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While we're all playing armchair sociologist-cum-psychologist, I'd say IMHO it boils down to the lack of a compelling future. Which is to say there's a general disillusionment with the state of humanity (as far as values, realizing our full potential, whatever that means, etc.) I'm not saying it's an accurate belief, but that doesn't make it less real to those who subscribe to it. It might explain why rich kids are even more depressed than poor ones. If you're already rich and you hate life, it's harder to dream about a better life. You're "supposed" to be happy already.

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.

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It's literally just mobile devices. Specifically the introduction of the iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the world for the worse if he only knew. Rich kids can afford more mobile devices at a younger age, therefore suffer worse.

I'm no luddite, mobile devices are amazingly useful, but their effect on people has not exactly been unmitigatedly positive.

It’s not the the medium itself or the message it carries, it’s the lack of emotional support that has been eroded for years now. It might sound cliché but in the end what every human wants is to be loved, even when teens and pre-teens want to reveal against parents and their rules and teachings they still need them. How can a teen learn and accept that possessions do not guarantee happiness when everyone they see looks happy and successful and their parents look and fight everyday for the same empty goals and they’re absent escaping reality on their devices too. Let kids be kids and teens be teens parents don’t need to be “cool” they need to be parents.

It's not just emotional support, it's the bubble of "pretty" social networking. Even people who hate eachother will smile in a photo for instagram and will look like they "love" eachother. People just post the filtered best moments of their lives, their best experiences, a lot of pretty stuff, and they filter out the rest... nice photo of a beach? Sure.. sewer pipe just outside of visible photo? Nope, cropped out. Roaches in the cheap shitty hotel? Nope. Nice sunset? Sure. Saving for months for that trip? Nope. Travelling 16 hours on a bus? Nope. Cocktail with an umbrella? Yep, photo!

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.

Emotional support is crucial for individuals' overall well-being and development. Unfortunately, families capable of providing such support are extremely rare in practice.

Phones and social media have replaced parents. Its' the reason there is less connection between kids and their parents, their peers, teachers, everyone.

You’re really underselling the burden of labor in parent’s lives. Lucky enough to have two parents? They’re probably working 50-60 hours every week including unpaid time necessary for their jobs like commute, meal prep, unpaid breaks, 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.

According to the stats parents now spend more time with their kids :

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."

Caring is not necessarily bonding. Caring could be stuff like making meals or laundry.

Speaking as someone who started their medical career as these came to the masses (student 2010-2013, internship 2014) this absolutely reflects my experience on the coalface experiencing double digit increases in teenage suicidal ideation and self harm presentations to the emergency department.

i’ve said it before here, so apologies if you’ve already read it, but:

> 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.

It’s so strange to go to public places and see very young children with headphones over their ears, and their faces joylessly glued to an iPad. There is no sign of curiosity or engagement with the outside world; it just can’t compete with apps that have literally been optimized for addiction with the aid of psychologists. This is very different from how children used to experience the world.

The Hidden Brain podcast came to the same conclusion in the Escaping the Matrix episode featuring Jonathan Haidt.

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.

Tyler Cowen also did a podcast with Jonathan Haidt where he questioned Haidt's conclusion that the smartphone/social media are the cause of (some) younger people's poor mental health.

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.

HN would be the first to tell me Jobs didn't invent the smartphone. /s

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_the_Edge_(film)

(+1, insightful)

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.

I wonder what it feels like WRT climate change, for the next couple generations. For millennials, it was really depressing because the previous generations left this giant problem for us, but at least there was the slight mitigating factor that, while the situation was pretty well understood by scientists, at least it wasn’t totally obvious to the whole population.

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.

Please consider reading Ritchie's "Not the End of the World" book I mentioned (or even just a summary).

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.

This is fundamentally why I find the technology / media narratives fairly compelling.

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.

Which past? People have been willing to follow doom narratives into the abyss pretty consistently over history, yeah?

Well, obviously it's very hard to compare things like this across time, and be confident you're still comparing apples to apples. But for instance, the evidence seems fairly compelling that young people are experiencing more mental health issues now than in past decades. For instance, suicide rates are a pretty firm indicator of this problem. And in pretty much any one of those past decades, you can find similarly compelling "doom narratives" as those today. But it seems fewer people were following them "into the abyss" of death.

I think blaming it on the phones themselves though is incredibly useless. Yes, the phones and networks permitting the construction of these echo-chambers are a problem that does warrant attention, but it doesn't change the fact that there are numerous, wide scale, huge problems that we are just not dealing with as a society. Is it healthy to have those problems shoved in your face non-stop? No, of course not, but it's arguably even more unhealthy to pretend they don't exist, especially when many of these are existential threats to us as a species.

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.

> 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.

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.

I don't think people suck at all, politicians do suck though. Numerous ones are clearly on the direct payroll of fossil fuel companies.

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.

Nobody is judging kids for being depressed!

> 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.

> The criticism of this always boils down to "well sure, but that's too little and too late",

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.

Your car analogy is not very good. First of all, the car is not un-driveable yet. It has a ton of clear and worsening mechanical deficiencies that are hindering it, but it's still running. Secondly, we can't take it to the mechanic, we have to fix it while it's in motion. Also, there wasn't an accident, a single clear moment where it went from pristine to hopelessly damaged, it has been developing these mechanical issues gradually over a long period of time; they were predictable (and predicted), but accumulating slowly at first and then accelerating more recently.

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!

Collectively, we might do more about climate change (and other problems) if we weren't spending all our time and energy on our phones...

Phones use very little energy, and if it causes a person to move around less, then it would greatly help reduce worldwide energy consumption.

Energy = mass * acceleration * distance

Oh bullshit. What are people supposed to do? More importantly, what COULD people do that would be 10% as effective as proper, top-down regulation on emissions and environmentally destructive industry? It's been bluntly obviously demonstrated at this point that this problem is above consumer activism's ability to solve. Maybe the market could be persuaded at one time to buy more electric cars and eat less meat, but we're reaching a point where politely asking is no longer sufficient if we want the planet to continue supporting us. Now we need to DEMAND it.

I understand how it can feel very daunting to figure out the right step, but there are tons of useful things to work on in this space. There is a huge amount of technological work going on, from academic research labs to commercial deployment. And there are also lots of people working on the policy and politics, which work is not actually primarily about doom-posting on social media.

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.

> Now we need to DEMAND it.

Demanding it is part of what "we'd do better if we put down our phones".

> "if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media"

there it is

The narrative around climate change, i.e., that it's happening and that we need to do something about it, is not demoralizing. What's demoralizing is that the people with the power, money, and influence to take the biggest steps refuse to do so. Someone has figured that the only way to get them to care is to badger them with the facts until they do, and a lot of us are okay with that. It's preferable to the alternative, which is ecoterrorism. Trying to sweep the situation under the rug while things become more troubled and people become more desperate just makes the latter more likely. In this case, the opposite of mopey and depressed isn't optimism, it's rage.

"How we *CAN* be" is doing a lot of lifting there. Boomers, GenX, and older Millennials all had ample opportunities to do something before we arrived here.

We / they did a lot.

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

This blaming the environmentalists for nuclear's failures is quite a tired argument. In addition to being false (environmentalists didn't have the political capital for it in the critical decades) the enormous public subsidies towards nuclear power in the past 80 years were an opportunity cost away from renewables. If we had spent even a small part of that on renewables r&d investment starting in the same timeframe (40s/50s) we could have transitioned from fossil fuels decades earlier.

> 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

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.

Because of Chernobyl.

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).

The "don't look up" mindset practiced by generations both current and previous reaches a new height of cognitive dissonance. The interesting question is that why such a thing didn't cause more widespread mental health problems before (though it did for many).

I'm sorry, but I don't think so.

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.

Didn't downvote you, but that's not a hopeful attitude. If the damage is done, figuring out who to blame doesn't repair it. Sometimes we gotta clean up somebody else's mess or nobody will. As programmers, quite routinely I suppose :P

But it sure is useful to figure out what policies and who did that... considering those are basically still the people in power. For any world-wide change you need to either change them or wait for them to die.

26, this feels so right. not sure what I'm supposed to be looking forward to.

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.

You are way too old to have such a childish outlook on this. The world continues to spin and most people continue to live their lives.

49 and have the same outlook so I guess i'm childish too.

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.

Trans rights are certainly not regressing. In the 90's, slurs about ladyboys, chicks with dicks, and so on and so forth were the norm in basically any social circle. The concept of an actual, real trans man or woman was completely alien to society.

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.

I agree it's better than the 70's , I didnt grow up then but it doesn't sound great. That's why I was saying that I could have been hopeful about this getting better since at least the 2000s to 2010s. But more recently, it seems to be going backwards. In my home state of Florida there's a ton of laws being passed, book bannings, etc. that are incredibly awful and depressing that undo a lot of progress.

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.

I’ve got a career I like, a wife and kids I love, and a city I enjoy.

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.

Sounds plausible to me. People need things to look forward to — not just for themselves, but also for the wider circumstances that surround them — in order to be able to get out of bed in the morning and feel good about living.

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.

It might explain why rich kids are even more depressed than poor ones.

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.

That's fair. I was mostly replying to someone's statement elsewhere on the thread. I don't know if rich or poor are more depressed.

Paradoxically there has never been another moment in all of human history greater than right now for an individual to seek their own happiness. A lot of this just comes down to comparison. We see wealth and excess as the norm to strive toward now, and that anything less is considered failure. There is no "honor in the struggle" anymore. It's just "Why don't I have that thing already? My life sucks".

> There is no "honor in the struggle" anymore.

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.

Nah, I really don't think so. There were periods of economic booms and less inequality, those gave people more margin for error.

I am not sure it is really a paradox though.

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.

What if your own happiness is contingent on the well-being of the planet and the other life here, which we are rapidly extinguishing? For people who are not soulless, wealth-chasing imbeciles there is no possibility of finding happiness. Soon though these same forces of human nature that are destroying our environment will come back to kill all of us, and that is the only silver lining!

yep, definitely no middle ground between “happiness contingent on the well-being of the planet and other life” and “soulless wealth-chasing imbecile”

What we need is a Defragmentation tool for our world. I will posit that the current state of it is a natural evolution of the process of breaking things down and creating choke points/friction to produce more value. Up to the point that each generation loses track of it's reference points little by little therefore repeating history under a different disguise.

There was a time in living memory when a young adult could expect to buy a house straight out of high school and pay it off in 15 years.

Edit: note that baby boomers are not the oldest living generation.

Among my Baby Boomer parents and their siblings (my 9 aunts and uncles), 15 years after high school only one of them lived in a house with the mortgage already paid off. None of those people even grew up in economically disadvantaged households. Did the majority of people in that generation (or an earlier one, if that's what you mean) actually own a house outright 15 years after graduating from high school?

My greatest generation grandfather paid off his mortgage in about five years with a sixth grade education. I grant that was in part due to the postwar boom and his real wages skyrocketing after closing, but it’s worth remembering that the working class stopped sharing in real productivity gains in about 1965. We’ve had similar economic booms but real wages have remained flat, or actually sharply declined in terms of housing.

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