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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

There are so many candidates for causes here. Thinking about and watching climate change can't be good for, say, a teenager imagining their future. Of course, that teenager is also watching the world not coming together to solve this problem so you could say the situation is connected to "loss of community" in a way.

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> Thinking about and watching climate change can't be good for, say, a teenager imagining their future.

That doesn't make sense. Kids in previous generations had to grow up with things like the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation, which had greatly faded into the background until very recently. Also (at least in the 80s) destruction of the environment was a an issue kids were made very aware of. At least when it comes to this teen mental health crisis, the 70s and 80s are often understood to have been far better.

I think pointing to climate change as a cause of the teen mental health crisis is a good illustration of how issue activists can twist and distort perceptions.

I don’t disagree completely but I think one could argue that while we had that threat, the government and people were in agreement that it was a problem to be addressed.

The equivalent today would probably be the United States having a few token nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union stockpiling nuclear weapons, and 30% of the country largely in charge denying that the Soviet Union even exists.

The latter scenario is probably more hopeless and frustrating.

There were plenty of people denying that the Soviets and communism at large was a threat.

Not in any important ways. The mainstream of the US and the entire government was focused on the Soviet Union as an existential threat.

I don't think increasingly poor mental health has much to do with climate change, but the threat of nuclear war is a bad comparison. Bombs either fall or don't. Climate change is a creeping, progressive issue that's visibly worse every few years, and the government has effectively said that that there will be no intervention.

I don't think I can disagree strongly enough.

Creeping changes are something you can adapt to and get used to. Nuclear war was (and still is to an extent) a looming boogeyman whose simultaneous distance and nearness, slowness and quickness makes it a literal nightmare horror-show. I mean, it's a literal sword of Damocles.

> and the government has effectively said that that there will be no intervention.

The government said that about nuclear war, too. No one has ever seriously considered getting rid of the bombs.

The average person isn't so blind they don't see the changes. The frog-boiling experiment is a myth. When there are state-spanning fires that darken the sky across the whole country every year, and hurricanes strong enough to shut down city infrastructure are a regular occurrence, and crops fail and lakes run dry and insects that were so thick twenty years ago you couldn't see through them can no longer be found, people notice. I think these things add up to much more psychological damage than the abstract fear of missiles, even if most don't connect it to climate change directly.

Im not a teenager, but really climate change is not _the_ concern I have about world that makes me disilusioned about our society. Its more the world-scope corruption and everpresent dog-eat-dog mentality thats keeping me disinterested from improving anything.

I don't understand why one wouldn't see inaction on climate change as part and parcel of world-scope corruption and everpresent dog-eat-dog mentality.

I wonder if there's any useful parallels to children and teenagers growing up during the Cold War - that feels somewhat analogous, at least in the terms of a looming threat that could be solved by more cooperation.

I'm reminded of Hypernormalization's portrayal of teens in the USSR. It's not just the impending doom, it's the dissolution of facts and the implicit knowledge that your leaders are super-predators with goals antithesis to your well-being.

I know it's hyperbole, but anywhere you look it feels like nobody is really invested in the future - that everyone's just trying to cash out ASAP and run away to the "safe place" of a gated community or something.

> it's the dissolution of facts and the implicit knowledge that your leaders are super-predators with goals antithesis to your well-being.

Boy, that sounds vaguely familiar.

Worrying about nuclear war was probably worse for mental health since you'd die quite quickly (if you were lucky), rather than some nebulous future were something's going to happen.

I'd rather be atomized by a nuke than die of heat-stroke in a wet bulb event after my air conditioning fails. I mean, I'd rather not die at all but given the options...

I don't know about the kids these days; I'm not one of them, but I'm personally rather terrified of the future that we are careening into in regards to climate change.

Let me tell you about fall out and how the majority of people who die in a nuclear attack will feel the meat peel off their bones over two weeks of unimaginable agony with nothing that can be done for them.

I would say the biggest cause is the endless feed of bad news(good news does not sell well) coupled with unrealistically high expectations social media gives to the people.

Majority of kids and teens do not care about that, as much as we’d assume. They are aware, but their day to day is what is important to them.

Friends, relationships, drama — they are kids.

It’s so much more than that. It’s the continually enshittification of literally everything. It's a hypercapitalist hellscape.

That is not true. Many things are much better now than 20 years ago.

Not mentioning even poor western people are living life in better conditions than the richest people lived 300+ years ago.

Things in isolation may be better, but the totality is far worse.

Rather opposite: thighs in isolation may be worse, but the totality is better than ever.

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