nominee for the presidency is not making this a center-piece of his campaign. Sure, there are some targeted things that they intend to undo or roll back, but it is not a major part of anyone's campaign rhetoric.
This is, truly, as good as it gets for a major piece of legislation. Nobody is particularly pissed about it, and the vast majority of its provisions are going to stand, regardless of who wins the next election. That is a very successful political outcome! Resist the urge to overindex on noisy edgelords online.
> Probably something to do with the fact that this discourse has been happening for half a century now and we're producing more CO2 than EVER and burning the rainforest down.
No, we have not been having this discourse for half a century. The discussion has shifted massively just over the decade and a half of my career, due in no small part to the massive shifts in the solutions we have to bring to bear on the problem.
Cynicism and nihilism are not the right conclusions to draw from the history of humanity working on this problem. The right conclusion is that progress can be made, and is being made more quickly now than at any point thus far, and continues to accelerate. Thank goodness!
there it is
Our parents might have been gullible but that’s a non-malicious failing. We’ve also done sweet fuck-all about global warming though.
We can say it is because we haven’t been able to grab the reins, but we’re hitting our 40’s pretty soon. We owed the next generation a revolution but we seem to be taking a “maybe I’ll get promoted” approach to things. It wasn’t enough.
I wonder if all we managed to do was kill the hope that “awareness” is actually going to accomplish anything.
Of course "awareness" is merely a necessary - and radically insufficient - condition. But a lot CAN be done, and it matters a great deal how MUCH, and how SOON we do them. The typical narrative of "we're completely screwed no matter what [so it doesn't matter what we do]" is both inaccurate and extremely harmful in that it impedes progress.
Acid rain and the ozone layer are a couple relevant examples of real success in global environmental challenges. Climate change is bigger and harder and more complex, but it's NOT "all or nothing". And there is room for -- even urgent need for -- rational optimism, which in turn motivates change of which we are capable.
I'm no luddite, mobile devices are amazingly useful, but their effect on people has not exactly been unmitigatedly positive.
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/escaping-the-matrix/
TL;DR: It's phones and social media. We're social creatures who rely on dynamic networks of diverse opinions, but social media perverts this. We build static networks affirming our own opinions and that leaves us afraid of the unknown.
My favorite point Jonathan made is that if you look at the world as a whole, the spectrum of morality is actually incredibly diverse! Nobody sets out to build an evil ideology. Empires, caste systems, and communism were all built from moral foundations, even if their values are alien to us. In light of this, instead of asking why so much of the world looks backwards from an American liberal perspective (full disclosure: my perspective), a more interesting question is why American liberals adopt such a narrow view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQoNd9oEeoI
(The discussion on Haidt's book "The Anxious Generation" starts at 13:08)
Cowen also questioned Haidt's prescription about how social media companies and the government should regulate social media through (stricter) age verification etc.
Most parents want to be more active and involved in their kids lives but material conditions get in the way. Blame shit economic policy and the greedy clowns that sold out America’s industrial base. Phones are an intellectually lazy excuse that ignores the facets that absolve parents of some of the responsibility you’re trying to heap on them. This is not to say that some parents are lazy and use screens as replacements for parenting; they exist but if you want to cast a net this wide - bring receipts.
From :
https://www.prb.org/resources/do-parents-spend-enough-time-w...
"Time diaries indicate that married fathers spent an average 6.5 hours a week caring for their children in 2000, a 153 percent increase since 1965. Married mothers spent 12.9 hours, a 21 percent increase. Single mothers spent 11.8 hours, a 57 percent increase."
And then there's you, doing all the same shitty stuff everyone else has to go through, sitting on the toilet at work, scrolling instagram, and you don't see any of that, but you get an impression that everyone else is living a much better life, because you only see the highlights of their life. And then you save all that money, spend it on the same shitty bus, for the same shitty hotel and sewer infested beach, but you still crop out only the pretty stuff and post that.
I could see conservatives blaming Obamaphones - making them accessible to all classes.
I wonder how the Holden Caulfield's, Johnny Stabler's or the Over The Edge kids would have done with smartphones.
> It’s literally just mobile devices.
It’s probably very unlikely that it is “literally just” mobile devices. I agree that is probably one of the major contributing factors. But when we’re discussing a very large complicated human problem, it almost certainly is not “ literally just” one thing.
If we want to accurately diagnose an issue so we can accurately address it, then we have to catch ourselves before we accidentally shut someone else down when they are very likely correct as well.
Many of the issues we’re facing are fractal level depths of human problems which are a result of years of denying the problems existed. They will almost certainly require many levers being adjusted, not “Just” one.
As I mentioned earlier, from my perspective, in addition to the GP comment, you’re likely also correct that mobile devices are a major source, I would add that it is almost certainly also unregulated social media companies, unchecked marketing, unregulated algorithms, and unchecked greed.
Celeb culture helps implant the notion that rich people are more dissatisfied with life or have more dysfunctional lives, because ordinary people who are depressed or dysfunctional get no media coverage.
I’m not sure this is true. From my point of view, struggle is valued no less than it ever was, at least when it’s clear there will be a payoff at the end. Struggling to chase a carrot on a stick that can never be caught isn’t admirable, it’s a waste.
It is straight from Buddhist text that the desire for things that are not easy to get leads to misery.
It isn't a paradox that a culture predicated on the idea that happiness comes from the acquisition of things that are hard to get would find itself producing misery if Buddhist text are correct. That is exactly what they say will happen.
This seems like it’d apply to teenagers even more than adults, between the combination of emotions running hot and having so many years ahead of them. It’s easy to see how someone might become depressed if they believe that their next 60-80 years are going to be some degree of awful.
Edit: note that baby boomers are not the oldest living generation.
All the movements I could be happy about are regressing (trans rights, women's rights, hell even gay rights which seemed incredibly solid). Climate change is going to ruin everything and we're not going to do anything about it. Gaza is a neverending parade of tragedies.
It feels like all there is to do is sit around and feel bad and wait for things to get worse.
I’m also sharing a planet full of a species that has endured and conquered plagues, slavery, centuries of war, and the threat of nuclear war, amongst other hardships. Things have been much worse and we will continue to improve.
Check out the book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know for a counter to your doomscrolling.
So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that, all things considered, the world is getting worse?
Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, observed, "There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less time—compare the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time needed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on."' News is bad news; steady progress is not news.
Modern life seems to be mostly just waiting around for the next bad thing to happen, to me or someone else I know or maybe both. Wasn't like this in my 20s thats for sure, it does appear to be a new thing.
Homosexuality follows pretty much the same pattern with a head start.
Women are achieving far better to the extent that some are starting to feel as if we've left young boys behind.
Gaza sucks, but we've always had wars. Ask a survivor about WW2.
Climate change is about the only thing on your list that is actually worth worrying about in an existential sense. We are worrying about it a LOT more as a society as we did back then, we just may not be doing enough about it.
It basically sounds as if you've gotten stuck on, say, people having debates about trans women in sport, and catastrophised that into somehow the whole world is going to shit. Maybe if you're a gay trans woman who ties most of their happiness into being able to broadcast their sexuality and gender identity then a reason to be upset might be that society isn't 100% accepting. You have to admit that's a super rare position to be in, though, and it's a hell of a lot easier than it was hiding in the closet in the 70s.
Gaza's closer to the Vietnam War, or the Global War on Terror - two tragedies that I at least hoped we could have learned from.
The amount of opportunities available to the next generation have dwindled compared to what I saw as a kid. Now, you can't expect to survive doing what you love. You can barely survive doing what you hate...
i'm not trying to rub salt in the wound, i'm just saying if you can improve your social abilities, there's not really a deadline for a rich and fulfilling life. especially since you are financially stable.
> more risk-taking
(per the op)
are the people who will not bother asking themselves these questions or will simply shrug and say "i dunno we'll get through it" and just do it
It's a mindset of just doing things without worrying about them or their consequences. Of course there's ups and downs. Like the poster above said
> the same social limitations that prevented you from partying as a younger person, probably also prevent you from enjoying your nice stable life to the fullest
It's a mindset of how to live life. You don't care about these questions, which you pay for later, but that's future you's problem
They will eat food bought from grocery stores and cooked on their camp stove or at the hostel.
They will speak English to most of the people they meet. Or use their phone to translate where required.
They will buy a used bike and continue on if it gets stolen.
As long as I have a $20 tent, an okay sleeping bag, and the clothes on my back I'll be okay. The real shame of our society is that so many people have been forced to live that way because of the greedy few.
It was really tough last year because I had never quit before, I'd been at a job I didn't like for years and years. Now that I've quit once, I'll probably feel okay being unemployed for a bit next time.
Not bicycling to Istanbul though lol
There is nothing worse than seeing the door close on the last bus leaving the station.
Firstly, the age of technology was seen as a godsend for a lot of us to connect more quickly and easily. In the beginning, it seemed great! I remember a lot of mid to late 2000s social media was user-focused. But we know that nowadays the value given to us was clawed back and monetized in an effort to generate returns due to the massive reliance on VC funds. And nothing generates engagement, clicks, and usage more than internet fights. I hate to say it but even just last week I found myself in a Twitter argument that had me checking and scrolling Twitter every 5 minutes. That's not healthy to anyone, but Twitter got more ad views out of me that day than any other day before or since. And because of that, my algorithm is absolutely f*ked and only shows me content that makes me angry so they can drive another internet argument out of me. I know Twitter isn't intentionally doing this, but the algorithm is built to prioritize engagement, and arguing was the most engaging thing I did.
Included with this is the proliferation of 24/7 news. My parents only saw the news on newspapers or on TV, which would typically only air it for a few hours a night. If you wanted to avoid the news, it was 100% possible and fairly easy. Nowadays, if you use the internet, you're going to encounter news. And, of course, news sites have to generate income through ads or subscriptions, so create clickbait articles, showing rage bait articles to drive traffic and arguments to further increase ad revenue. I can't even scroll through my friend's Saturday night Instagram stories without seeing someone post bloody bodies from the Gaza/Israel conflict.
Lastly, there's a lot of resentment in the younger generation. I'm not even 30 and I've experienced two recessions, a pandemic, wages have stayed stagnant since I started working while rent has tripled in that same timeframe, the city I grew up in is sinking due to climate change. My friends right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are discussed on TV like they don't matter.
I guess the concise way to boil it down is: No matter where we look or what we do, we are inundated with anger, rage bait, consume consume consume, if you want to rent a place then work multiple jobs, everything you remember growing up will be gone by the time you're old enough to truly appreciate it, etc. We've internalized that there is no future for us, and it's everyone's fault.
This blog post demolishes Odgers critique with a simple chart that could have been researched by Odgers with a few minutes work. Instead, she just threw out a politically popular attack without taking any effort to see if it fit the available data.
This follows recent trends, of Nature making decisions to publish content in line with their preferred political ideologies, without regard to any scientific evidence.
I know I’m providing no evidence, but this feels so obvious to me. I’m 27 fwiw. Does anyone else agree with my flippant perspective?
This really makes Odger's position difficult to understand... unless she is getting some sort of kickback/benefit, real or imagined, from not interfering with the profits of the so-called "tech" industry.
Whether or not phones and conniving websites run by so-called "tech" companies are the "cause" of problems should not impede anyone from taking steps to lessen the suffering from them. Maybe they only aggravate a condition caused by something else. That they are not the underlying cause should not stop people from seeking immediate relief.
Compare it to working for a dying company that does layoffs after layoffs and is eating itself in a downwards spiral. Of course nobody is happy.
The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right
But they still suffer from the same teenage mental health problems at similar rates.
We still suffer from the aforementioned issues...
Just saying that it hasn't changed too much over the past 50 years – it was also difficult for the previous generations.
At least in Denmark, the situation is better now than it has been earlier, despite the market being heated. You can comfortably buy a house at around 4x annual salary with reasonable savings (~10% down payment).
This is in part due to interest payments being tax deductible, a measure to help the Swedish housing market bounce back from the housing crash in the mid '90s.
The government "forgot" to remove that insane policy even once the market had recovered, since it would be unpopular for everything to be more expensive, even throughout the negative interest rate years they didn't do anything about this. Which means everyone and their grandmother has loans up to their ears, taken back when interests were basically free. ... so now interests have gone up by like 5 percentage points and everyone with a loan is in struggling, that interest subsidy policy is going nowhere in a hurry, meanwhile it still drives up prices and creates an ever-widening gap between those who own and those who can't afford the down payment because the market has seized up entirely since nobody wants to realize the loss of selling their house for less than their mortgage.
regardless, in Copenhagen you can get a 2 room apartment for 2.5m DKK. if you have a down payment of 200k you can buy this with a salary of roughly 550k a year, which indeed is reasonable as you live in Copenhagen. if you are a couple, then you are at 5m kr where you can start to get houses in the suburb or quite nice apartments.
personally I prefer a market with higher interest rates such that the price is not just set as multiples of a median salary.
https://www.eiu.com/n/singapore-and-zurich-top-the-list-as-t...
> Singapore and Zurich top the ranking as the world’s most expensive cities
Especially the emphasis on cities. At least in Denmark, living in a city is a lifestyle choice. It is fair to want to live in a city, but one can't cry the added costs of your lifestyle decision as a general trend.
For Singapore (and other city states) one is obviously not afforded the choice.
In Denmark you can live in what's considered a rural area with 30-45 minutes commute to most places in central Copenhagen.
Also, we need to be a bit precise: cost of living and housing prices, while related, is not the same thing.
China has the same thing with "lay down" culture. We just call them NEETs in the west.
Ironically, tradesmen these days are the ones who are KILLING it next to highly paid SWEs. If you don't thrash your body, those jobs will pay you well for life.
The SWEs that I know who are KILLING it are in the 100-250 hr range but I can guarantee you that a tradesmen in the bay that is good and skilled is pulling that as well.
Electricians and plumbers especially make a lot of money if they're licensed and have the experience. Most guys go solo business and have enough booked worked for a life time.
This was the consequence of people doscouraging trade work on the 90s and 2000s. These guys are doing very well now.
"I can guarantee you that a tradesmen in the bay that is good and skilled is pulling that as well." - or to rephrase; a similarly skilled tradesperson isn't making more in trades than they would have made as a SWE.
In general there is a competency crisis so I'm sure competent tradespeople can and do charge a premium and as things get worse I'm sure the premium they can charge can increase. That said, the US was angling to be a 'knowledge-worker' economy but for some reason, like many western countries, there now seems to be a huge appetite for importing unskilled labor to create a more mixed economy. I believe there will be an effort to push the newly arrived unskilled labor into the skilled tradespeople labor force which would put downward pressure on blue collar salaries. So the current windfall that they are enjoying might yet abate.
I think the denigration of blue collar was done so people wouldn't feel as bad about shipping factories overseas to increase corporate profits. The process of financialization and deindustrialization was driven by politicians and bankers and I think culturally the rest of us are were reacting to these realities as opposed to driving them. I think financializing and deindustrializing the economy was a mistake, as is importing large amounts of unskilled labor. I truly would have loved to have seen a larger blue collar middle class.
Are there reasons to be optimistic? Sure, but to suggest things are going well is to be beholden to some of the weirdest neoliberal freaks you'll ever see on the internet.
But to think that there's "something wrong" with a specific teen is already down the wrong path. It's like 5 goung to therapy while working for Amazon.
I’m a millennial and I remember a lot of talk around depression and anxiety crises when I was in school.
I'm also really surprised that none of these scientists seem to be looking outside the US. We have no school shootings where I live, a very different economic environment, a completely different approach to racism, much less helicopter parenting, far less doomsaying and polarization, and yet we have the same problems. To me, this rules out everything except smartphones and possibly lockdowns, and that's with my pro-covid, pro-big-tech bias.
Source: firsthand knowledge
That's simplified and idealized. But those elements can also be proxied if they're not there originally... approximately.
For teens a half-generation before mine, for music, it was common to buy CDs (and to have the money to do so). For my generation, it was common to pirate everything (so it was okay that we were all broke). In both cases, there was a sense of "ownership" over one's music collection. If someone wanted to take it away from us, they'd have to break into our house or burn it down or wipe our hard drive or something.
What do today's teens have? YouTube and Spotify and SoundCloud. Slightly more expensive than "free", even though affordability has gone down. But what's worse is how easily TPTB can reach into your playlist, your account, the platform as a whole, and erase your music. Just, poof, gone, with no warning.
The older ways of building a music collection still exist, of course, but they're not as accessible. Best Buy doesn't even sell physical media anymore; every teen's favorite boom box (their used car) is now prohibitively expensive. Torrenting still exists, but it's outside the mainstream of music consumption; can you even do it on an iPhone? Downloading in general is discouraged by the big platforms, except as a way to keep you engaging with the app if the WiFi goes down.
Teens, of course, have existed for millennia without easy access to the latest pop hits. I dunno if cultural expectations have caught up to this regression to the mean, though. Are you uncool if you don't have SOME kind of musical identity? Advertisers sure want you to think so. Your parents probably treat your adolescence as an echo of their own, too, even with the massive changes in just this small corner of teen life. Carbon copy to every other facet as is appropriate.
So (in a bit of semantic irony), I buy it. (Also ironically, given the above,) it's a bit of a mirror of Millennial angst wrt home-buying, marriage, etc. It's actually obvious to me, and obvious why Boomers can't see it (or are slow to come to it): they hold all the capital that would otherwise be solving our issue.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/vinyl-shop/vinyl-records/cat020...
But it's a very long stretch to suggest the mental health crisis is caused by economics. In my mind the current mental health crisis comes from 4 key sources.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2854760/
There are about 30 major sources contaminating our drinking water. We are effectively giving low level HRT to everyone in society. With the obvious consequences.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...
The sources are unimportant. Just that we must discontinue the idea that our drinking water is clean.
2. Government restrictions on in person social interactions preventing people from having friends. In my jurisdiction, government has effectively eliminated in person social interaction; but it will vary i'm sure.
3. Significant social changes which have obvious consequences. This started probably around 2010, but then gamergate and metoo are kind of your major sparks which started the social wildfire. Record low fertility rates and still dropping.
4. Covid lockdowns. Everyone pointed out how this was a bad idea which would cause a mental health crisis, especially for children.
I'll take my downvotes now.
The cost of living is extraordinarily high. The housing market exploded.
What is there going on for the lives of teenagers exactly? I can gauge that the smarter ones will be locked inside a claustrophobic concrete prison figuring out how to pirate literature, movies, software, music, etc ... produced in a time where humanity was flourishing culturally. For example, classical literature from the 20th century and earlier periods is far more seducing for a teenager trying to create a soul for himself, because they explored societal and existential problems in a much deeper and romanticized way. This high culture still exists, but you have to scavenge through the wasteland that the internet has become.
I say this from brazil: this place is completely dead, culturally dead. The educational system here is broken and suffers from the ideological indoctrination. One selects a path at a very early stage in life. If that goes wrong, it is extremely difficult to switch to another job or career path. Almost every industry requires three to five year education degrees. Any alternative career path means having to go back to school and redoing everything. A degree in Mathematics, Physics, or Chemistry is completely devalued, leaving only Medicine, Finance, and Technology as sane career options, so choose your poison. Medicine is bizarrely competitive. Medicine is viewed as a way to make money and the life of the students literally depends on their exam proficiency. Medical school is not a real academic course, it is an over glorified professional polytechnic factory for the mass-production of medical slaves.
Not to mention that we have belgium levels of corruption and the society is not homogenous, but some kind of abomination miscegenated. Shared norms and social trust are almost non-existent, replaced with hostility and individualism. Governance is basically impossible. A country where a bunch of people with radically different beliefs, ideologies, religions, and ways of life were shoved into a room and told by the government: Be Nice. Or Else.
Does this sound like a happy country who will breed healthy and strong young girls and lads for the future of the nation?
The 'High Cultute' here meant you were middle-class reading European literature and watching Hollywood movies fantasizing that the world was going to be one hell of a ride based on the American Dream lifestyle with a mixture of LSD-driven Science-Fiction, Drugs, Sex, and Rock n Roll.
Summation: Existentialism; Culture; Educational System; Technological Addiction.
tldr: rich kids are nuttier, nobody knows why, I'm sure you have an opinion
The former would probably have some people seeking out a diagnoses for the illness, whereas the latter would have some people intentionally avoiding a diagnosis for the illness.