Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts | Hacker News Reader

Decline in teen drug use continues, surprising experts

arstechnica.com

372 pointspseudolus598 comments

I wonder if the new drug of choice is actually technology. In some ways I think that the addiction to technology has some similar mellowing effects as drugs. Some research indicates that smartphone addiction is also related to low self-esteem and avoidant attachment [1] and that smartphones can become an object of attachment [2]. The replacement of drugs by technology is not surprising as it significantly strengthens technological development especially as it is already well past the point of diminishing returns for improving every day life.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07475...

The article discusses all drug use, not just addictive use. I don't think addiction is prevalent enough to solely explain those numbers.

Well, I think there is also an emergent theme in the research that there also needs to be two distinct concepts: addiction, and attachment. See [1].

[1] Hertlein, Katherine M., and Markie LC Twist. "Attachment to technology: The missing link." Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy 17.1 (2018): 2-6.

Does compulsive technology use trigger the same neural pathways as addictive substances?

Because "addiction" is a very loaded term (with a specific clinical definition when it's not being used colloquially), and the sources you cited used "attachment" instead.

I think the answer here is a bit subtle and hard to explain, because it contradicts a lot of common assumptions about addiction and drugs.

In short, many addictive substances create a chemical dependence that often has awful, even potentially fatal chemical withdrawal symptoms. Behavioral addictions don't cause this, which makes people assume they are entirely something different, and categorically less serious and damaging.

This is wrong- because those withdrawal symptoms, while they do make it harder to quit by making going cold turkey difficult and sometimes impossible, they are not the underlying reason why these drugs are being abused in the first place, nor the reason they destroy peoples lives. The reason is that they stimulate the reward system and/or allow one to escape negative emotions and trauma. Behavioral addictions also do that, and can just as easily ruin ones life, by completely overcoming someones mind and will, such that they no longer are able to live their life, and are unable to escape or quit with willpower, just as much so as with drugs that cause withdrawal. They can still completely ruin your life and drive you to suicide, etc.

Moreover, people also often emphasize that many addictive substances can directly cause serious health problems, or even death. This is also not central to their harmfulness, nor always the case. In fact, for a drug to have substantial abuse potential it must be relatively free from serious adverse health effects, at least in the short term, or else it would become impossible to abuse- the most damaging substances are the ones where people can take higher doses for longer with less adverse effects, because this more strongly emphasizes its ability to be used to strongly stimulate the reward system and escape negative emotions and trauma for longer periods of time - cementing the addiction-, without causing a new negative experience on its own. Methamphetamine for example is unique among stimulants in how benign it is- allowing people to take massive doses over really long periods of time, and not face immediate health issues. Counter-intuitively, this is actually what makes it have so much abuse potential and cause so much harm, compared to other stimulants which quickly make you sick or feel awful at high doses. From this perspective, you can see that the fact that behavioral addictions are also able to be repeated in "large doses" for long periods of time without immediate short term health consequences can make them have a high potential for harm in the long term.

Explain why MDMA isn't a huge addiction problem like meth (or all that popular any more).

MDMA has little addiction potential- for one it isn’t really just an unhealthy escape from negative feelings, but helps people process traumatic experiences and negative emotions by temporarily lowering anxiety and fear, and may be close to being FDA approved for that therapeutic purpose.

I have only tried it once, and it permanently eliminated my crippling social anxiety, by temporarily eliminating it, and allowing me to experience and remember what that was like. I felt no desire to use it again, because the (life changing positive) effect was permanent.

Second, it seems to have rapidly diminishing effects that make it self limiting- if sometime takes MDMA too much or too frequently, it stops having the desired effect.

MDMA can be addictive, though usually on people who are dealing various issues that, like alcohol, can mask or suppress "bad" feelings. It pumps up the serotonin levels and people can definitely get addicted to that (the same way shopaholics are addicted to the temporary dopamine hits they get when they buy something new).

MDMA (and other drugs that fall under the psychedelic umbrella like magic mushrooms or LSD) has has shown some clinical success in dealing with trauma and other mental health issues, but only supervised and combined with professional help. Most people I know that have used MDMA/Ecstasy usually only stopped because the crash sucks as they didn't want to deal with it after. That's the main reason it was used for social gatherings like raves; it really helps eliminate social anxiety.

Yes we know :)

Every time there's talk of drugs people will just shuffle and repackage some random facts they know about whatever drug in question and preach it like it's something they just discovered.

I'm not really sure how the behavioural addiction here is harming the person. You're talking about an external harm with the behavioural addiction being symptom treatment due to feeling trapped.

It ends up consuming all of a persons time and energy, and they stop doing everything else that is important or essential- maintaining their own career, friendships, family obligations, and health. They lose the ability to feel joy or engage positively in anything but the addiction. This causes a downward spiral of physical and mental health, that destroys quality of like and can in some cases be ultimately fatal.

Some corollaries, that might not be obvious for those not deeply familiar with drug policy:

1. Statements like "we can't legalize a drug until we have proven that it's not harmful" are nonsensical given that it's easier to become habituated to drugs that are less harmful. The standard should be, "when measured holistically, does legalization and regulation increase or decrease harm relative to banning and criminalization?"

2. Lumping habitual use and sporadic use together as "abuse" is counter-productive.

3. A humane and just drug policy would focus on removing the causes of people wanting to escape negative emotions rather than on removing the tools they use to escape those emotions.

Fair point. Some other studies use addiction too, though, and there is a distinction between both addiction and attachment and the links between them is a bit nebulous. You can check out the results on Google Scholar if interested.

I couldn't agree more. Using the term addiction in contexts where it is not medically valid is very dangerous (like yelling "fire" in a theater) and leads to the use of violent force against those one falsely claims are "addicted".

Audio-visual stimuli from screens and speakers has never been shown to be able to have the same effects as a dopaminergic drug which is to say, completely turning up incentive salience regardless of reward or lack of it. That is why drugs are dangerous.

Technology can only be habit forming (in some contexts, maybe) if it continues to be rewarding in some way. Psychological dependence, maybe, but never addiction, and not even physiological dependence. Addictive drugs do not have to be rewarding or pleasurable. They just hijack wanting.

They are not the same and definitely should not be legislated the same. Enjoying something that is actually fun is not the same as wanting something because it chemically turned on wanting.

There is no reason to assume that a behavior that activates the reward system is categorically less harmful than a molecule that activates it directly. In both cases it can completely overcome someones will such that it destroys their life and they can’t escape it. Both are addiction. You’re making a distinction without a difference- a fire only needs to be hot enough to kill, it does not become “invalid” just because you can think of other types of fire, or hotter fires.

You are using the word “medical” to emphasize your point incorrectly- behavioral addictions are included in the modern medical concept of addiction, and the idea that they should be considered categorically separate from substances is an outdated concept. The DSM-5 for example has a diagnostic criteria for gambling addiction.

>no reason to assume that a behavior that activates the reward system is categorically less harmful than a molecule that activates it directly.

There are mountains of papers, books and all sorts of evidence that drugs that directly act as agonists for populations of dopaminergic neurons the VTA that mediate incentive salience (methamphetamine, cocaine, etc) are incredibly addictive (wanting, not liking, not reward. reward prediction). This is very different than an experience that is naturally rewarding like sex (liking, and maybe wanting later remembering the liking). Anticipation of sex may activate VTA dopaminergic populations but the reward of sexual activity itself does not. And certainly not things like viewing audio-visual media on screens.

I use medical to emphasize that when you try to reason about these things without fine grained understanding you come to false general conclusions.

I do agree that with drugs that just activate reward directly (like opioids with glutamergic populations in the shell of the nucleus accumbens) can rapidly become addictive. But these too are different than expriences that happen to activate reward through sensation. For example, sexual activity is a behavior that activates reward yet very few people become addicted to it.

> Does compulsive technology use trigger the same neural pathways as addictive substances?

Absolutely yes: the dopamine circuit.

Triggering the same neural pathways is also a flawed way to look at things. Dopamine exists without the presence of drugs despite the dysfunctional state of discourse demonizing literally anything which releases dopamine. A true dopamine detox would in fact be very bad for your health, physical and mental. The point being, drugs exploit existing pathways and biochemical interactions, they don't create them de novo. The set isn't just "compulsive technology | drugs" it is "compulsive technology | drugs | eating | running | mental stimulation | sexual activity | etc."

Be careful of a possible false dichotomy; People don’t need to have a drug.

Hey, speak for yourself, buddy.

More seriously, I think there's ample historical evidence that drugs (with a liberal definition, beer, etc) are very popular across various times and places.

And religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people

That very wikipedia article you links makes it clear it's not intended to mean religion is a "Drug" in the sense of being addictive, but rather a sociological pain killer. A tonic that limits how much people react to their own suffering.

Absolutely. And smart phones are also not literally a drug. Drugs, video games, alcohol, and religion, are all used as a part of coping mechanisms for many, however.

> a compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects and typically causing well-defined symptoms (such as anxiety, irritability, tremors, or nausea) upon withdrawal or abstinence

(Merriam-Webster, "addiction")

It might be stretching it somewhat, but I think video games, social media, and religion can manifest a habitual need to indulge, negative effects from doing so, and negative effects from not doing so. Perhaps not in most people.

Coping mechanisms/painkillers can naturally cause some people to be "in too deep" because they keep using it and become dependent.

Popularity doesn't necessarily imply a need.

If you want to get technical, doesn’t it? When some particular variety of thing is popular across all human cultures, doesn’t this point to it addressing some deep desire we might put on mazlow’s? What distinguishes a deep, innate human desire from a need?

One way to distinguish them is the retrospective analysis of the outcome. What happens when someone obtains or goes without each category?

To go deeper, I think one needs to more fully defined "need”. Need for what? Are we talking about needs.. to sustain biological life? Are we talking about needs... To sustain happy and productive lives?

If we take the second definition, there is a pretty clear difference between a desire and a need. Satisfaction of a desire does not necessarily advance that goal, and can very well be counter to it.

I would just argue that “happy and productive“ is vastly too reductive. This seems like a very difficult definition to nail down, but those needs which are not required for survival would probably be defined as something like “those things which increase the flourishing of, maximize the potential of, and/or contribute to a valid and lasting feeling of deep satisfaction in the individual.”

From this definition, it seems like some drugs and some uses of drugs are most certainly not necessary while others seem to be contributing to a real psychological need. Some drugs can give people insight into the nature of their own mind or of their experience, or reshape their worldview for the better. They can allow us to experiment with our own consciousness, which seems to be something that we derive a lot of satisfaction and even utility from. In these cases, drugs may be fulfilling a need. Simultaneously we can recognize that drug use intended more just to anesthetize or produce blind pleasure is most likely not contributing to a need, as it was defined above.

OP didn't say that.

Who like hermits and people that follow asceticism?

That's fair. But I was only referring to those that tend towards drugs, since the entire study is about a reduction in drug use.

Indoctrination into a dependency mindset fits the "buy a solution" model that our societies run on. We are already primed for this indoctrination from the moment mother puts a pacifier in our mouths. Then constantly looking up at her approval, that constitutes the beginning of our need of approval from the women in our lives. We are programmed and primed from day 0.

We're just missing a cigar and a dream about trains here.

What's the reference here? I thought Pink Floyd at first.

Quoth the AI:

> According to Freud, dreaming about trains often symbolizes the journey of life, with the train representing the progression of time and the destination representing death, and the act of riding a train can be linked to unconscious sexual desires due to the sensation of movement and confinement, particularly when experiencing anxiety about missing a train or being trapped on one.

Any exceptions for when you had train wallpaper as a kid? Asking for a friend.

Yes, Freud was who I was referencing; the references to the mother, pacifier, and constantly looking for approval from women made me think of Freud's fringe theories about the Oedipus complex. He was also big into the symbolism of dreams, and thought that one explanation for trains in your dreams were the phallic representations of your repressed sexual desires.

That kind of misogyny sounds like some deeply rooted trauma you have there, buddy.

Have you ever considered that humans are simply social creatures, that the only thing really separating us from other animals is our ability to socialize and organise in groups?

There is no programming, it’s our nature.

So if babies are ignored and raised in isolation they still grow up with normal social skills? I think it’s fairly clear that socialization is learned (a term which I think is equivalent to programmed in this context) and not something as innate (or “in our nature”) as breathing.

That’s a fallacy. Human babies don’t grow up in isolation; if they do, it’s in contrived experiments, and drawing conclusions from that is about as helpful as watching birds in a cage.

Humans in their natural environment will interact with other humans socially, mirror their display of emotion, and have a desire for affection.

Of course they will. But that’s is programming. Nurturing, socializing, teaching… all of it is programming. I’m not placing any negative connotations on the word. I’m not sure why you don’t view those things as programming?

A human baby is helpless and "primed" for dependency on others - there is simply no other way they could be (without a drastically different evolutionary path). This whole thread is about the modern difficulties of teaching children to become independent in spite of that beginning and the corporate machine that wishes to keep us there ("commoditize your complements"). So uh, welcome to the conversation and try not to be so fatalistic.

So what‘s your drug of choice?

I really found it interesting that in the engineered society of Brave New World, everyone got a drug. I guess my personally opinion is that I disagree with you, that in a world where you know about drugs, drugs are a sort of need.

If everyone is switching from drugs to social media, then that's progress. Twitter and Facebook won't harm your body. They're also free, so your habit will never make you poor and desperate. This kind of revolution in improving our health makes me proud to work in the tech industry. The worst that can happen is you'll feel sad if people bully you online, but that's the fault of people, not the technology. We can improve the human condition, but we can't change human nature.

Perhaps? But a confounder is the strengthening or weakening of social ties. It's not clear that what seems to increasing loneliness is doing well by this next generation.

Mental health is health, and poor mental health can result in death... death rates that we have seen climb precipitously among children. Trading heroin deaths for suicides isn't an improvement, even if the dealers feel they aren't directly responsible.

Plenty of bad side effects: Harming your brains development, ability to concentrate, harm the ability to find joy in non-screen activities, mental health and so on.

I’d argue that targeted advertising and unprecedentedly-centralized corporate control of what text, images, and video we see online is just as potentially harmful as (recreational) drug use, if not worse. And online-shopping/adventure-travel/other addictions facilitated by targeted ads and targeted content algorithms can definitely leave people unable to achieve goals in life.

Creating a new addiction to replace the last generation’s isn’t really something to be proud of. As developers, we should be aiming to create ways to communicate that aren’t addictive and facilitate genuine connection with others that includes their highs, the lows, and financial/socioeconomic transparency.

I strongly disagree with this. Social media companies are incredibly valuable specifically because they are effective at getting people to spend their money on things they otherwise wouldn't have.

Depression, suicide, and other serious mental health disorders are strongly linked with social media use. Is that better than more kids drinking and smoking pot? I don't know, it's complicated. It's certainly not clearly better and might be significantly worse.

Hand waving away these costs is putting on some seriously rose colored glasses.

They are also really valuable at building/generating personality models of large swaths of the population, the data can be said knows us better than we know ourselves. Since the memory of our patterns can be mined for discovery or narrative creation. That's why they really exist. Just follow the money.

Drug addicts sell their children (in the worst way) for the next hit. It's not the same.

And likewise child porn trade/child trafficking is a nagging problem on social media platforms. Stereotyping is rarely illuminating.

> It's not the same.

I would not be so sure of that: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/farmville-playing-mom-admits-sh...

Hello, depending on data from the CDC, we have:

>Number of alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides: 51,191 Alcohol-induced deaths, excluding accidents and homicides per 100,000 population: 15.4

>All suicides Number of deaths: 49,476 Deaths per 100,000 population: 14.8

Apparently, not all suicides are caused by social media, and accidents may be more important here. I just want to offer some data that can be easily fetched.

The problem with alcohol is that it’s a drug that isn’t just legal and tolerated, it’s a drug that’s celebrated and encouraged.

social media can definitely harm your body if you’re constantly overstimulated and sedentary

As someone who grew up in the 90’s and partied the way they did in the 90’s If there is a switch from drugs to social media I find that incredibly dystopian.

> Twitter and Facebook won't harm your body. They're also free

Only if you value your time at exactly zero.

> The worst that can happen is you'll feel sad if people bully you online, but that's the fault of people, not the technology.

By that logic it’s also your body’s fault to react poorly to drugs, not the drugs’.

Thinking of it in terms of “fault” is also not very productive. I’d say it’s definitely a (possible) negative consequence of social media usage that might otherwise not have happened, and as such worth studying.

> This kind of revolution in improving our health makes me proud to work in the tech industry.

I can say with some amount of confidence that the number of people wasting their talent and life in making up bullshit engagement algorithms, who thought about it as a way of getting people away from drugs, has been exactly zero. So, it is definitely not something to be proud of, but maybe something to think of as a funny coincidence, provided that the premise actually holds.

> The worst that can happen is ...

That you'll remain or become an idiot, or suffer physically and mentally as a result of being inactive while consuming the garbage your proud tech workers shove down your head.

Suddenly I remember this movie from the 90s where people drugged themself with some kind of minidisc. “Strange Days”, maybe? Anyhow, I always found the plot weird, but maybe they actually were onto something…

The minidiscs in that case where full-sensory VR recordings of people’s experiences.

The discs had -in the movie- the memories of another person, and you would experience that memory and sensations as if you were living it. So, e.g. someone would record themselves doing something risky and you would get the adrenaline rush from watching it.

So... Maybe in some way one could argue that social media gives some sort of connection were you get some feelings from what others are doing/showing. I mean, technologically it's quite a leap, but in a conceptual way... it's still a bit of a leap but maybe not that big.

Sounds like Brain Dances (BDs) from Cyberpunk 2077.

Yes, which originally came from Cyberpunk, the first sourcebook for which was released in 1988, with Cyberpunk 2020 releasing in 1990 complete with the idea for pre-recorded replayable memories/full sensory experience, ie:Braindance.

Strange Days was released in 1995.

Maximum Mike was, and is, a prophet right alongside Gibson.

edit: Although almost certainly this wasn't the first place people imagined being able to record and playback memories.

Made me think of Total Recall, which was adapted from "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," looks like from 1966.

Wiki tells me there was a Cyberpunk 2013 released in 1988. Feels like a millennial cult that keeps missing it's big day...

Cyberpunk 2013 - join us! Jack in choom

Cyberpunk 2020 - oops sorry, had to reschedule

Cyberpunk 2077 - crazy story, anyway we've got a new date

Cyberpunk ???? - this time, we promise!

Simstim from Neuromancer (released in 1984) is the first mention of such a thing that I know of.

Brainstorm (1983) did it before Neuromancer. The movie is about a device that records and replays sensory and emotional experiences, and a central plot point is that it records the dying moments of a character.

I thought the central point was the porn played on a loop. Maybe I was distracted and missed the real plot. Also maybe mixed up by the fact that one of the principle actors died in real life while the movie was being made.

The central point was like Lawnmower Man, the military / government were going to misuse the tech for evil purposes.

The porn and the vicarious near-death-experience were just plot points.

The military stuff is a McGuffin-type subplot. The real plot is the main character's obsession with seeing Lillian's vision of the afterlife.

The author of the screenplay, Bruce Joel Rubin, is a self-described spiritual teacher, and "transitional journeys" is kind of his thing. His three most well-known films (Brainstorm, Ghost, and Jacob's Ladder) are all about characters experiencing the afterlife in some way.

The porn thing showed that the device could be harmful to the viewer. This adds another dimension of risk to the later scenes where the Walker character is experiencing the death tape.

The actor was Natalie Wood, and the event is shrouded in mystery about how she died. However, the character who dies in the movie is played by Louise Fletcher.

> Maybe in some way one could argue that social media gives some sort of connection were you get some feelings from what others are doing/showing. I mean, technologically it's quite a leap

That technology exists; it's called empathy, and the extremely powerful form of it innate to humans is arguably our singularly defining characteristic. It's our tech moat, so to speak.

This is exactly the parasocial way my girlfriend's niece and friends experience life. No relationships of their own, it is all celebrities and their lives, ingested on their phones. I don't have the heart to tell them that 95% of it is stuff created by PR firms.

playing devils advocate for a minute... isnt that similar to what our parents said in the 80's/90's about our generation? all that "tv and phone" brain rot

And they were right. But we would watch TV usually together and only for around 4-5 hours a day. Do you know how much screen time are people having ? 8 to 10 hours are not uncommon. And alone.

Yes. And what the previous generation said about rock music.

Celebrities and “socialites” have been idolised for years - Paris Hilton certainly isn’t the doing of this generation, neither is Jackie Kennedy.

If you think that what we’re doing with mobile apps and social media is new, take a look at the 20th century a little harder.

1. People were clearly wrong about music. Audio only is clearly not as addictive as video + audio.

2. People did say that about TV and TV maybe had the potential to be like this. However, TV failed in many ways to be a hyper addictive device. Some of the many reasons: i. Just less content. There wasn’t that much TV content at all. YT probably adds more content in an hour than all the TV content ever created.

ii. You couldn’t choose what you wanted to watch beyond a few dozen channels at best. So you always had opportunities where you were forced to do something different at many times.

iii. The TV wasn’t available to you at all times. You had to go to the den to watch it and you couldn’t take it to school with you.

iv. TV couldn’t specifically target you individually with content to keep you watching. The most amount of targeting TV could do was at maybe a county level.

v. You couldn’t be part of the TV. Social media and phones today make you an integral part of the “show” where a kid can end up having a video of them popping their pants on a playground shown to millions of people. Even in a more ordinary sense, a kid commenting on a video or sending a message to a friend makes them part of the device in a way TV never could outside of extraordinary situations.

TV certainly could target their audiences. Television shows would share their viewer demographics with advertisers: age groups, income levels, race and other social indicators, related interests.

The shows had target markets often driven by the need to reach certain demographics, though actual viewer demographics sometimes were surprisingly way off the mark.

They could not do this at the individual level, nor did they have ways of reaching people to persuade them to watch (notifications from mobile apps, emails about posts).

> 1. People were clearly wrong about music. Audio only is clearly not as addictive as video + audio.

Or they weren't and addiction wasn't the crux of their position; and I say that as someone who loves a lot of rock derivatives.

The influence pop icons with broken lives had on teen generations was horribly deleterious (and I'm not even talking about hippies), mainly because malleable and unproperly taught minds rarely see that an artist's respectability is completely separate from his output.

The ancients had the concept of muses for a reason.

The key is limits. In the past, even if celebrites were idolized, we had a limited amont of information compared to now. The fluid variable is the increase in information, which makes the situation different.

You might need to recall just how crazy it was e.g. literal shrines to boy bands were just normal. To cover every inch of your bedroom walls and ceiling with photos of a celebrity crush was not unheard of. At school, every conversation could be about these obsessions. Folders/files would be covered with pledges of devotion.

No comment on how it is today, but looking back it was terrifyingly nuts - full on religious fervour to the point of mental disorder. When bands broke or people married/died, there would be full on breakdowns and sympathy suicides.

The lack of information might have helped exacerbate the religious mystery and make more space for imagination, fantasy and faith.

> take a look at the 20th century a little harder

Effectively unlimited content is huge, though. IMHO that pretty much overshadows everything. There were only so much records, magazines and other content you could consume before the internet.

I do think TV was, and is, harmful. I do not have one for that reason and I think it was good for my kids (as well as myself).

I also think social media is a lot worse.

And our kids will warn their kids about how the ‘direct to brain’ type interface they will use is rotting their brains. Each generation will have been a little correct along the way; the harm at each step was just always gentle enough to not scold the frogs too quickly.

No, they hung out with each other in person too.

>> some sort of connection were you get some feelings from what others are doing/showing. I mean, technologically it's quite a leap, but in a conceptual way... it's still a bit of a leap but maybe not that big.

Play that VR game set within in the shark cage. The adrenaline rush is definitely not much of a leap from the real thing.

Or the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Game [0]. Every time I watch that I get this eerie sensation that we're essentially giving our free will up to the masters of the games and social platforms we're addicted to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28Star_Trek:_The_Nex...

Darn, I forgot that episode. That's a very eerie parallel to some of what we have today.

"If you just let the game happen, it almost plays itself." The quote from the episode certainly makes me think about the "idle games" genre that has emerged in that last several years.

Wow! The game in this episode has been living in my head since I was a child and I could never find where it was from!

I need to watch this episode again

Offhand the only drug-like thing I remember from that series is the nutrition bars that had 0 calories that most of the school got addicted to. Or maybe the cheerleader that got bee pheromones and started controlling the rest of the students.

Aside - I just learned a month ago that there's an official followup miniseries that brought back several of the original actors, titled "Echoes", with hopefully more coming since it's called Season 1. Came out over 2022-2023: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHGrvCp5nsDJ1qSoKZEmm... (the trailers are at the bottom of the playlist)

Dangit tried to delete this when I realized this is completely unrelated, just a similar name, and was seconds late. Got the delete link then it denied me.

Straight to the dungeon for you.

Best OT I've seen in a while : )

Brainstorm (1983) had the tape version of that.

> Suddenly I remember this movie from the 90s where people drugged themself with some kind of minidisc.

With Ralph Fiennes. I think that, although strange, it's actually an underrated movie.

That movie was awesome. I remember the first time I saw the trailer in an actual movie theater. It was mindblowing.

“Have you ever jacked-in, wire-tripped..”

“Santa Claus of the subconscious”

https://youtu.be/8RoOs-S_JVI

In Serial Experiments Lain, they have a drug that makes your brain think really fast.

Tek comes to mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TekWar

Hey I remember that show! What a weird one. I kinda liked it though.

Gen Z was conditioned with algorithmic timelines and loot boxes (gambling).

I wonder if that’s why there’s now such a fucking problem with sports betting…

I think it is more the accessibility increase from it being allowed along with unfettered advertising ensuring that the targeted ad demographic is "literally anybody who watches sports and more".

You can thank the supreme court for that. Also Trump ran 2015 in support of sports betting online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...

It is somewhat amusing that Leary had a period of saying that computers were the new drugs (“PC is the new LSD” or something)

Marshall "Joyce is my LSD" McLuhan would agree emphatically.

"Turn on, boot up, jack in" ~~ Timothy Leary

Chaos and Cycberculture, Timothy Leary, 1994.

An astounding book.

Opiate of the masses (21st Century version)

Bread and Circuses. Or at least, circuses.

They'll have bread, but they won't have bred.

I think psychedelic is more apt (but not a perfect analogy either).

Expands horizons, connects self to world, catalyzes cults and psychoses.

Growing up, people on the street would fidget with their cigarettes. Now they fidget with their phones.

I would argue that the health impacts of both habits are comparable too.

Makes complete sense to me. Drugs are an effective distraction because they're easy to use and often fast-acting. Outdoor/sport distractions require effort (driving, etc). Video games require much less effort. Add to that less-trivial things like investing and research, and you've got the perfect "addiction"

There are games designed to be addicting. Some even have gambling built in. Technology is just a tool.

You can order custom kitten being killed videos on the internet. Is this suppressing the serial killers and rapists in our society?

It's along the lines of your theory, the internet is filling in a base need for a segment of society that's always been there.

I wonder if it is like facebook.

The next generation weren't interested in facebook, because "that's what moms use" and figured out something different.

As to drugs, now many are legal, so parents can now partake in what used to be illegal for them. Or for harder drugs, "Uncle Bob does drugs, and he's always in trouble".

So one generation of parents acts as a negative example for the next generation to reject.

It does replace a demand of people who want to mellow out.

The same tech completely disrupts how drug-use spreads as well. There is nobody to offer a first hit if you're hanging out online.

---

Though I would caution taking tech as _the_ cause. Things like demographics and the general zeitgeist shouldn't be ignored.

Maybe the kids are really into DARE.

> There is nobody to offer a first hit if you're hanging out online.

Silk Road/etc.?

don't pretend that's the same thing

This was my first thought too. Their phones are all they need. Plus they are legal, encouraged even.

This is a massively overstated, trendy, technically incorrect thing to say.

Even if technological "addiction" is not like real drug addiction, it is something strange. People constantly checking, scrolling without any real purpose. There's some sort of conditioned behaviour in it that has some facets of addiction.

How do you know they don't have a purpose? Seems like you're projecting your insecurities on strangers.

A lot of people have the same feeling about technology. I personally regulate my technological use fairly stringently. I almost never carry a smartphone with me for instance. It's got nothing to do with personal insecurities. I'm just interested in contributing to a more critical discussion on technology.

You should read some absurdist literature, people doing things without any real purpose is very common.

Nobody cared about drug addiction until it was politicized. US politicians have a long history of using drug users as scapegoats to win elections to disastrous results. Prohibition, drug war, next are social media bans. The insanity will never end.

Agreed. The original comment just made me think "good grief".

No, scrolling on a website is not the same as doing lines of coke in the club bathroom.

No, it's not, but there's a spectrum of drug experiences. Scrolling social media is more like sitting in a shitty motel by yourself on a meth binge, or being on the nod.

I fear the (negative) impact of our current technological drugs goes beyond the impact of traditional drugs.

I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller.

Main impact on kids is lack of socialization, lack of emotional regulation and a complete impact on their capabilities to keep their attention. Those used to be indicators for a future failed adulthood.

I remember traditional drugs only becoming present around 14-16 years old. Alcohol was probably the most prevalent, and probably the most dangerous. Followed by Cannabis, tobacco and some recreational drugs like MDMA.

Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life. Obviously tobacco with terrible potential future health effects, but beyond that, everyone I know turned up pretty healthy. Not only that, I remember some time later that the most experimental group (mdma, LSD, mushrooms) of drug users being full of people with Master Degrees and PhDs.

The new technological drugs scare me way more than the old traditional ones. Obviously it is a normal response of the known va unknown. Time will tell.

Playing Devil’s advocate… Socialisation is what’s driving technology use. It’s just happening on the phones, not irl. Just like with alcohol, anyone not participating will be left out. If everyone’s on their phones all the time, IRL socialisation won’t matter compared to socialisation via phones.

Disagree. Nothing can replace face to face socialization. We're not even close. Our minds are just adapting, but to a new local maximum that is far away from the global maximum of ideal.

(Edit: corrected typographical error.)

Socialization online exists, but I'm not sure that it's the main activity on phones.

When you look at https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-for-teens it does not look promising. Video is leading, then Gaming which can include socialization then third come Social media but with Tik Tok leading which I would not categorize as socialization.

Rather: avoidance of socialization is what's driving it. It's the easy way out of meeting people while still getting compliments and such and pretending "everything is fine". In that sense, it indeed has a lot in common with alcohol.

I think this was true a decade ago, where people used social media to talk to each other and actively kept chats with friends, etc.

What I’m seeing now is social media got so hyper optimized for engagement that it became a passive consumption mechanism, and the only “socialization” left is sharing memes. It’s a widespread digital heroin epidemic

The communication aspect has just moved to other places.

such as?

I’m very much for legalizing and regulating (almost) all drugs, but watch out with the confirmation bias of “everyone in my social circle who used recreationally turned out fine.”

I can’t find it right now but I read a great comment on legalization that pointed out that a kid experimenting with weed and cocaine in college is doing so for a radically different reason than a kid doing it escape the daily misery of his ghetto neighborhood.

This is also why you’ll often see staunch opposition to legalization in the lower socio-economic classes, with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.

And yes, legalization and regulation would of course also allow harm reduction. But it is good to be able to take the opposition’s perspective :)

> with them having seen people close to them destroyed by drug use.

But isn't this a false correlation, then? Were they destroyed by drug use, or by the daily misery of their ghetto neighborhood?

The combination, which is the point of the comment above. Legalization may be fine in places where people have other support factors that make them less likely to destroy their lives with drugs and alcohol, but in areas without those protective forces, it's good that there are some controls (or at least many of the people who live there think so).

At that point it becomes important to ask (1) how much damage does the illegalization itself do; (2) how much harm does the limited access actually prevent; and (3) how much damage alcohol does, and what the tradeoff is.

If you’re going to make a harm reduction argument, you need to do your best to fully account for all the harms in play.

Spot on- so many social problems get attributed to everything but the economy and inequality. If we could make our system more equitable, then we would not have such desperation.

What happened with the tremendous social spending by the government?

Government spending is not a panacea for structural economic issues

That money is handed to the poor.

Imagine hearing someone's loved one dying to drug use and asking them, "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

Okay, but the person wasn't asking this of the family of a dying loved one, they were asking it in this space where ideas are discussed and examined. Yes, it would be disturbingly unempathetic to ask that question in such a circumstance, but asking it in this circumstance is neither cold, inappropriate, or a demonstration that the asker lacks empathy.

> "But isn't this a false correlation?". What a deeply and unsettlingly cold question that lacks any potential for empathy.

That's an absurd mental picture you've imagined. Using that to undermine the discussion of the reality that people use drugs to temporarily escape from desperate conditions is unsettling and lacks empathy and judgment.

You've deeply misunderstood my comment.

You've deeply misunderstood your own comment

I disagree entirely, and I have personally witnessed people lose themselves to drug use.

Anyone with a relative dying of addiction has no doubt been long exhausted in watching them circle the pit of their addiction. They are going to be under no illusions regarding the chances there were to escape it, and the choices made to remain there.

Asking if they were escaping from a miserable reality vs chasing a high isn't offensive. It's just dealing with the reality of the situation as it is. The only person I see being offended is someone in denial, blaming the drugs alone rather than allowing any blame to the person using them, trying to imagine them an innocent victim without agency in the matter.

The question is a good one. It actually looks for what caused everything to go wrong, rather than just being pointlessly offended on behalf of the imagined umbrage you think others might feel.

I disagree with your characterization of my comment and I think you greatly missed the point I was making. The OP presented a false dichotomy as if these things aren't woven in with each other in a large feedback loop.

You comment falsely assumes that I don't have familiarity or loss stemming from addiction.

You've had multiple people "misunderstand" your comment. I suggest reconsidering how you express whatever it is you are trying to say, as I and the others are responding to what you managed to actually communicate, whether that message was your intended one or no.

It has been put into consideration. But now that we've made it clear that there have been ~ misunderstandings ~, can you try to see where I'm coming from now? :)

No, I don't know what you intended to say there if not what I initially read it as. It seems a straightforward reading to me.

My point was to suggest to OP that their dichotomous reductionism goes way, way overboard to the point of unproductive callousness. People with addictions aren't just data points. Saying this as a data journalist who focuses on policing and jails.

That you used a forced analogy (even if experiential) and ethos in a policy discussion? Sure, I can see that. I can even see blaming drugs for mental health issues and addiction despite the causality really being screwy if you try to force it that way.

It's okay to be wrong, even when emotional, so long as we learn from it.

Friend, your lack of consideration that you might be wrong or that I'm wrong, absolutely-fullstop, is telling. I stand by what I said.

Telling is that you expect folks to introspect because you're failing to admit rhetorically twisting the head off the chicken of an argument.

We thus persist. Pleasant evenin' to you sir or madame.

I think poor people in the US are against legalization mostly due to the decades of “war on drugs” propaganda or other forms of conservatism (eg religion), not because they’ve seen people close to them being destroyed by drug use

These same sources also mistake causality, as many folks with mental health issues self medicate, rather than having drugs be the absolute source for mental health issues. Example: Cleon Skousen.

The primary reason to legalize isn’t to make it easier to do drugs, it’s to not use the justice and court system for dealing with addiction problems.

Our goal should be to legalize use and then take the money saved from police enforcement and funnel that into programs that get people off drugs. In the US an issue is that the latter part is part of the healthcare system, and we all know that has a lot of issues in serving people who fall into the under-employed category.

Several states have tried that. Some have already repealed the laws because they were a disaster.

Not my area of expertise per se, but the counterargument that I've seen is that the states (e.g. Oregon) that tried it never got the backstops in place to help soften and support the transition (i.e. rehab centers, support programs, social programs). Instead, it was just a hard switch that went expectedly bad.

There's at least a theory that people believe will work that hasn't been correctly implemented yet, but whether or not it's feasible to implement at all, I'm not holding my breath.

When this happens the reason 90% of the time is usually not because the program wasn’t working but the opposition to the program has made sure to either gut the funding or put in measures that makes those programs not work (only hiring 2 people to handle all the work or excessive operating requirements.

Cops will fight tooth and nail against social programs because it reduces their budget when problems are solved.

Look up these programs and you will see centrists claiming the progressive program was bad, but never indicate reasons as to why.

In Portland, decriminalization was poorly planned, new treatment options were implemented badly, and the alternative penalties for possession were not meaningfully enforced. It was a failure of execution.

I don’t think it tells us much about how well an ideally functioning decriminalization or legalization effort would work. It does update us in understanding that it’s difficult to accomplish this transition successfully.

Absolutely, Americans love saying “we’ll just send the cops after them.” Because then they don’t have to do any of the hard work of understanding or funding the programs. Americans are lazy when it comes to solving actual hard problems.

Works for Portugal since forever

We really don’t know that, they had terrible data reporting on drug use before the policy was implemented so we can’t even make a before/after comparison. We also can’t parse out the extent to which changes in drug use stats reflect changes in autopsies or in cultural attitudes and candor about drug use affecting self reports.

Those states half arsed it.

They did the decriminalisation step and then never bothered with the “redirecting savings from policing into services” step.

They also fucked it in other ways.

For an example of where it does work - see Portugal.

In numerous places those efforts have been purposefully sabotaged by police who aren't happy about the loss of court revenues and the eventual cutbacks on police funding for drug prohibition. With them literally refusing to enforce some laws like public intoxication or shooting up heroin in the middle of the street because their more profitable and super easy to get arrests for drug possession laws no longer existed.

Citation needed on claims of poor people opposing drug legalization. I can show you stats from Oregon showing that poor people overwhelmingly support, and still support, the bulk of our legalization efforts (I.e legal shrooms and legal weed)

> Most of those drugs had a component that actually pushed kids heavily towards socialization and forming peer groups. Now looking back to the results of that drug consumption I would say that most of the individuals engaging on them were able to regulate and continue to what it seems to be a very normal adult life.

Counterargument: a "very normal adult life" in our generations treats alcohol as basically mandatory for having a good time with a group. As someone who doesn't drink, I'm perfectly happy to go to parties and hang out and socialize, but as the night wears on it becomes less and less stimulating as the alcohol kicks in. People get less interesting on drugs, but they perceive themselves to be having more fun. It's a crutch.

Now, maybe having a social crutch like alcohol is better than having a drug which encourages disappearing from the physical social world entirely, but our generation's answer was hardly healthy.

A substance is a means to an end. What you described is just one of the many.

And I agree. I do not drink, not even in social settings, and I feel like I'm the odd one out for doing so, thus I typically avoid parties and gatherings as much as possible.

I do take something people would consider a drug though, but for different reasons you described. It is to manage pain, anxiety, and depression, difficulty walking, and urinary incontinence. What I take works for all of the problems that affects the quality of my life.

That said, new year is coming up, and I'm definitely not going to drink.

I don't think that's true any more, at least not in the UK. Not drinking alcohol is becoming normalised to a large extent - most restaurants and bars I go to now have non-alcoholic options, some of which are really delicious. I had a non-alcoholic "dry martini" in a bar the other day which had a really nice bite to it. I used to feel a bit cheated with non-alcoholic options because they were mostly like overly sweet cocktails or nasty-tasting beers, but the choices are really opening out now.

Old drugs are also at least sometimes social. Even heroin gives rise to cliques of users. It’s deeply unhealthy and self destructive but at least there is connection. Sometimes you get art out of it too. A whole era of great music has many bittersweet odes to smack.

I particularly worry about men. The greater cultural and possibly (more controversial) biological susceptibility to isolation coupled with this stuff means a generation of young men who are isolated, hopeless, poor, lonely, and sexless.

Then we have a culture that, depending on which side you listen to, either shames them as potential rapists from the patriarchy or simply “losers.” (IMHO the “woke” shaming is just code for loser, as I have heard said in private.) They are neither. They are victims of exploitation, of a nearly exact analog to the Matrix that is destroying their minds.

I speak mostly of social media and addiction optimized gaming, not all tech. The problem is the apps not the phone. Really anything that works very hard to “maximize engagement” should be considered guilty unless proven innocent. This phrase is code for addiction.

As we have seen the gurus that appeal to such men are the likes of Andrew Tate. As awful as he is Jordan Peterson is actually among the less toxic of the crew since he does occasionally say something good.

In the future we could have gurus for hordes of lonely poor men that make Tate look helpful and wise. This is how we either LARP the Handmaid’s Tale or — worse — ISIS or the Khmer Rouge.

I have two daughters and I fear for their safety in a country full of fascism radicalized angry emotionally stunted men who have been told they are losers and then handed pitchforks.

Our industry is the industry making the opium to which these youth are addicted and that is destroying them. We are destroying the minds of a generation every time any B2C app tries to optimize its time on app KPI.

Mothers and fathers of boys: raise your sons or Andrew Tate will.

If you read William Dalrymple’s book about the early Christian church in the Middle East, that is exactly what happened in terms of gurus for hordes of fanatic monks.

I’m sure that’s just one of endless historical examples.

Large numbers of desperate people are a danger to society. I harp on men because I think they are more vulnerable (for various reasons and the reasons don’t matter much) to isolation and radicalization, though as we recently saw with our young lady school shooter this is definitely not universal.

I also didn’t mean to dismiss the damage addictionware can do to young womens’ self esteem and mental health, and I have noticed a disturbing rise in “femcel” rhetoric that mirrors the incel cancer. The style of the rhetoric is a little different but it’s coming from similar places and has similar effects.

We need to stop calling it social media too. It stopped being social when algorithmic timelines were introduced and over time it’s evolving toward less and less connection and more shoveling of engagement bait slop.

Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute.

1) They can be socially isolated in ways that few children are. An unsupervised septuagenarian can go literal days without speaking to another live human being.

2) They’re more technologically competent than we give them credit for, certainly enough to spend days doomscrolling their politically aligned newsfeeds of choice. The generation who thought their CD-ROM drives were cupholders passed quite some time ago.

3) They have an outsized influence on politics. Not only do they vote more than any other demographic in the US, they are the most likely to turn up and harangue your city council or school board meeting.

Of course, nothing new under the sun, their parents’ generation was mainlining cable news and AM talk radio 20-30 years ago.

>Why are the moral panics always about the media diets of children? Let’s talk about old people for a minute.

This same reasoning is highly applicable to how various "so terrible, they're a threat to X!" are constantly vilified, yet the Normies (who cause most of the problems) get a free pass.

Rigged popularity contests are a terrible way to run a world, yet we insist on it.

because children are undergoing a critical phase in their development that has no analogy for older populations? I'm not saying isolation among the elderly is not concerning, nor widespread phone/tech addiction among adults. But I think there’s ample reason to have particular concern for the effects on children.

LOL at “mainlining cable news and AM talk radio”.

Why play kids and the elderly off against the other? How is there even a dichotomy here?

> I’ve seen kids not even 3-4 years old already hooked to smartphone screens. Even toddlers around 1 year old with an smartphone mount in their stroller.

Now imagine that they would not be engaging with silly YouTube videos, but with an AI trying to get them to interact with them in order to learn to speak, to learn about the world. Things which parents can't dedicate enough time to. Then also give the kids ideas for what to do with the parents, what to talk about, tease them about science and stuff they'd normally have no access to, because it is information mostly hidden in books or in an inaccessible format, like dedicated to students.

I do see a huge potential in this, call it cheaply a "nanny for the brain", to help develop it better and faster. There are certainly risks to it, but if it were well done, in a way in which we assume universities are "places well done", it could be better than just having the kids watching TV.

Please no.

While what you describe may be better than YouTube/TV, there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact.

Let’s not give parents another excuse to have devices babysit/raise their children.

EDIT: and if your post is being upvoted -- and it seems to be -- I hope it's by people that don't have children, and will later realize how bad of an idea this is once they do have children.

Sometimes there is no choice when both parents must work so better raise the child by AI rather than TV.

If you have a nanny/preschool/daycare that is letting your child be raised by TV, the solution isn’t instead have your child be raised by AI.

The solution is to replace the nanny/reschool/daycare with a better nanny/preschool/daycare.

> there is no replacement for development through human interaction and contact.

The issue was that he has seen these kids being entertained by smartphones. This kind of implies that they were not in daycare or any other position where they could interact with humans, unless the parents wanted to interact with them, which they obviously didn't (or couldn't, for whichever reason). That was the context.

See my response to your sibling post.

The parent post is throwing AI at the problem. The solution isn't to improve technology to make it better at parenting/babysitting our children.

The solution is to replace technology with humans.

> This kind of implies that they were not in daycare or any other position where they could interact with humans

I'm not sure where it is ok for children, particularly early developing children, to not be around other humans, or humans that can't or don't want to interact with the children. If that's the case, that's another problem altogether.

If people are having children just to have them raised by technology/AI, I hope they realize that before having children and reconsider.

I assume you don’t have kids because as the parent of a toddler this is a terrible idea. The last thing a toddler needs is AI hallucinations “teaching” them

I don't have kids, but I am not talking about contemporary AIs which love to hallucinate.

Until a new modem architecture comes along to supplement current LLMs, I'd recommend keeping this idea in the speculation bucket.

Sounds like “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” by Stephenson

Thanks. I started with Snow Crash and disliked the style and parts of the content so much that I ditched it and never bothered to read any other book from him. Maybe I should try that one then.

First off, kids that young learn best in context and with tactile feedback. Until AI have bodies, they will not fill that niche.

Secondly, there is a while cottage industry of young kid's videos to just show kid's the world and engage via a screen with it and explain it. A 3 and 4 year old knows so little, they don't want even know what questions to ask because they know nothing. The value of slop like Blippie or even Ryan's World is alerting kids to the fact that things exist in a digestible way. And they need to loop it. They need to be exposed to the information many, many times to truly get it. Early education is in no way shape or form a good candidate for AI. I'd argue that the repetitive videos we have now are about as ideal as we can get once we filter out the surreal nonsensical videos targeted at kids.

We could already have extremely high quality children's educational content via videos. But instead the ecosystem is dominated by garbage that can draw engagement rather than enrich.

Why would AI be any different? I'd expect AI content for babies to be garbage because the incentive structure is exactly the same as it is for noninteractive videos.

The problem is I thought kids would have been doing this 15 years ago already by using the internet to learn more and more.

This is not our culture. We don't have a culture that is really able to take advantage of the internet for this. Our culture plus the internet actually creates a type of learning disability for a huge % of the population.

A small % of people will use AI to be smarter than they would have otherwise. A much larger % of people will use AI to learn less than what they would have.

I’ve said this story before but I quit Facebook about 10 years ago, at a time when it was essentially the only social media game in town, so I was essentially quitting social media, and the quitting process felt exactly like when I had quit smoking the year before that.

Indeed. And I do feel that we need a sort of new terminology for technological "attachment/addiction" or whatever it is. Because people continue to nitpick on whether it is physiologically the same as physical dependence and that completely misses the point.

Yes, and a former executive confirmed that it's intentional: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498

> I wonder if the new drug of choice is actually technology

Technology certainly is the economic sector that we privilege against all criticism of the harm it does to young people, to voting adults, to information quality, to public discourse, and to democracy itself.

Well, we have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology, so regardless of its negative effects or its diminishing returns, we develop it. It's a strong piece of circumstantial evidence for technological determinism, not to mention many advancements are clear-cut cases of the prisoner's dilemma (arms race), such as computer security vs. hackers.

I’ve been looking at it more from an ecological angle.

“We have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology” — this implies it was a deliberate decision. Whereas in reality, there’s a selection effect where leaders who embrace technology the most aggressively simply get rewarded in money and power, and they go on to promote accelerationist views with that power.

With the logical conclusion that people are increasingly treated as resources to be harvested by technology.

I don’t know the answer, but I refuse to accept determinism (despite not believing in free will, separate conversation), and I think that framing this as an ecological competition between species — humans vs machines — is clarifying.

> “We have tied all of the smooth functioning of society to producing new technology” — this implies it was a deliberate decision. Whereas in reality, there’s a selection effect where leaders [...]

No, it doesn't imply a deliberate decision. I've never said it was deliberate. It's more of an emergent phenomenon.

> I don’t know the answer, but I refuse to accept determinism (despite not believing in free will, separate conversation), and I think that framing this as an ecological competition between species — humans vs machines — is clarifying.

True, but determinism shouldn't be thought of as inevitable. And that's not the case in the philosophical literature either. Technological determinism is more of a force like gravity that can be overcome, and can be measured (theoretically, some have tried) numerically. The large the force, the harder it is to overcome, but overcoming it is not impossible obviously. Feel free to email to discuss further.

I think it’s not technology as a thing people are hooked to - it’s taken over social life. My 13 year old and his buddies socialize online, period. In person stuff is mostly organized. That is helped by school policy that got rid of the idea of a neighborhood school.

Additionally, the social activities that coalesced around things like alcohol are out of reach of many teens. I live in a city that had a very active college bar scene. It’s dead and gone. Crackdowns on underage serving and cost drives it away. Happy hour special at a place that other day was $12 for 4 coors lights in a bucket. In 1998, I’d pay $15 for a dozen wings and all you can drink swill for 3 hours.

”My 13 year old and his buddies socialize online, period.”

Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.

It's a different beast, these days, though.

Back then, only "nerds" socialized online. Nowadays, everyone does it.

I'm of two minds about this.

On one hand, I'm really glad that kids aren't screwing up their formative years. Drug use during growing/development years can wreck someone's life.

The issue is that, if you are an addict (which is different from physical addiction. Many addicts never get physically addicted to anything), then you'll eventually have problems with drugs; even if they are "socially acceptable" ones, like pot or alcohol (pot being "socially acceptable" is kinda new, around here, but Things Have Changed).

It'll still destroy your life, but, at least, you'll hopefully have something like an education, and living skills, by then, which can help Recovery (and also hinder it).

It was maybe only nerds in 1994, but by 1998 everyone at school was asking their parents for the internet so they could talk on ICQ—not just the nerds!

ICQ was a way of texting friends so that you could go party. At least for me, and I'm a nerd. I remember even "normal" friends were using IRC as a way to hookup. Cell phones were not very common.

Looking at my non-nerd 17 year old, they meet maybe once a month, and it's to cook food together during the day. Nobody drinks. They just see it as a waste of money. Maybe not the most normal sample. They love biking and also go to circus school together (Montreal).

Love how you describe your kid as not a nerd and then mention he bikes and goes to circus school :)

Nah that's just normal quebecois stuff. Picture cirque du soliel or how much the french love bikes

That was still nerd behavior depending on the group you were in. A lot of folks knew AIM, but ICQ was different.

For sure, I remember that. I remember that even the most popular, non-techie kids got on ICQ, though it was probably more around 1999 by that point, but every kid that had a computer at home had an ICQ account (though how often they could actually go online and use it was another question, thanks to dialup lol)

Though, still, only the geeky kids like myself were spending numerous hours online and having a high % of socializing occuring online, even then. The non-computer-geek kids would come online for like, an hour or two. I had already been online for hours before them, and would still be for many hours afterward (it helped that we got ADSL in 1998, after so many years of 14.4/28.8 dialup)

My gut is that this will mostly break even at best.

Whatever "gains" you see in terms of less drug addiction, etc, you're going to see losses in terms of the negative effects of not being "in person."

I confess that it's probably to early to even strongly know what those negative effects are, but I don't think this picture is likely one of strong improvement.

I was addicted to, of all things, text MUDs, when I was younger. It's ditch weed compared to what you can get now.

My drug of choice was “Wyvern” by Steve Yegge, which was heavily influenced by MUDs despite being graphical: https://web.archive.org/web/20040102095422/http://www.caboch...

You could connect to it with just telnet, and while not realistically playable that way, it was great when just chatting.

Dark Castle here. DIKU based MUD. Ah the good stuff.

> if you are an addict [...] then you'll eventually have problems with drugs

Do I understand you correctly that you're saying that people addicted to smartphones in their youth will (more likely) become drug addicts in adulthood?

What makes you think that people don't just continue being addicted to phones as adults (instead of doing drugs)?

Nah, but addiction to smartphones might be an indication of future issues with other stuff (not just drugs). Long story, not really the kind most folks around here are interested in hearing.

I’m not sure which of you I agree with more, but I don’t think GP is crazy: self-control (i.e. delayed gratification) is a transferable skill.

> Nothing new under the sun. Me and my friends were like that 30 something years ago.

(1) When I was growing up, nobody had any online presence. I remember life without the internet.

(2) The fact that it is not new does not mean it has not changed in magnitude and addictiveness.

(3) The fact that it is not new does not mean that it is not a problem. It is a growing problem. Especially because societies these days do nothing about their problems except through more technology at them, which rarely solves the underlying issue.

Aside from BBSs from about the mid-80s, followed by some Usenet and related later, there was very little online presence until getting well into the mid-90s or so. Certainly my social friends who weren't part of the local BBS scene had no online presence until maybe the dot-coms really took off.

Mid-90s were 30 something years ago. Perhaps the US was a little slow to develop in this front compared to Europe.

Maybe, though that would surprise me a bit. My first personal webpage was probably around 1996 or 1997--and I assume that was fairly early for that sort of thing. As I said, I had been using BBSs for a while and also accessed usenet and FTP sites somewhat later. (I would have only had access from work to the Internet for quite a while.)

For most people, it probably wasn't until MySpace and the like and the popularization of blogging in maybe the early 2000s that an "online presence" was really a thing although people increasingly had access to email etc.

(My dates may be a bit off but not by a lot.)

AOL. In the late 90s, I was in the chat rooms, by the early 00s me and my friends would swap between AIM and text messaging depending when texts were free. Kids definitely had an online presence, but it wasn't like the mid-00s and after when social media rose up.

I wasn't in instant messaging until I was an analyst in the 2000s. Never had an AOL account outside of being IM I used for some subset of mostly journalists. So, yeah, didn't really communicate with social contacts with email/IM until the 2000s for the most part.

I guess it might be an age thing. My teens were the start of proto-social media. Forums and IMs were big. Neopets and livejournal was a core memory of my youth. These were social spaces even if they were be nothing like when Facebook rose up in the late 00s and changed everything

There were various sea changes over fairly short time horizons. When I went to grad school in the mid-80s, few people had their own PCs and mine wasn't a portable much less a laptop. At my job afterwards, we still used terminals and were ahead of the curve in that we made heavy use of internal-only email.

It wasn't the internet that was the problem exactly. 90s internet was still a haven for nerds because you had to choose to be there over somewhere else. You weren't carrying the net around.

2008ish was really probably the most massive change in this. About every cellphone turned into a web device at that point and social media started it's mega boom as a phone app.

Even when you were out in public everyone was on the net.

Maybe a couple years later. The iPhone came out in 2007 but it was probably around 2010 before it really exploded. I was doing email with an earlier smartphone before that but 2010 or so is when mobile web really exploded and everything associated with that.

And, yeah, the 90s weren't really a mobile era for most people overall. I got a laptop at work in the latter part of the decade because I sort of begged and pleaded but it was mostly unconnected. Even when I became an analyst in 1999, I had to buy my own laptop for travel as I was just given a PC. (And WiFi at conferences was still an adventure.)

Fair. But you didn’t have teams of MIT PhDs driving your engagement upward.

> I think it’s not technology as a thing people are hooked to - it’s taken over social life.

One cannot separate the tool from the use. Of course, you are right, though. Technology has done two things: it has eradicated communities by making communities less economically valuable, and it provides a superficial alternative.

But the end result is that people become effectively hooked on using the device. The device is nothing without what is happening on it, but it cannot be deconstructed and separated either into a social component and the technology itself because it is more than the sum of its parts.

See https://www.addictioncenter.com/behavioral-addictions/

I wonder if we're entering an era of social stagnation, caused by screens. Before screen-based entertainment was so ubiquitous, young people (teens and young adults) experienced a lot of boredom, which pushed them to do new things. Many of those things were stupid and bad (drugs etc.), but some of those kids decided they were ambitious and wanted their life to be above ordinary in terms of achievement and impact on the world. Today, there's less room for such thoughts to even emerge - and if they do, they have to compete for mindshare with addictive entertainment on a daily basis.

I like this idea, but we are nowhere near a point of diminishing returns. We are about to experience the wholesale obsolescence of the economic value of human labour, which means in practical terms, no stupid jobs just to have a place to live, intelligent robots cleaning your house etc

If anything, buckle up. Going surfing every day or crotchet may become a perfectly legitimate life aspiration.

> just to have a place to live, intelligent robots cleaning your house etc

Animals could say precisely the same thing about living in a zoo!

(1) Who determines the allocation of resources in your utopia? How do you handle an ever increasing population that depends on the biosphere which itself is the only source of raw materials and energy for the incredible amount of energy required for it?

(2) People need a purpose. Most people will find a life of really doing nothing quite boring. Like it or not, people want some control over their destiny, and not to be animals in a cage.

(3) If people really don't need each other, what will happen to the social fabric? If AI can really do everything for us, then what is to stop some people from killing all the rest and taking everything for themselves? We have only relative morals that function when they are necessary, and some people not even that.

Luigi and Uncle Ted both thought technology was evil, and preached about it to anyone who would hear but they were both censored and ignored, forcing them to violence to reclaim there tongues. They both knew that, as Euripides said many years before: 'This is slavery, not to speak one's thought.'

Watch people on their phones just endlessly watching, scrolling, clicking… little actually being done. It’s mostly a series of tiny high’s the apps, esp games and social media, are designed to generate. People also experience withdrawal-like symptoms when they go cold turkey on it.

Technological media is definitely like a drug in many cases. Not all or for all people but often. It also lets others influence your mind for selfish reasons. Between the two, it’s a good idea to both be selective and limit it.

It was not until I recently set up Screen Time in macOS that I realized how much I was being distracted from applying myself to the specific creative endeavor that I have set for myself. It works per-application and across devices, and it is a real benefit compared to the iptables rules I had set up before. I have web, news and other things on Downtime from midnight to noon daily, and throughout the Sabbath. It brings clarity to do the most important things first in the day.

Another aspect here I think is the generalized fear and anxiety present in young people. Having spoken to some family members in the 15-18 age bracket, the message they seem to be receiving is that they are without a future... they won't be buying homes, they won't be getting high paying jobs, and that the system is not going to work in their favor. I think people of this age are uniquely feeling mortal and vulnerable in a way teens typically have not, causing them to be more hesitant to risk losing their mind which they may need to protect themselves down the road. But they also are modern teenagers, not only low in willpower but also coddled by their smartphones, which is why technology addiction is the go to "safer" alternative to habitual drug use.

Also, you typically need to be unsupervised with friends to get into drugs, something teenagers no longer have access to compared to 10-15 years ago. If we look at the social decline due to the pandemic, what made experts think these kids would bounce back? They are forever changed, and will forever be less social than other generations because they missed out on formative experiences.

> uniquely feeling mortal and vulnerable in a way teens typically have not, causing them to be more hesitant to risk losing their mind which they may need to protect themselves down the road

its just as easy to reach the exact opposite conclusion when everything is so hopeless and nihilistic. you are extrapolating way too much here.

less unsupervised time, location tracking from parents, unregulated dopamine from chatgroups and algorithms in public social media, and the risk of fentany and other poisons in drugs, are much better contributors to extrapolate from

I imagine that, for the young people of the world, the Covid years really ripped away the illusion that the adults of the world are in competent control. To a degree that modern generations (from otherwise relatively stable, wealthy countries) have never experienced. While there are other major factors clearly contributing to the generational angst, I think this was the catalyst.

I wonder how the economics stack up, because intoxicants aren't free. If the researchers are saying there's X less drug use, then presumably that either implies (a) teenagers are now spending X more on other areas instead (and what are they?), or (b) teenagers now have X less money.

See also: anyone who lived through the decline and fall of the USSR.

Presumably you’re referring to disillusioning a generation, right? I wonder if the masses had smartphones in 1992 if they would have withdrew to the internet rather than vodka. Genuine question - yours is an interesting connection because the circumstances of disillusionment are so different.

Online services have displaced at least:

  - the TV
  - the radio
  - board games
  - card games
  - video games
  - theaters
  - phones and faxes
  - the mail

Perhaps the above where the equivalent of vodka to some of you, but I wouldn't look at someone with their smartphone and think "wow, they're getting wasted !"

It replaced those things but that list doesn’t include the major time sinks, besides TV: social media, porn, doomscrolling. We already made fun of TV zombies, and at the worst it absolutely can remind me of a drunk or unstable person.

I understand how much people are emotionally reactive to these part of the net, and the cultural hatred some can have for "unproductive" time (does it match what you call "time sinks"?)

I still don't think they stand on the same foot as vodka.

I find it easy to drink in moderation because I only do it socially. One or two drinks at a dinner party has never cost me a day of work. But I have spent a whole morning in bed scrolling Instagram Reels instead of going in to work.

Passive consumption of short-form videos lacks that social feedback mechanism that keeps my behavior in check. It’s easy to stay up way later than I meant to and be wrecked the next day.

Consuming by yourself in a dark room is the default consumption mode for Reels/Shorts/TikTok, whereas in my social circles drinking alone is very unusual.

Would you say the same for people looking at the clouds passing by the window ?

Should we classify these clouds as worse than alcohol because they were looked at alone in a room instead of doing some other work ?

To get more personal, I had a CD player as my alarm in the morning, and a few times skipped worked because I couldn't get myself to stop the playing album. I didn't blame the CD.

That's also how I realized that job was well paying but otherwise really shitty.

I probably wouldn’t stay up 3-4 hours past my intended bedtime staring into space or watching clouds or listening to music. It’s just not stimulating enough. I wouldn’t stay up that late reading either, since once I get tired enough I can no longer do it effectively.

There is definitely something different about TikTok, or video games, compared to your examples.

> He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretence, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.

(Wikipedia: HyperNormalisation#Etymology)

Agreed that Covid was disillusioning for young people, but uniquely so? The 2008 financial crisis, 9/11, and the GWoT would all like a word.

The only generation I can think of without a similar formative crisis (in the US at least) is Gen X. Does the death of Kurt Cobain count?

the financial crisis was just financial. 9/11 or war on terror was just behind a tv screen.

covid was actually something everyone felt personally - not just empathized with through media. I feel like I just started recovering mentally from the lockdowns - all my college years eaten up by them.

I mean, lock down absolutely was a disruption - but I know more than one or two young men that ended up in the desert after 9/11. Maybe we’ve also acclimated so much to the post-9/11 infrastructure of fear and surveillance that we assume this is how it always was?

i am just old enough to have experienced 9/11 when i was in elementary school. it was a similar change to society to how covid screwed everything

when i was a child, there was no security in airports. like literally NONE. you could walk in and buy a flight with physical cash. if you wanted an international flight, there was a metal detector like you might find in a night club

government ID and drivers licence did not have your photograph on it, and some state drivers licenses were printed on non-laminated card. there was also no functional internet surveillance (there were no good search algorithms or tools in the early internet, so the government couldnt search either).

but the real big change, which is kind of what everyone felt i think, is the whole world was celebrating the end of the cold war and so vehemently protested going into the middle east, and the government just did it anyway. the largest protests in the history of the west were against that war and it was all totally ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War

then we got the PATRIOT act, NSA/CIA spying on the population, heavily armed police. btw, in the 1990s you would NEVER see police with assault rifles and armoured trucks etc except for swat teams in major cities and the ATF. The idea of your local police department having a heap of military equipment was crazy. a great example of this is the LA riots in '92 - they had to call in the army and the national guard because the police simply werent equipped for it

and they would run these polls on tv, like gallup polls, falsely claiming that 20%+ of people publicly supported the war

even though it didnt affect anyone as much personally, it was the turning point where the gov just started brazenly ignoring people and introducing the heavy duty surveillance state, which was especially painfully felt in aus, canada, new zealand, the us, and the uk. and covid19 tyranny was only possible because of what bush did in response to 9/11 - it physically could not have happened in the 1990s as there were no government agencies that could have done it

I thought the AR-15s that the police carried in America were semi-auto. More like a sporting rifle than what the military uses.

AR-15s are more versatile than shotguns, though less powerful they are more accurate. If your going to carry a long gun around, it's probably the most logical option.

Basically anyone who isn't a prohibited person in America can field the same equipment. Though I think police have more access to restricted ammunition.

Police carrying AR-15s is a very different vibe from police with only holstered sidearms. Regardless of the trigger system they’re equipped with.

you are correct re: semi autos. most infantry would rarely use fully automatic fire with ar15 spec rifles too, as it is wasteful and inaccurate. exception being squad automatic weapons

echoing wat titanomachy said, there was a time where it was unthinkable to see police with anything more than a sidearm. a lot of police still had revolvers into the 90s as well.

Sounds like you were born around 93, but a lot of the things you're saying weren't the case in 2000. Airports had metal detectors and xrayed carry-ons well before 2000, and drivers licenses also had photos on them around that time. What you're describing is more 1990 than 2000.

> really ripped away the illusion that the adults of the world are in competent control

In the context of this the GFC was much worse, though. It was entirely avoidable and a direct outcome of extreme greed and extreme incompetence. With Covid/lockdowns all options sucked to one extent or another.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, distant buildings were bombed too, and endless Cold wars and Middle East wars etc were a given too. However, your average 12 year old doesn't deeply care about finance or politics or distant wars. Their day-to-day routine goes on. Those are adult problems.

With Covid, the difference is that it came home, for everyone. And not just the US, but globally. Every home was directly affected, for months or years. 9/11 or 2008 didn't lock down entire countries for weeks and months at a time, impose country wide curfews, close all schools, suppress all socialising, impose home schooling, adults/parents working from home or not-at-all, shuttering of global supply lines, increased mortality fears for all older relatives, and constant everyday panic headlines and monitoring for years. We're still working through the aftereffects. So yes, very unique, in its direct effect upon the youth of wealthy countries in modern society.

First-time home owners have increased in age[0], the middle class is shrinking[1], education costs have vastly outpaced inflation[2] as have medical costs[3].

Perhaps the generalized fear is not so much about "coddling", but concrete realities. I do not envy them.

[0] https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/american-housing-market-old... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a... [2] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/how-does-medical-i...

Also the insane political risks and social instability, climate change, heightened risks of war and econmomic calamity, housing cost increase.

All I want in life is a good union for software. Role finished this week, who needs me next week? Off I go.

How would a union help you move between roles? Or are you saying the opposite.

Most professional sports players are unionized and they move around all the time. :P

I hope we get a union with a draft and such.

This would rule. I would watch the FAANG draft.

Actually, anyone who want's to scratch this itch just youtube the Excel World Championships. It's way more entertaining than it has any business being.

In the sense of how certain trade unions function as a hiring hall. Like a centralized job assignment. We already have a version of it except it's a million splintered hiring/recruitment agencies that may or may not be good. Lot's of time wasted.

Probably the wrong place to be barking up this tree though.

The political instability, social instability, climate change, wars, and more will affect you whether or not you deny them.

Those are easier to cope with when you live in a supportive society. _Most_ humans naturally help each others in case of emergency. It’s easier when the framework is already in place.

People help each other in war? Catastophy? Sometimes they do, sometimes they definitely do not.

Yes they do [0].

[0] Poland's entire history.

Look up what people in Poland did to help Jewish Poles when the Nazis came in. Someone whose family was from a small town in Poland made a documentary about it maybe 10 years ago. Generations later people in the town were still covering up that their ancestors put the Jewish neighbors in a barn and set it on fire, and still strongly discouraging asking any questions. What happened to the property of the large Jewish population in Poland before the war?

People do help each other. Look what Denmark and Bulgaria did in the same situation.

Yes I am aware of the "szmalcowniki", those that extorted Jews for profit and it is unfortunate.

Are you aware of underground organizations like Żegota? Or Jan Karski who risked his life to document the Warsaw ghetto and providing munitions to the Jewish fighters in the uprising?

Or the thousands of families that helped aid Jews like the Ulma family killed with the family they were hiding, or nun Matylda Getter who rescued hundreds of Jewish children, or Żabiński who hid hundreds in a zoo. Or the 7000+ poles recognized by Yad Vashem, the highest of any nation. Poland was the only occupied country where aiding Jews was punishable by death.

I urge you to look into the following families and their roles in aiding jews in WWII: Ulma, Kowalski, Baranek, Zabinski, Kossak, Podgorski sisters, Wojciechowski, Baranek, Skoczylas, Jarosz, Przybylski, Wolski, Banasiewicz, Bartosiewicz and many others.

Also, I meant more in the general sense of the populace resisting occupation time and time again seeing as we still have a country, which doesn't happen without sacrificing for one another.

What town are you talking about btw?

>Look what Denmark and Bulgaria did in the same situation.

Yes they had much more time to evacuate their Jewish populations. We had the largest population and we were first to be invaded.

I'm not saying nobody in Poland did anything, but that isn't the standard. I think this is the story:

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/film-about-massacr...

>"Even if this terrible crime concerns only 1 percent of the Polish nation, it doesn't matter, because we want to know about that."

The problem is that for every 1 percent that actively does the nasty stuff, you have a lot more people watching and, at best, pretending that it doesn't concern them, and at worst, sympathizing with the violence.

Current Israel's gov is the reincarnation of Jewish people's former oppressors.

It's sickening how they're looking into singular events from the past to explain their current attempts at committing ongoing genocide attempts.

More of gen z are home owners than previous generations at that age[0], real wages are increasing for the lower and middle class for the first time since 1970[1]. More people are leaving the workforce than anytime in history, creating high paying trade job openings at an unprecedented rate[2]. Health care costs are growing slower now than any prior decade[3].

Every generation has challenges and benefits. Framing the narrative can happen in any direction and the variance in group is bigger than the variance between.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-...

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are...

[2] https://www.protectedincome.org/news/labor-day-peak-65-trade...

[3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

[0] needs to breakout what proportion of the homeowners received help from parents, either via free rent or cash.

[0] in the parent comment needs to note most of the increase comes from older people living and staying in their houses longer rather than dying, moving to facilities or in with family.

> More of gen z are home owners than previous generations at that age[0]

If you’re going to make a claim this bold and this counter to the prevailing narrative, you’re gonna need to cite a better source than an outbrain-riddled webpage that tells me to “watch our video to find the lede we buried”. I’m not saying this isn’t true, but extraordinary claims require good sourcing and explanation.

Here is the underlying dataset https://www.ipums.org/projects/ipums-cps/d030.V11.0

Redfin did the analysis quoted https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...

> The homeownership rate for 26-year-old Gen Zers is 30%, below 31% for millennials at 26, 32.5% of Gen Xers at 26, and 35.6% of boomers at 26.

Unless you're specifically 26 years old, I suppose? This analysis seems far from scientific and cherry picks data in strange ways.

The fall in genz ownership rates is also quite interesting: I guess they weren’t buying during the pandemic?

> If you’re going to make a claim this bold and this counter to the prevailing narrative

What do you see as the prevailing narrative? The one I see is homeownership itself, which suggests that homeownership has been seen as being hotly desirable. I strongly suspect we wouldn't have a homeownership narrative to speak of if ownership was unwanted. When something becomes unusually desirable like homeownership has, it is not unexpected to see an uptick in participation around it; in this case owning a home. Much of the urban age has been marked with the majority of the population being renters. Everyone wanting to own a home with such furor is historically unusual.

I expect homeownership has become so desirable as it has become seen as a way to build wealth. While, historically, housing only kept pace with inflation at best, real home values have risen by unfathomable amounts in the last decade or two. Which, again, attracts people willing to risk it all for a chance at some of that wealth opportunity. It would be unusual if said generational group had comparatively lower ownership rates given the "FOMO" aspect. People run away when prices are falling, not when they are rising.

Given the market we've watched, the extraordinary claim would be that Gen-Z has lower ownership rates compared to previous generations at the same age.

Well said. I remember making a spreadsheet in maybe 1995 laying out the math to compare the real costs and expected gains from buying vs. renting.

It mathed out about even. I decided to go with renting instead of buying, with the logic that the S&P didn’t need me to buy it a new roof every 15 years or to work in its garden every weekend.

It worked nicely too, growing the money that would otherwise have gone into mortgages and property tax, letting me take some of it out recently and buy a house with cash.

I don’t see much of this attitude in my younger friends now. But living cheap and saving does actually work.

A 20% down mortgage is a 5x levered bet. Plus you can roll capital gains into new real estate. The S&P 500 cannot offer these advantages.

With the proper mix of retirement accounts, options, and futures contracts it can. It can offer even more leverage if you want.

The bigger win is the government subsidies and tax breaks.

You need very little on hand cash to get a very low interest rate. Much lower than asset loans at equivalent levels of wealth.

There is little tax break for home ownership currently with the SALT cap + high standard deduction. You get some break if you have a large enough mortgage or high enough interest rate but it has been very nerfed.

I know SALT went away, but there's still 1031 exchanges, which mean that "capital gains" can be tax free, which is a big deal in an inflationary environment. So long as the government keeps printing money (which it will), there's a de-facto wealth tax that only real estate avoids.

A retirement account is a ship in a bottle. You can't put much into it. The only way to make it huge is to take huge risks inside and have them work out. Which isn't a plan.

And -- options? The most leverage I can think of reasonably getting would be LEAPS (calls) and rolling them. But, even with LEAPS, you have limited timing flexibility, and are forced to realize more gains/losses.

There's nothing on par with a house. They're almost $1M everywhere now. You can't get that much into a retirement account when you're young.

You can back door around $70k per year into a Roth currently I believe. I don’t know where you’re from, but few people would say that isn’t much.

And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option. Theta is only one of the Greeks. Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage.

With respect to “bets” and having them go your way: dude you’re talking about a $200k investment on a property worth $1MM. It seems like your whole view on property ownership is premised on the idea that property values always go up no matter what. That’s no more a fundamental law of nature than the stock market going up, and a bet on the property value for a specific home in a specific location is probably riskier than a broad market fund options play.

I’m also not sure why you’re talking about the full price of a house? A $1MM house with 20% down means the comparator is 200k - you can't get that kind of cash together when you're young any more than you can get it into a retirement account. But to the extent you can, you can back door that into a Roth in 3 years, and you have plenty of stock/options/futures setups that will give you leverage to $1MM notional of exposure. And capital gains on that position are actually tax free by the way, no shenanigans required with 1031s and residential conversion or having to wait until you’re dead to get the tax benefits.

The bottom line is that buying property is rarely the best investment decision quantitatively because you can get equivalent (and often better) returns in the market while maintaining liquidity, meaning that you can almost always pivot into a house at a future date for cheaper (on an adjusted basis). But people FEEL good doing it, so the mainstream view is that owning a house should be a goal. Common sense oftentimes isn’t; owning vs renting is one of those times.

> You can back door around $70k per year into a Roth currently I believe.

You can only backdoor $7k/year into a Roth IRA. That isn't much.

If you have access to a qualifying 401k plan, you can mega-backdoor $46,000 into a Roth 401k. Many 401k plans do not support this, however. In practice, a plan is unlikely to support it if the company doesn't give a 401k match (it's basically impossible for a plan to meet the "non-discrimination" requirement without matching).

> And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. [...] Theta is only one of the Greeks.

Because the effect of theta is least for LEAPS. They're the "most share-like" options.

> Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option.

I agree that the "natural leverage" is the reason for the appeal, but the 100x multiplier is priced in.

In practice, IIRC (it's been a while) I've found that, with long-dated calls near the money (ideally a little bit in the money, for lower risk), you end up with about 2x leverage. The "100% loss" downside sort of gets "balanced" (debatable) by "2x upside". In the past I've felt really smart doing this until it's blown up in my face. Given the multiplicative nature of gains/losses, I'm not sure it's a good deal at all.

> Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage.

Curious about this. I suspect that it's a sucker's game, but wouldn't mind learning more.

>> [Roth IRA stuff]

Debating the availability of a Roth backdoor is something that's orthogonal to the discussion. I agree that your $46k number is the correct number, so adjust the numbers in my prior post as appropriate (e.g., it'll take 5 years to get to $200k in a retirement account). I still assert my primary conclusion: buying property is generally not the best option on a purely financial basis.

>> [Options stuff]

I disagree with your view that LEAPS are the "most share-like" options. Short dated deep in the money calls are essentially a synthetic stock position, and they are the most share-like in that they will move nearly 1:1 with stock price whereas LEAPS do not move 1:1 with stock price fluctuations because of time attenuation. If leverage is what you want then there are probably better options than LEAPS (rolling 3 month to 6 month positions maybe) because you pay out the nose in terms of time value on LEAPS.

Interesting points about those calls: "Go shorter but deeper in the money, and roll more often". Would be a pain to do by hand, unless you enjoy it as a hobby. Makes me think about moving to Interactive Brokers so I can play with the API. Probably won't happen, but who knows; I might get bored one month.

A 5x levered bet with no prepayment penalty subsidized by future Americans, and it cannot be called and is non recourse in many states. And it provides shelter.

The claim isn’t that homeownership is undesirable to Gen Z, but that a lower percentage of Gen Z owns homes compared to previous generations regardless of the specific reason. I think in this case the most likely cause is the increase in prices is causing houses to be unaffordable to Gen Z, despite their desire to own houses.

There may be some temporal confusion here. Gen-Z rates of homeownership has stalled out over the past year or so. Prices are no longer rising like they once were, with fears over impending decline, so the desire is not what it once was. It may be fair to say that the narrative has shifted to "too expensive", but as they loaded up early when prices were rising at unprecedented rates there is a big head start at play. They don't have to buy any more homes for a while to maintain the lead.

Regarding home ownership: they only started with a higher rate. It's too early to say, but considering that growth has stagnated, they're on track to become the generation that will own the least homes.

> Health care costs are growing slower now than any prior decade[3].

I don’t see any data on that page supporting this claim. The current decade is growing much faster than the previous one, and they only show data up to 2023.

> Health spending increased by 7.5% from 2022 to 2023, faster than the 4.6% increase from 2021 to 2022. The growth in total health spending from 2022 to 2023 is well above the average annual growth rate of the 2010s (4.1%).

I should have said compared to gdp.

Society hasn’t setup future society to be better. It’s a grab and go everywhere you look and it’s tiring. This is coming from a millennial with a good tech job. I cannot imagine how younger generations feel.

This is the inevitable result of higher connectivity in society. More spoils flow to top performers due to the reduced friction. I don't see any way to undo this trend short of undoing the connectivity, i.e. forcibly rolling back technological progress. Kind of a non-starter.

First-time home buyers are getting squeezed by a combination of peaking market forces, but those forces are peaking and we're probably seeing the worst of it at this moment [1]. It will get better.

[1] https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-i-dont-inv...

Their arguments for "won't go up much" are reasonable but their arguments for "will actually fall enough to allow two generations to finally own homes" are pretty fucking nonsensical.

They're comparing to hosting dips in the world wars and while I assure you ww3 will have enough loss of life to make houses quite cheap a third time, you still won't want them because they'll be covered in radioactive contamination.

The issue isn't blind supply and demand, it's that we've made construction expensive through code and arbitrary supply chain constraints and we're planning to deport all the construction workers. Even if population grown naturally slows to zero we will simply stop building houses because it won't be profitable. That's what got us here in the first place.

> code

I quite like the parts of the code that prevent random electric shocks, and the parts that keep the roof from caving in, etc. (I assume you meant building codes)

The forthcoming mass deportation will definitely fuck shit up though. UK is having a similar issue due to Brexit. I guess Eastern Europeans are to the UK, as Mexicans/etc. are to the US?

I didn't want to get into a huge aside so I just left it there but imo the NEC et al are absolutely great. In a lot of ways current building standards actually make things easier and cheaper, they remove ambiguity and offer a set of best practices that are time tested to reduce labor and errors.

The issue is how local municipalities enforce it along with zoning to make building massively more bureaucratic. Reaching the right people is impossible, everyone has their own agenda and interpretation, and city councils across the country add arbitrary stipulations entirely to reduce construction so line goes up.

Boomers can't say in their four-bedroom homes forever.

> education costs have vastly outpaced inflation[2] as have medical costs[3].

This is basically a law of nature. Anything that's done by humans and can't be scaled will necessarily get more expensive in real terms over time. See: Baumol effect.

Your last point was my knee-jerk reaction, "where are they going to do drugs? There are fewer and fewer places available to spend time without paying a fee." I'd like to know if that's true or just a mistaken impression on my part.

> they won't be buying homes, they won't be getting high paying jobs, and that the system is not going to work in their favor

I dont have a clue what your upbringing looked like, but even up to around age of 25, I never ever expected nor was told to expect any of that. The success despite all that is much sweeter.

Maybe thats some US thing, being raised in eastern Europe you were born to shit, you were considered insignificant shit and that was about it. Thats what being occupied for 4 decades by russians causes to society, on top of other bad stuff they are so natural with.

Maybe stop telling kids how they are all special and great and all will be astronauts and let them figure it all out by themselves? Teenagers being frustrated that they wont be owning some posh expensive house, thats pretty fucked up upbringing and life goals to be polite, thats not success in life in any meaningful way.

I recommend checking biggest regrets of dying people, focus on careers and money hoarding are consistently at the top.

It didn't even cross my mind until the very late teens that it might be possible for me to own a flat one day, the sums involved sounded not much different than a "gazillion dollars", but that particular future outlook definitely had zero effect on my behavior.

> Teenagers being frustrated that they wont be owning some posh expensive house

Posh expensive house? Nowhere was that mentioned.

The post-WWII 20th century American social contract was: "You will have the ability to get married, live in a modest home of your own, own a car, raise 2-3 young children, and go on a modest annual vacation even if you work in a factory".

> The post-WWII 20th century American social contract was: "You will have the ability to get married, live in a modest home of your own, own a car, raise 2-3 young children, and go on a modest annual vacation even if you work in a factory"

Few under 50 actually want a suburban home in a no-name town with a single domestic holiday a year and a job requiring physical labor (and hard limits on clocking in and out) that feeds your family with industrial calories.

If you do, you can get that with practically zero training in a mid-tier hospitality job (or working as an e.g. bank teller) with an hour commute each way. Small-town suburban homes are cheap.

Neither of my parents _ever_ went on vacation until they were adults themselves. Both were middle class and white. 3 of my 4 grand parents worked in factories. 1 was a teacher.

My dad’s parents owned their own home. The _biggest_ one they owned was 1000 square feet, which they viewed as cavernous. The one my dad lived in as a small child had no indoor plumbing and the heat came from a single wood burning stove. I was alive when my dad first lived in a house with central air.

My mom’s parents never owned a home while she lived with them.

The numbers will back me up that this was a completely typical middle class American experience post ww2.

What seems to have changed is a) the class of housing stock available. b) trends around _where_ people live and c) the narrative about the past.

US home ownership rate has been in the 60% since WWII. What changed?

I have had the opposite observation. Millenials and older Gen Z have extremely pessimistic takes on the future. Our childhoods were some of the most materially comfortable in human history, and everything in comparison is downhill from there.

But high schoolers I know today seem more even keeled about things. They are graduating into a world where fast food jobs start at $17, no one needs to go to college if they don't want to, and they are accustomed to a world where everything is temporary and digital.

I think the strongest evidence of this is the sharp decline in military recruitment.

Millennials had high hopes and were disappointed; Gen Z didn't have high hopes.

Exactly. In 2014 I really thought we'd have flying cars, exploring space and world peace by 2024. Instead everything looks the same, regressed even in some areas and all-around alot more cynical

You might not need to go to college, but you're going into significant debt if you do, so now one has to decide which disadvantage they want to start their career with: no degree, or crippling debt.

A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr, not to mention other basic costs like groceries, rent, and buckle up if you have to go to the doctor. Pay has simply not kept up with the cost of living for most Americans.

Why would anyone be happy that everything is ephemeral? That implies a lack of stability, more anxiety about the future, less confidence that you can weather bad times.

Humans are tactile creatures, everything being digital leads to a counter-intuitive sense of isolation - more connected, but less personal. There are positives too, but as an older Millennial, it has been interesting to be along for the ride as the potential of the internet and social media went from a superpower, to kryptonite. Who knows where things will be in 5-10 years, but it's hard not to see how some of our greatest tools are being turned against us in the search for more profit.

Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic - a trait required to navigate the last 16 years. We were forced to watch as the last bit of life in the idea of a strong middle class was snuffed out, and had to enter the workforce right as the GFC hit. Our parents were the last generation where one could reasonably expect to live a life that truly lived up to the ideal of the American Dream - that one could get educated, get a job, buy a decent house and raise a family, without it being especially noteworthy to do so. For many Millennials, if not every generation following, it is essentially nothing more than a dream at this point. Corporate greed, and a government fully captured by it, has all but killed the middle class, and I fully expect that the advent of AI - rather than being a boon for the middle class - will drive a nail in its coffin. Those with the most to gain are already on top, and I've already heard way more people here talk about what they'll be able to do without needing to hire anyone, than I have about how the people left jobless will benefit. It is readily apparent that nobody with any power is going to do anything about it before a significant amount of suffering is felt - maybe not even then. All you have to do is listen to how people talk about it, as if everyone will magically figure out something else to do when every sector starts losing jobs simultaneously. Our society has a greater chance of eating itself alive first.

I consider myself lucky amongst most Millennials - I entered the workforce before the GFC, then joined the military shortly after it (not due to the GFC, but the timing worked out). I was able to get far enough along in my career in those first years though that I never had to struggle with finding a job like many did. I was able to get a house in my 30s thanks to the GI bill. Very few of those I grew up with are in the same boat, many are living much the same as they were 15 years ago - unable to save enough to buy a house, facing reduced job prospects in the future. What reason do they have to be anything _but_ pessimistic?

For me personally, I think we've simply lost the battle against greed, and there is a tipping point after which reigning it back in is impossible without burning it all down. That's something nobody should want, least of all the rich, but it's played out many times in history, and we keep falling into the same trap, just different ways. I think this time it probably was Citizens United where we lost our grip, that decision made it inevitable that corporate interests would be the driving force of government, not the needs of its people. Who can say for sure what will happen, but we're all along for the ride regardless.

> A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr

This is probably the worst example. In 2008 gas cost as much as it does now and fast food did only pay $8/hr. https://www.creditdonkey.com/gas-price-history.html

> Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic

No, your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Complaining about anxiety is one of the hallmarks of a millennial.

> In 2008 gas cost as much as it does now and fast food did only pay $8/h

Did you deliberately pick the time where the cost of gas skyrocketed before eventually coming back down to more normal levels? Gas where I lived at the time went from like $2/gal to $4/gal for months, then came back down to ~$2.75 but never fully returned to where it was. You're cherry picking your facts.

> your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Complaining about anxiety is one of the hallmarks of a millennial.

Where was I complaining about anxiety? I do think many people are anxious, and have reason to be - but if I'm complaining about anything, it's greed. Dismissing the extensive evidence of its pervasiveness in our society today, and the negative outcomes it is producing, is the mindset of someone that doesn't care about anyone or anything that doesn't affect them personally.

Inflation adjusted gas prices have been on a slight downward trend for a long long time: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjust...

With the increase in fuel economy, the cost of gas as an actual pain point is close to the lowest level it has ever been for the vast majority of the US. The only real exception to this is places like California where additional costs are added for tax revenue or additional emissions controls.

> I do think many people are anxious, and have reason to be

Previous generations had just as many reasons to be anxious, they just didn’t sit around crying about it non-stop in victimhood perpetuity.

As a person in that age bracket, I don't feel like my peers and I are lacking in opportunities to participate in drug & alcohol use.

As to why I choose to abstain, I honestly am just not interested in drinking or doing drugs. I don't see any benefit to it socially, since I have more fun with my friends doing things while they are sober, and I don't want to be one of those adults that can't socialize without it. Also, the consequences for getting caught are high.

I'm very pleased to see this sentiment, as a father of a 14 year old boy. 4 years ago I decided to quit alcohol altogether (from a moderate by Australian standards consumption), and I hope to be a positive influence on him through his formative years through open and honest conversations about the topic.

(He has no desire to start drinking etc early or at all at this point.)

Long term health impacts are high, as someone in my 50s I'm certainly doing better for my choice. And yes, not making stupid decisions under influence also cannot be underestimated.

This is what I’m thinking. All of the kids I know from 16-22 are the most level headed group of young adults I’ve known. It is hilarious to me that this group of brilliant technologists leans so heavily towards seeing the absolute worst in every data point.

Could it be that, kids are doing less drugs because they’re more informed, less bored, and less reckless than previous generations?

We all aspire that our kids will do better than we have. We did our best to instill a sense of confidence and worth in them.

What if it is finally starting to just, f’ing work?

> This is what I’m thinking. All of the kids I know from 16-22 are the most level headed group of young adults I’ve known.

Taking this on a bit of a tangent, but as an elder millennial, I recall having been told (by elder relatives in their mid-30s at the time) all about how one day I'd too be an "old fogey" looking down on "teens being teens" and how such progression is just the way of things. Hell, I still hear people preaching such "wisdom" today to their youngers.

Yet here I am, just past the age I'm supposedly meant to start ragging on "kids today", and all I can remark is that this same 16-22 set you speak of are remarkably respectful, polite, and considerate, perhaps more so than my own cohort at that age. I almost worry they're not rebellious enough for their own good.

My son is 15 and he’s a lot more level headed, compassionate, and mature than I was at that age. Even his worst friends are just like mischievous vs the real menace to society type teens were in my generation. As a parent, I want to take the credit for the man my son is becoming but I know I’m just a part of the equation. …a BIG part but still just a part :)

My experience is similar. The young people I know don’t seem to struggle any more or less with social media addiction than my peers. But there’s selection bias: I only get to meet young people who are very engaged in their careers or in their (non-online) interests.

Teen suicide rates have almost doubled since the iPhone came out, so I think there’s something real going on here even if it’s not visible to us.

> you typically need to be unsupervised with friends to get into drugs, something teenagers no longer have access to compared to 10-15 years ago.

They don't? I'm pretty sure I saw unsupervised teens hanging out at a mall even just a few days ago.

Gen X’s will probably remember being unsupervised from about the age they learned to ride a bike. I think we were the last “get home before dark” generation.

Millennials were the same for the ones born in the late 80s and early 90s.

Not to sound snarky, but please consider interpreting comments like these as making a statement about rate rather than an absolute binary.

Right back at you. I was also commenting on rate rather than saying that I saw one or 2 in the last 10-15 years.

Not all locations are the same though, so maybe there has been a noticeable decrease where you're at. Personally, I think I've felt an increase if anything.

These changes aren't always easy to spot. I live in a city that acquired a significant Ukrainian population over the last two years. Whenever I see a group of kids that biked to an arbitrary location and play, they turn out to be young Ukrainians. They do the exact thing local kids would do 20 years ago.

I suggest you read up on or watch a documentary on the 60s. We are fucking pampered today.

You’d think doomerism would lead to MORE drug use.

Bad times create strong people.

To clarify, I really think that is what's happening. People feel that their future is not a guaranteed success and make safer choices to be clear minded and focused to achieve success. Probably just my bias is talking...

Today on HN, Jonathan Haidt afficionados lament the decline of use of addictive, life ruining, hard drugs. Something about "formative experiences." I think it's a good thing kids don't do hard drugs today, information addiction is a thing may be but going back to hard drugs isn't a good thing.

> the message they seem to be receiving is that they are without a future...

At least when I was that age, it was usually the low income people who's greatest achievement in life would be avoiding prison, who usually turned towards smoking, alcohol, drugs and sex. See "Common People" and similar 80s/90s Britpop songs.

What changed?

I grew up in a lower middle class family, and for me the feeling that I could end up like that - as many people I went to school with did - was what pushed me to achieve. My parents could only just afford their bills, so I didn't get any handouts from them. Of course I don't have a Lambo, so maybe I'm considered a failure by Gen Z? Has the boundary of what is considered "successful" shifted?

> Also, you typically need to be unsupervised with friends

There's a bigger cultural shift going on where people just don't like hanging out with each other anymore.

I don't think it's be cause if anxiety, it usually increases drug use not decreases.

It's much more about people ha ing less friends and socializing less

Good point, most people I know who refuse to do drugs (psychedelics) is due to fear

This isn't a new phenomenon though.

Gen-X felt the same way. The entire youth culture at the time was based around the vibe that the culture sucked and there wasn't a future worth having for younger people. Apathy was the youth cultural vibe of the day.

Then again with older millenials it happened with the great financial crisis. There was a widespread feeling of hopelessness about the future. Outsourcing and trade liberalization (the AI-like job crusher of that period) left the future job market uncertain.

I think what's new now is social media and persistent phones. If you're feeling anxiety about the future you don't escape into wild parties, you escape into your phone and videogames.

A question for older folks: what did drugs do for us? Why did we do them?

For me, drugs were:

- socialization. I met a lot of friends through alcohol & drugs and they became the social glue for my circle. Alcohol & drugs became a large part of my identity.

- a way to cope with boredom. Every day is a party when you're high.

- identity. In my generation, drugs were mostly cool and associated with iconoclasts, artists, etc.

Young people's culture changed. I don't think kids see alcohol, drugs and being out of control as cool anymore. I don't know specifically what changed this. Better social messaging, mass prescribing of ADHD meds, more competitive job markets.. Social media and multiplayer gaming have both ramped up competitive drives for what used to be more relaxing activities. Maybe the current optiate and meth epidemics are more effective as a warning than, say, the crack epidemic was for us?

Kids have tech to glue them together(poorly in many cases, but it does fill the niche). Kids have internet subcultures to define their cultures now. Alternative lifestyles are much more accessible and take much less risk to participate in vs my childhood in the 80s. You don't need drugs to meet people or forge common identities.

Kids are never bored anymore. I suspect there has never been a better time to be a kid in a boring small town. If you have bandwidth, you have culture. You have better shipping, home delivery, cheap imports, etc. Affluence seems more common than it used to be, even in our highly divided economy.

Gen Z here and people are definitely still doing drugs and drinking, but it does seem massively less.

Just a personal anecdote, but there’s still a lot of house parties and stuff going on, and most people will have a couple drinks, some will have none, etc. But you are absolutely expected to handle yourself appropriately, getting too drunk or taking drugs you couldn’t handle isn’t tolerated and you’ll find yourself uninvited to future events. It is significantly more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it is to get too drunk and act inappropriately.

> It is significantly more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it is to get too drunk and act inappropriately

From what I’ve seen, this is partly a function of embedded social media. A drunk night at a friend’s isn’t just a bad decision, it reflects poorly on everyone in the room, including the host, in a semi-permanent and semi-public way.

Handling your stuff isn't all that new. Unless you're hanging with very close friends you always needed to not be a problem or you wouldn't get invited back.

I'm curious what GenZ+ thinks about the movie "The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down" which is a tongue-in-cheek, funny look at mid 00's partying culture in LA. That's not really my generation, but is a bit of a window into what I think was the last generation to really embrace intoxication.

As a millennial this is just great.

The more i read about GenZ’rs and their attitude to work and life the more i like this generation.

Yes, people should be expected to handle themselves appropriately. Getting black-out wasted with alcohol is not cool. It’s just unhealthy. Way to go!

  getting too drunk or taking drugs you couldn’t handle isn’t tolerated
  and you’ll find yourself uninvited to future events. It is significantly
  more socially acceptable to drink no alcohol and take no drugs, than it
  is to get too drunk and act inappropriately.

That doesn't sound all that different than previous generations. SXE's been a thing since the 80s. Not everyone is Bret Easton Ellis. I don't think that attitudes have changed all that much, but circumstances have. Inflation and wage stagnation mean less discretionary spending. Fentanyl analogues mean street drugs are significantly more lethal than in generations past. Legalized marijuana means there's less mystery and motivation to experiment further.

I've interacted with a number of Gen Zers in their 20s and Millenials in their early 30s, some in passing and some on a more regular basis. In my experience that cohort spans the gamut. Some are teetotalers, sure. Most use drugs (cocaine, ketamine, assorted off-label prescription stuff, marijuana, etc.) at least occasionally, some daily. It really doesn't seem all that different from when I was their age. Excluding peer pressure, most of the societal ills that drove my peers to experiment with drugs still apply. Conversely I've seen a lot of my peers start to dial back drug and alcohol use as they get older.

It certainly was cool and expected to get “too drunk” when I was in high school and college. It was really not cool to have zero drinks.

It reminds me of Mitki[1]. Their way to go to the party is to bring a bottle of vodka and drink it in one go before knocking at the door. Such a guy would seems ok and would be welcomed by the host, but in a 10 minutes he would become really drunk, while everyone around him is still 100% sober.

Completely non-gen-z way to behave, I suppose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitki

Yeah but at some point the life of the party became boring because it was all day every day. So we just hung out and smoked weed and played SNES, PSX on a daily basis and went to clubs on weekends and cafés from wed/thur onwards.

I met so many people only through smoking weed. And because weed is such a laid back drug, we were all laid back and friendly with each other.

What I learned to hate over the years was that daily routine of finding something to smoke. We had our dealers we phoned up or sometimes we would deal ourselves to finance our consumption.

Dealing drugs was another level though. Hostilities arose. Some people claimed turf and threatened others with violence, those were "miraculously" found by the police and landed in jail. Also dealers that scammed others. The scene had a way to police themselves. Those were the good years.

Later the quality became worse and the quantity as well. It was no longer... how should I put it,... fun and games but people discovered it as a source of making profit. Even friends or people you considered friends would try to scam you and you weren't any different. That time began approximately when the Afghanistan wars began and the CIA was cut off from the cannabis sources.

It was like this, we would smoke weed in the summer and black afghan in winter. The black afghan fell off. What remained was green hash from the turks and weed, which was stretched with hairspray and silica sand.

I quit doing ganja, also because I hated being stoned all day every day and having to do the daily finding weed routine. I was so tired of it, also "what am I doing with my life".

I lost most "friends", I had to, to not be exposed to this crap on a daily basis. I wanted to get somewhere in life not just consume weed all day and be a loser who got nothing done. Better late than never.

I very rarely do resin nowadays, not by smoking but orally, and it's like once a year or every 2 years. Cannabis is definitely good for your health, if not overdone.

The improved treatment, and acceptance, of ADHD is certainly one key element here. I hope we continue to support kids if they show symptoms of any psychological disorder.

Here's a 2018 study following kids into adulthood and questioning them on their substance abuse: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985671/

My brother is one of those really bad cases, while I got my diagnosis just recently; never had more than a slight drinking problem which has almost disappeared since the I started taking medication.

We can take a good thing too far (and probably are at that point). ADHD is being overdiagnosed and medication is being overprescribed, especially in young men.

Over-diagnosis would mean we'd see a lot of kids and adults being diagnosed with ADHD despite being normal/typical. Granted ADHD shows in a spectrum of symptoms but I can't find any study that systematically re-tested patients to find over-diagnosis.

There might be clinicians who diagnose ADHD much more freely than others and whose verdict might not withstand the critique of a more experienced clinicians, but that can happen with any other disease, especially when it's still being studied and not every doctor has learned about it during his medical education. Just look at the speciality of psychiatrists near you, you might for 10 times more for depression than for ADHD. Despite both having the same prevalence and depression often being a comorbidity of ADHD.

Over-prescribed medication, well it is a problem because of the myth that Ritalin would help studying but at least here in Austria it there's enough hurdles to get a prescription. And the meds alone won't fix ADHD.

What we know from studies are under-diagnosis in women and the severe effects an undiagnosed ADHD can mean for a person. What we also know from studies is the under-diagnosis of girls, only in adulthood the gender-ratio of late diagnosis is almost even. Please don't talk ADHD down, it's too severe and we have a hard enough life already without being told by others that suddenly everyone has ADHD...

I don't think we've hit overdiagnosed, I think we've massively underestimated how many sufferers there are. But assuming you're right, so what?

There's an argument to be made that getting the diagnosis right for kids is imperative because the medication is essentially impressed upon them but for adults, who cares? They're not cheap, the side effects are kinda awful, it's annoying to get the dosing right so you don't build up a tolerance, you have to go to a doctor every time you need your rx renewed. If someone without adhd is going through all that because stimulants help then power to 'em I guess. There's not really a downside, stimulants at the doses prescribed for adhd aren't life ruining.

I am about to turn 40 very soon. Do I fall in that generation? Because all those things did hold true and was there when I was growing up/adulting. But I never felt any need of it and many didn’t. But many did. Many still do. Because those small pockets are still around where drug is still cool and even back then those were small pockets!

One of the reasons is - it has become too difficult and costly (at least where I live). Even for weed, which was pretty much kosher unless you were caught by the police keeping KGs on your person or home, it has become too difficult to procure and not get caught. That could be a reason.

In many places where weed is available like cigarettes - maybe it’s not the forbidden fruit anymore. That danger or aura of different is gone with it.

Teens aren't doing drugs, smoking, drinking, or having sex. And the suicide rate has never been higher.

I'm not contradicting you, but it appears that the suicide rate hasn't changed since 2018. See this interactive chart and switch the Injury Type to Suicide:

https://wisqars.cdc.gov/fatal-injury-trends/

That chart shows the rate has hovered around 4000 per month for years. That's 4000 too many, but at least it's not increasing.

But we are also seeing shrinking amounts of children. So a steady suicide amount in raw terms is an increasing rate.

That is the raw number, not the rate.

Since the spread of social media, suicide rates are up for children, significantly: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db471.pdf

> The suicide rate for people aged 15–19 did not change significantly from 2001 through 2009, then increased 57% from 2009 through 2017

> For people aged 10–14, the suicide rate tripled from 2007 through 2018

I don't follow.

If the rate has gone and population as well, how come the total number is about the same?

It decreased for older folks, and there are fewer kids now.

Oh, I see it now. Thanks!

How are you disagreeing? The comment you responded to said it hasn’t changed since 2018.

The increase from 2009 could also be correlated with the rise of smartphones

Or a major financial crisis that left behind many people?

> I'm not contradicting you, but it appears that the suicide rate hasn't changed since 2018.

Peak social media?

I've had is persisting thought that, we as a society have been delaying adulthood, thus extending childhood, with each decade for a while. And we've now pushed it so far that the current cohort of teens simply are effectively young children on a social/emotion perspective making them unprepared to handle the stresses their age is exposing them to.

There must be a good balance between the grow-up-quick-or-die-horribly of the pre-technology world and the my-cats-are-my-kids life of the post-danger world

The age of majority should be the end of a journey, not a bureaucratic milestone.

I would agree that modern childhood is protracted to what is perhaps a damaging extent, but would also argue that the stresses and anxieties of everyday life are more constant and overbearing than the human psyche is equipped to handle. It’s mot healthy for well-adjusted adults either. We’re built for dangers and stresses that come in relatively short bursts, not those that are without end.

In 1924 you would expect to be a child in a family of 5 with two dying before they hit their majority.

We are simply blind to how much even the relatively recent past sucked.

> have been delaying adulthood

If you have kids, do you see them as less mature than how you perceived yourself at their age ?

TBH I feel the opposite: current kids have a lot more to deal with, and are expected to be much much more down to earth than a few decades ago. The most basic things: a single post on an SNS can stick with them for the rest of their life, yet we moved half of our social life online.

My observation of teens online, as someone who was once an online teenager, is that they are noticeably less mature than my cohort. Perhaps because it's no longer just the nerds who are online all day—if everyone in my high school was chronically online, there's a high possibility that Bush-era teens would've been just as openly immature and stupid as today's youth. Whatever happened to pretending to be an apathetic 24-year-old?

Lol, when I was 12-14 that is exactly what I tried to pull off... A early 20 something so people wouldn't kick me from the server/team lol

It used to be that the stricter the adults only verification for an IRC channel, the more certain the head admin was 16.

By 17 I was on my own and joining the military. My daughter is 25 and just got her first real job out of college. By her age I had a 6 year old child (her). I'm not saying I took the right path (I didn't) but the level of maturity I had at her age was vastly different. Her peers are all similar, and when I was young many of mine were similar to me. I do thing generationally / culturally there's a difference.

> I'm not saying I took the right path (I didn't)

Not picking on your personal experience, but if you see it as a mistake, wouldn't it be a sign you weren't mature enough to take the right decision ?

Now, having a kid definitely accelerate that maturing process. But without a solid parental environment (which was common at some point, especially with the grand parents being around) it's a recipe for disaster, I wouldn't see it as an appropriate path for most in this day and age.

I see your point on much of a change it makes to have fewer young adults already being parents. That's definitely impacting.

> current kids have a lot more to deal with, and are expected to be much much more down to earth than a few decades ago

For sure not. They are pushed to play in a stage and fake drama. Decades ago, many 13 years old kids worked for 10-16 hours a day.

Erich Fromm said this in his "Fear of Freedom" We live in a time that we are able to customize our lives to our delights. That makes us lose perspective and purpose. So we look to movements to fill the void.

That was back in the 50's/60's I think he was spot on why this generation can't see past the last scroll or click. They don't have perspective because they have not been bred to have it. It's very sad.

> They don't have perspective because they have not been bred to have it. It's very sad.

Did 'bred' once include upbringing? I thought it began and ended with mate selection, pairing, and procreation.

> Teens aren't ... having sex.

Nor are people in their 20s (that is, both groups are having much less sex). That is the most worrying thing to me. People are not even engaging in the most fundamental, unavoidable, pleasurable human drive.

They seem very much like traumatized people, on a massive scale, just trying to survive.

I think we all realize deep down there are too many humans on this planet.

We can comfortably host 100B or more on this beautiful planet. Just gotta be strategic about it.

It’s possible to have infinite sex without influencing the population quantity. Well, you could decrease it.

I fundamentally disagree with this take, it's at odds with my belief in growth and dynamism.

Quorum-sensing ain't just for bacteria.

When you don't get matches, it's pretty easy to avoid sex.

... and if everyone is always on screens it's hard to avoid the dating apps where they're not getting matches.

Women get tons of matches though.

That doesn't explain why people would have less sex now than in the past.

I'm starting to think many people just aren't into sex that much, in the same way many people aren't into food.

Many people just get hungry and inhale the most convenient thing they can to scratch the hunger itch. McDonald's is always busy. People would be there on Christmas day if it was open. These people aren't into food as pleasure, they just don't want to be hungry. Of course with meal replacements bottles etc McDonald's isn't even the bottom of that particular barrel.

It's the same with sex. I've met people who define themselves by their sexuality. They consider it a primary pursuit in life. But for others it's just scratching an itch. I've realised I'm basically that way. It doesn't mean that much to me, it's just something my body makes me do. Porn is now everywhere and more easily accessible than drugs. People are now able to reach for McDonald's or the meal replacement, but for sex.

You should do what you feel, of course, and there is no right or wrong. I still think that, generally, we have evolved to have a strong sex drive and to very much desire and enjoy it.

My point is it's not just sex drive. Do people who enjoy fine cuisine get more hungry than everyone else? I very much doubt it. There are just other things to do now and sex (and food) can be a very small part of a rich and fulfilling life.

But I'm not disputing that this is (or will be) probably a problem. Not because of sex specifically, but because of people having no meaning in their lives. In less than a decade we might be facing a bunch of enslaved virgins approaching 30 realising they have nothing in life. No assets, no relationships, no family, and no prospects. Tik Tok isn't going to work out for 99% of them. It's going to be interesting.

> Do people who enjoy fine cuisine

IMHO that would be the analogy for 'great sex' rather than for 'sex'; that is, it would be for people who are motivated to have especially 'good' sexual experiences.

I think the analogy for sex generally is basic hunger - food rather than starvation. Our sex drive, generally speaking, is that fundamental.

On the flip side, imagine the tremendous spiritual development possible to be unlocked by a generation undistracted by carnal desire.

But instead are distracted by modern algorithms built for a slow drip of dopamine!

Our sex drive is an essential, wonderful part of our spirit, IMHO.

But more to your point, they are not undistracted, meditating peacefully. They are traumatized into submission. That's not a good state for spiritual development.

> They seem very much like traumatized people, on a massive scale, just trying to survive.

Every few years I like to leave the world for a bit and do something else to reset a bit. For example I just finished walking 779km on the Camino in Spain.

What you said is essentially true for the vast majority of people in our modern world. What we have built is terrible for us, and we’re all suffering and very sick.

There is also a corresponding decline in alcohol consumption.

One angle that hasn't been researched enough is the link to anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication. These has been a significant rise in the prescription of both to young adults: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/anxiety-prescripti...

And on these medications there are often severe interactions with alcohol and drugs which would be enough to frighten off most people. Some e.g. bupropion even reduce addictive tendencies entirely.

The other thing I haven't seen in this thread yet is that kids today are really focused on is: lifestyle -- they want to work hard at school so they can get great jobs to make a lot of money so they can afford to own a home and live healthy lives. With the cost of living, and everything else, they're going to have to make a lot of money to life the kind of life that they're used to as kids.

My kids are not on social media. They eat like pro athletes. They ask me why I'm eating things with higher amounts of sugar or ultra-processed foods. They do an hour of gym class at school every weekday and then they want to do sports every night of the week and on the weekend. They do their homework and get straight As. They are concerned about bullying and suicide -- they talk to each other, even siblings, in a healthy and caring way.

My oldest couldn't understand why people drink alcohol if it's bad for you. I explained that some people like the way it makes them feel, "So what? It's bad for you. Why would anyone do that to their body?" They couldn't understand why I bought a gas guzzling luxury sports car instead of an electric car given the state of the environment (I've wanted one my whole life and I could finally afford one, yes it's selfish and they are more ethical than I am).

There are definitely a bunch of things going on with Gen Z and Alpha that have made (some of) them this way. But one of the results is that they're not interested in a lot of unhealthy things simply because they know they're unhealthy. They can't understand why we do things that we know are bad for us, the environment, etc. and they're probably right.

They're not perfect, but I do have faith in the next generation and we're going to see some amazing leaders come out of this group.

It's great but the way you write I can't stop comparing them to what used to be brainwashed communist kids.

People aren't robots, or we would be living in a sad world

What did you do to make them behave like that ? That's uncommon, at least in occidental society. Closer to what the CCP does.

As the article says, most kids aren't drinking or doing drugs these days. When I talk to my friends, that's true for their kids too. They're very different from how their parents were and still are to some degree. I don't know why my bad habits didn't rub off on them, and like I said, they criticize me for my bad habits, so I can assure you that if someone brainwashed them, it wasn't me.

Sure but there is a wide gap between teens doing less drugs but still being teen and kids behaving like tibetans monks.

> My kids are not on social media.

Your kids are big outliers then. I wouldn't extrapolate to the general young population.

That's true, most are on social media. But as the article says, most kids are the same as mine in several ways. When I talk to my friends, they say the same thing about their kids (anecdotal of course). We don't know why they're so different from us when we don't hide our poor habits from them.

> kids today are really focused on is: lifestyle -- they want to work hard at school so they can get great jobs to make a lot of money so they can afford to own a home and live healthy lives

To expand on this point: American kids today are facing a world that’s drawn up the ladder behind them economically, and their only hope of escaping the pit of despair is to work themselves to the bone for the dregs of pay available to them. Unhealthy habits cost precious wage-earning time. Their intoxicant of choice is prescription medications because they’re covered by insurance, and that’s largely kept things from boiling over into harming the ascended old people — until recently, anyways.

> I do have faith in the next generation and we’re going to see some amazing leaders come out of this group.

Not if today’s leaders have anything to say about it. What leadership arises is, to date, captured by the pre-existing social structures and has had no power to keep the ever-older graying generations from holding the reins away from them. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when public health insurance is taken away, as withdrawing the last of the price-accessible drugs will certainly put their skills to the test.

I remain hopeful for the outcome, but the circumstances are already set in the recent past. What a time to be a social scientist, though!

I'll take a guess: you are raising kids in a small-to-medium, moderately-or-more affluent community -- or a similar enclave, or selective/private school, in a larger city.

I would further postulate that your parenthood community is more affluent than your childhood community.

My point being: the lifestyle you describe (and its offset from the median) has "always" (post-war at least) been common in "nice" places. But nice places are unusual.

I think information and culture/fashion both have a lot to do with it.

Pre-social media, you could get drunk and embarrass yourself, and forget about it by the next day. Now everything is recorded. Information about alcoholism is easier to come by, and there are influencers like worldoftshirts who show people what life as an alcoholic is like. I don't see how anyone could want a drink after watching content like that. Smoking weed in front of a camera doesn't seem as edgy as it used to now that it's legal. Having red eyes in a photo is annoying. Vaping has always had a cringe factor.

All of this tech is giving us the ability to look in the mirror and see what we're doing to ourselves.

oh my god, never thought there would be a day I saw WorldofTshirts mentioned on HN

> Monitoring the Future Study, which annually surveys eighth, 10th and 12th grade students across the United States.

I wonder if there is correlation to the opioid crisis, where the "downsides" (if you want to call it that) of drug abuse are so visible to teenagers that they are staying away from it. Doing drugs when it's associated with being "cool"/interesting like rappers is one thing, but when you associate it to fentanyl zombies living in the streets it loses a lot of its glamour.

I was not able to find the regional breakdown so it's just a conjecture though.

Not data driven at all, just my life experience, but I was a teen during the crack epidemic phase. It certainly had me and my peers cautious of crack itself, nobody wanted anything do to with it, but it was not a deterrence to drug usage in general. I was pretty experimental but when offered some crack once I remember declining; I wasn't even curious. The things that had the most correlation with my drug experimentation was 1) social activity/partying and 2) boredom. I think it's important to note as the average teen socializes significantly less and always has a digital crack pipe to cure their boredom; so I'd look there for a stronger causation.

I can’t speak for anyone else but I’ve completely stopped doing any drugs that I can’t make myself or purchase from a liquor store or dispensary (or shroom store). The risk of fentanyl making it into the product even for unrelated party drugs is just insane now and I don’t trust myself to use fentanyl strips properly while already high or tripping.

I wonder if that impacts teen drug use too, because for the first time opponents have a tangible risk to point to instead of just a dumb frying pan commercial and fearmongering.

I was a big fan of cocaine back in the 90s. I never got to the "problem" level with it but if it was there I was the first to raise my hand.

My personality has changed a little, but I'd still probably jump at it today, if it weren't for the fear of fentanyl. I'm not worried about addiction, I'm worried about death.

I go to university next to a safe injection site. It's very clear what addiction leads to.

My pet theory is that buying drugs requires a level of personal interaction that many young people now avoid.

That actually makes a lot of sense. I know of quite a few younger people who pass on things they can't order online. Grubhub vs phone-in takeout, Amazon vs malls, etc. I wonder if the areas that are legalizing drugs will see a DrugHub app pop up.

It's insanely easy to buy drugs online.

But someone has to tell that link and I am sure peer pressure can be one of the major reason for addiction.

You still need crypto, no?

Nope. Don't even need the dark web. All you need is social media.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/who-needs-the-da...

I don't see anywhere how they actually buy the drug.

Or do teenagers get legal access to credit cards in the US ?

Teenagers can fairly easily have credit cards in the US and Canada. I had my first credit card at 15. They can also have debit cards from childhood.

It’s not very common though.

In my experience it is nowadays. I'm Gen Z, by 14 all my friends had credit or debit cards.

Don't forget prepaid Visa/MasterCard too. (Maybe grandma still sends a $20 every birthday.)

The motivation to try drugs, especially initially, is often social. I would wager that’s really what OP means

Technology (e.g. highly addictive short-form video apps) seems like a likely explanation; fear of fentanyl is less plausible (it would not deter drinking or vaping). Surely the biggest factor, however, is just the interruption of social contagion?

I strongly suspect that physically separating highschool students from their older peers for a couple of years meant that most of the older kids who were in to drugs etc. graduated and were not around to introduce their younger peers to these vices.

It's the flip side of the phenomenon whereby many university societies shut down and either never reopened after the pandemic or struggled to get going again (examples I know about including swing dance clubs and solar car racing teams), because the only students with enough experience to teach their younger peers had by then all graduated.

The obvious reason for me is simply that everyone is much more health conscious now. That also plays much more of a role in social status than it did before. That also extends to showing off your healthy lifestyle on social media.

Simply put, it's not as cool now.

I like this thought process your brought up here! I hadn't put much time into thinking about the physical separation of generations in organizations like schools. A certain absence of physical heritage if you will... A mini extinction event

Makes you think of other, perhaps smaller, things that may have gotten a gap in physical hand offs. Perhaps I'm generalizing too strongly here, but certainly someone that was a middle school teacher or something before and after covid might have some observations on little oddities that may have escaped the public eye.

smh kids be on they damn phone so much it's killing the drug dealing industry

Technology is causing antisocial behaviour in young people and teens, I see it everywhere in public. Even amongst friends on a night out people are glued to their phones. Antisocial behaviour brings fewer opportunities to meet people and be exposed to drugs. Drugs were rife during my adolescence in the UK no matter what part of 'society' you were from during the 2000s. I get the impression speaking to younger colleaugues that there a fewer big house parties and nights out clubbing and summers spent going from festival to festival. I started smoking weed as a young teen simply through boredom and curiosity, I only had access to a shared computer a few hours per day. The rest of the time I was out, god forbid, socialising with friends and strangers alike (the skatepark, local parks, parent-less houses, etc...).

In the age of fentanyl I am not at all surprised by this news. The age of experimentation is waning when you can't be sure that your substance is genuine and the cost of being wrong could be your life. If I were a young person today I probably wouldn't even touch anything powdered or pressed.

I always thought, thank goodness for video games because without them I would probably be a drunk or something similarly physically harmful. I guess the world is just now catching up :-D

I used to regularly skip meals when I gamed. Weight started creeping up after I quit

You also got older ... Age is a factor.

Does weight increase as you get older if you consume the correct amount of calories?

Weight will increase as you get older if you consume a constant amount of calories. Your metabolism slows with age (and generally entering the job market means a much more sedentary life style for most white collar workers).

So you adjust your calories

Calorie counting is a habit that's generally unnecessary as a teenager so it's a habit not everyone is familiar with.

Easy to say difficult to do. Most people have family, work, 100's of tensions etc.. Reducing calories might not be that much of priority.

People tend to have more major life events as they get older, and sometimes they choose to soothe with food when facing major loss in other areas.

No, but the 'correct amount of calories' is a steadily decreasing number, so it requires constant adjustment.

Isn’t this good? We’ve literally told teenagers to not use drugs or have sex for decades and it’s obviously working. The consequences are far higher today or at least more well understood and the messaging is getting through.

We’ve trained younger generations to be extremely risk adverse and they’ve listened. I line they’re probably dangerously exposed to other risks that we don’t have generational knowledge of yet.

Social media, for example.

Yeah I think it’s just this. We learnt that alcohol is actually really bad for you in many ways, and we taught our children, and they listened. I think it’s pretty funny that our instinct is somehow to be slightly horrified that they stopped drinking or using drugs. I guess they can’t do anything right

I think the issue here is more about the unintended second order effects. Yay! Drug and alcohol use is down... annnnnnddddd now theres a mental health crisis, increase in suicide rate, and the fertility rate is dropping like well drug and alcohol use.

I'm personally not saying the isolated health aspect of reduced drug and alcohol use is a bad thing. In a vacuum it is obviously positive. When you consider how they function in a broader social system it may turn out that its not a positive change.

It’s probably because previous generations are becoming okay with drugs and millennials tend to be in favor of more permissive drug use.

If parents think it’s cool, teens won’t.

Pretty clear cut to me.

Yup this is exactly it. In the middle class UK even cocaine use is normalized. When your parents are smoking weed, doing lines of coke, and drinking excessive amounts of wine/beer, it's not exactly cool.

Incorrect title. "Illegal drug use among teens drops" is what the study is talking about.

Psychoactive prescriptions are up probably orders of magnitude in the last fifty years.

People have been talking about "self medicating" with alcohol and other legal drugs to deal with various problems for decades. Now there are legal "doctor medicating" options.

The pot industry is having serious problems. The market was not only way overestimated, sales are down.[1]

World's smallest violin plays.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/de36eb98-f28d-4594-9ae6-624d25802...

This growth story I never understood. The grey market has been extremely saturated for at least 20-30 years - demand can’t really grow from “everyone who wants it has it”. There is barely any value add that a company can do with the raw output (flower). The growing and processing equipment is already a mature market. Growing is easy if you can follow a basic guide and invest $500 in equipment. Harvesting is just cutting it off the plant and putting it up to dry.. The vape cartridges etc, anyone can buy from AliBaba for cents a piece. I just don’t see where you can outcompete a random Joe

Fentanyl contamination is a real concern though.

Why would anyone put fentanyl in weed? The black market does have many negative consequences I agree on that

A competent large scale farmer can outcompete a random Joe, much to the annoyance of the potheads who thought they were going to own the industry. The largest pot operation in California also has tomatoes and cucumbers growing in similar greenhouses.[1][2] Their production cost is down to $103/lb.[2] "For a small farmer, it costs around $500 to grow a pound. It’s barely paying the bills.”[3]

It's commercial agriculture. Go big or go home. The little operations are thus rapidly closing down.

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/cannabis/article/largest-california-c...

[2] https://glasshousebrands.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Q2-2...

[3] https://www.foodengineeringmag.com/articles/99944-price-per-...

I remember lying on these surveys when i was 12 out of paranoia, i wonder if the internet makes teens more prone to this

I think one of the major obvious changes from generation to generation is that it’s now the norm that anyone who’s too drunk or acting up because of drugs will expect to be instantly live broadcast to the world and have those videos shared to anyone who knows them.

Back 20 years ago if you got too drunk it was just a funny story people would retell, now at least in college it’s a fixed part of your online persona as anyone who knows you will have videos of it share with them.

Is it possible this batch of survey respondents just doesn’t trust anyone with information about their habits, so they lied?

Came here to say this. I remember these surveys in high school and how non-seriously we took them. Really, I can’t imagine any group less credible to survey than high schoolers.

But it's changing over time, and students always lied.

But it's possible that this generation is wiser/ more cynical and doesn't believe in anonymous surveys.

I know I don't.

everywhere this survey has been done. colleges, independent firms, doctors office, the results are all the same.

Teens and young adults today are doing less sex, less drugs. All those can't be wrong unless todays teens are collectively less truthful than tennagers from previous eras. I doubt that.

Simultaneously, pharmaceutical use rates have skyrocketed and continue growing. I'm curious if there is a causal relationship there.

And I don't think this is a positive trend. Teens experimenting with weed, alcohol, and so on should not be encouraged but is, or was, just a part of life. Teens being on antidepressants, prescribed stimulants, and so on is rather quite sad.

I think you have a warped view of antidepressants, it's not a sad thing, kinda the opposite actually. Medicating with drugs and alcohol is the much sadder timeline.

Pre-antidepressants my life was fantastic on paper: stable job, close friends, good family, strong relationship, perfect health. But none of it mattered, there was no happiness, no sadness, no fulfillment, no contentment, it's hard to convey the total absence of literally any feeling at all toward anything. And I had no other frame of reference so I thought that's just how life was. I even went to years of therapy and that didn't help either. Eight months of antidepressants and I was a different person. I can't tell you how much regret I feel that I could have been happy for all those big important life moments— my first kiss, my first dance, my prom, winning states, graduating college.

Did you consider you might have a warped view on what is supposed to make you happy? IME society will lie to you about that because it has wholly different goals.

Happiness, to me, also seems like such a false goal. Happiness is, and should be, a fleeting sensation.

I think the term we generally really mean when we say happiness is contentedness. Because that is more a state of being than some temporary sensation.

And far from just a semantic difference, I think this opens up an entirely different life perspective because it's much more about controlling your response to things, particularly those outside your control than it is about pursuing some carrot of happiness that will always slip away as quickly as it comes.

The Stoics referred to this state of mind as apatheia [1]. It's not apathy, which has the connotation of indifference, but rather the freedom from one's emotions so you can guide your life without being pulled in a million different, and oft irrational, ways by emotion.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatheia

> Pre-antidepressants my life was fantastic on paper: stable job, close friends, good family, strong relationship, perfect health

I had the same. Post-SSRIs I have none of those things, and am surprised that I'm still alive.

When I asked my shrink 'why zoloft?' the only reason was 'got to start somewhere'. I wish we had evidence-based psychiatry, but instead we have 'throw shit at the wall' psychiatry.

By this standard we don't have much evidence based anything in medicine. The process of finding a treatment that works for you by just trying things and see how it goes is true for lots of illnesses. My MiL tried 20+ different drugs for her chronic fatigue until she found one that worked.

Once you've been diagnosed with MDD and decide you're willing to try a medication the process of finding one that works and has tolerable side-effects starts. I don't really consider that to be "not evidence based." If you keep a medical journal while you try different drugs you're arguably doing science.

Ample bodycam footage of people on drugs, or overdosing is widely available. I’d like to imagine that many people’s first exposure to drugs is seeing the terrifying things it leads them to do.

There’s regular news articles about people straight up dying from dodgy pills. Why would you take that risk. There is no way to safely use drugs when a single pill could kill you instantly.

not that you are wrong but life without risk is what today’s kids are mostly experiencing and it is no way to live. statistically based on number of pills consumed your chances of straight-up dying are very low. drug dealers do not want to kill you any more than Elon selling you a Tesla without brakes. we do thousands of inherently dangerous things all the time (e.g. each time you fly you should know that chances are your aircraft may have been maintained / repaired in any of the 900 facilities outside of the United States and such work is performed by people making less money per day than you spend on pumpkin spice latte… and yet we fly…) statistically though, your chances of dying from a dodgy pill are very very low

I find this discussion quite odd. Society has worked quite hard for a long time now to reduce drug usage, and now it’s actually going down, and somehow that’s meant to be a bad thing.

I get the point about kids being afraid of taking any risks being bad. But why is taking drugs important to someone’s life in a way that riding a mountain bike and risking hurting yourself doesn’t satisfy?

Is there? LiveLeak and it's ilk are gone now

I was in eighth grade at the start of the pandemic (college freshman now. Insane how the pandemic was 5 years ago). For a lot of people like myself, it was when I got into programming and found my career. However, I know lots of other people who basically sat on dopamine loop apps all day.

Our habits from then continued on. While I can't prove this, I would suspect that this isnt due to any lack of vice, but because plenty of people have that feeling satisfied by short form algorithm apps.

I think the pandemic had nothing to do with that except maybe that it served as a trigger for you or others. Plenty of people got hooked on programming in normal and peaceful times, with plenty of addictive distractions around - be it chess, reading, popular sports, Pokemon, movies, etc. Not everyone is interested in, or has the patience for, programming. You see its potential and what you could do with it, they see it as a chore better left to people who like that kind of stuff.

I’m guessing it’s linked to declining social interaction among teenagers, which also explains the decline in alcohol consumption too.

Well, tell the experts that if you just stay home and stare at your phone, you don’t go out an experiment with drugs with your irl friends (because you don’t have any) Also, when I was a teen, I had my own place kids nowadays live in the basement

Or someone misunderstood. Teen drug use did not decline, it shifted. From substances to social media / “AI”.

The general sentiment around this phenomenon tends to be that a drop in drug/alcohol use is a positive social change... I'm pretty skeptical of that hypothesis.

They also left out that having sex is on the decline and that is 100% a bad thing for our society.

Hum, If we hypothesize that drugs abuse could be ruled in part by genetics (some people are more prone to became addict than other), then the drug epidemics from 70's, 80's and 90's should had pruned a lot of this genes from the population.

The current teen not doing drugs are mostly the sons of the former teen not being killed by drugs on its 20's (because they didn't do drugs, or were able to quit drugs before it was too late).

I wonder if an effect of the Fentanyl epidemic could be traced in the genetic makeup of the future USA population, when the children of all the young that died (obviously) never appear in the population pyramid.

[flagged]

Drugs don't usually kill or cause people to die or otherwise become unwilling or unable to reproduce? In fact they may remove inhibitions and lead to producing more children than those who abstain, at least on the whole.

Anyway, I'm not sure and of that is true. It's just one set of possibilities.

What's surprising about it? Teens are attracted by things that are forbidden to them. When you legalize drugs that falls off. Also enough information is available nowadays that doesn't come from some finger waving "you you you" morality zealot, but actual real life examples.

For me at least the pull of cannabis and other drugs, never did real hard and addictive drugs like heroin, was that they were illegal and the effects weren't as bad as the lectures said they were. So I thought what's true about cannabis is also true about cocaine, lsd, psilocybin, xtc etc, but I've seen enough movies about heroin addicts going to waste. I was wrong about lsd and psilocybin and coke had no positive effect on me, except once I became Mr super cool monopoly player ans the other time I was full of energy, but I believe it was mixed with something other than coke. LSD was very uncontrollable, the 1st time was great, simple laugh and dance, the next time was awful and I suffered from it for many years. Psilocybin then, with friends cleared my mind and I was able to articulate myself and think clearly like never before. Amphetamine, I'll never forget the sour smell, but essentially a useless drug, except to stay awake. MDMA varying degrees of happiness and community. But the worst drug was nicotine. Useless, super addictive and really bad for your health. So hard to quit and it's everywhere and it's even worse now with all the e-cigarettes / vapes. Nicotine is an epidemic that needs to be eradicated. It's pure evil.

The withdrawal symptoms for nicotine are mild anxiety and cravings. It's not a real addiction by any stretch of the imagination. Also, vapes are much safer than cigarettes. [0] Some of the other formulations (tablets, lozenges, and pouches) are likely even safer but can affect oral health in some cases.

I think the real danger is that people start to see LSD, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca as a doorway to another world when in reality it's akin to a dream state. It's delusional thinking and many people claim to be making serious, life changing decisions based on their experiences. That is scary.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/dec/28/vaping-is-95...

They don't know who to buy them from because they don't have any friends and don't go out.

This is not accurate in what I see around me. Alcohol far less common among young people than it used to be. Cocaine and MDMA is flourishing.

Ritalin like drugs is out there as well but I dont have much inside inot how common it is.

That is a tiny tiny sample compared to the study so it does not in any way say that the study is wrong. It is just what I myself see and hear around me. (and what the police see a lot of )

The obvious reason is they don't have the freedom or space to with helicopter parents and fear of strangers. It's a wonder they even leave the house but if they do mother will drive and pick them up.

Plus weed is legal now in many places. Kids don't want to do what their parents are doing.

It doesn't look so good on IG and TikTok if you're wasted and unhealthy. Image culture's positive flipside is appearance is a currency of respect, and people don't want to lose it. I guess there had to be some silver lining, right? Ha! :)

In the future, will there be drugs specifically for kids?

I find it weird that we don’t give kids coffee to help them focus on math. (But amphetamine is fine?) There is no evidence coffee is bad for kids.

Psychedelics are so similar to kid level playfulness — and sometimes I think it could be helpful to help them see the big picture.

Even cannabis— we know it’s controlled use is fine for kids, based on studies of usage for epilepsy, etc.

Why do we wait till kids try it themselves under suspect circumstances rather than introducing it with intention?

Just provoking some free thought.

> Why do we wait till kids try it themselves under suspect circumstances rather than introducing it with intention?

if you are talking about a "kid" of 16, 17 years old, that's less problematic. But a parent shouldn't be part of all experiences of a young person, much less actively pushing things.

It’s pretty normal for parents to drink alcohol with their kids. Letting kids of 12+ drink in special circumstances is common in Europe. But wanting to toke with a 15 year old to make sure they have a good first experience - why is that absolutely taboo?

I don't think it is a taboo but not something we should normalize, not because of the responsible parents but because of the already irresponsible ones.

we already drug our kids with heavy drugs like ritalin so why not other less dangerous drugs…

Don't quit your day job just yet

Recreational drug use implies some vitality. Teenagers increasingly being depressed social media/game addicts sitting alone in some room don't do recreational drugs.

There are definitely at least some youth (16 to 25 year olds) around these parts smoking marijuana, and of those the ones who look more like gaming addicts tend to be chronic[1] pot smokers.

Probably depends at least to some extent on their socio-economic status, but then again I’ve known plenty of professionals who are gamers and pot smokers, meth users, heroin addicts.

Having said that, if a persons drug use is chronic then it’s arguably no longer recreational.

1. chronic in the medical sense, as in chronic disease - usually a condition that lasts for at least three months.

What about sugar addiction? Read recently an article in the news that that's what is becoming a problem, actually, much more than alcohol or cigarettes. Anecdotally, I see kids around drinking all kinds of sweetened beverages. My friend who cleans at a college picks every day full baskets of empty bottles. And in my school, some parents giving kids chocolates for a snack or kids buying themselves a pack of sweets from their pocket money.

Fentanyl contamination/adulteration seems like a sufficient reason to not use any street drug active in greater than microgram quantities. (If I were a parent, I'd probably prefer to give "good" drugs to a kid who was unavoidably going to do them vs. trust their friends/etc. to find safe ones, although there's obviously horrible moral hazard there. I have no idea what the right answer is.)

TikTok might be more additive for the average teen

I find the decline in alcohol consumption fascinating, how much of it is lack of sociability, being more aaare of its dangers, or just not willing to put up with the hangover.

I was at a family event last night and all the cousins and their friends were using zins - tobacco pouches. I don’t see those mentioned in this data under nicotine in the article.

> surveys a nationally representative group of teens each year

Self reported with nothing actual to verify (e.g., hair sample, school sewer water sample, etc.) Self-reported data is notorious for being unreliable. Why would this be any different?

Editorial: What a waste of time and money. Hopefully taxpayers aren't paying for this.

TikTok is the drug of choice. I’ve found in my family people turn to drugs in downtime. Less downtime, less drugs

Most initial exposure to drugs is social. That happens less if you’re holed up in your room on your phone.

Why would a teen use drugs when they have TikTok? All the kids I grew up with who did drugs did it largely because they were bored or had bad family lives. The internet is an increasingly addictive distraction.

The drugs are digital now.

No wonder that the birthrates are in the dumpster. How are you supposed to get laid in the absence of social lubricants?

Think most commenters are correct and that tech and screens have usurped more “medicinal” drugs.

What I find interesting is the general lack of care among folks here at HN. There was a comment thread about some person in AL alluding to not being able to find qualified workers at their government contractor implying a morale hang up on “weapon systems”

I’d argue tech kills more folks than these contractors but people can easily look past that.

It's a question of spectacle. 300 people dying in a plane crash is perceived as worse than 300'000 dying of preventable disease.

(Or 1 insurance CEO being killed being perceived as worse than 50'000 being killed by denied insurance claims)

Thus my point. Cognitive dissonance at its finest (worst)

The article linked here doesn't compare previous time periods, only showing the percentages of use/abstaining that they detected now and just saying that's a decline or record decline, while the article it links to does compare to prior time periods for you to make up your mind about that better

https://news.umich.edu/missing-rebound-youth-drug-use-defies...

the appetite for self-destruction is just as big now as it used to be among teenagers. i think people simply dont understand how self-destructive social media is. thats why theyre surprised.

It's because they dont have same day delivery. Who has the energy to stop scrolling on tiktok and get out of the house to get anything. Let alone drugs that require you to speak to someone.

You can probably get same day delivery on drugs, too.

"surprising experts", LOL

It was clear ever back when the Dutch decriminalised weed that its normalisation led to youth not being that much interested any more, and so it was everywhere else where weed was legalised decades later.

But hey, just because the Dutch have had decades of experience, the rest of the world still isn't able to learn from them.

It's time to end the war on drugs, once and for all. And DARE etc can go and die in a hellfire where it belongs.

> The initial drop in drug use between 2020 and 2021 was among the largest ever recorded.

No surprise, with the world in lockdown and most schools in lockdown it was harder to get drugs, and meeting up to consume drugs could in many countries lead to a knock on the door or even a raid from the police - it happened quite the surprising amount of times in Germany.

They only legalized it recently though.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/legal-weed-netherlands/

Yeah, it was decriminalized... but that wasn't my point. The point is, police didn't care, and it wasn't interesting for young people because of that.

Legalisation/decriminalisation was only one part of the strategy.

Real problem they had was heroin. So they made heroin(or some replacement) free, pushing out drug dealers from the market. Importantly: providing other help to addicts, so they could/would be part of society.

https://youtu.be/6OYLoPvLzPo?feature=shared (1h video comparing situation in US, Portugal, Netherlands; Netherlands part starts around 27:00)

Original source (4 points, 8 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42442279

I wonder if this decline means the public health campaigning and lessons about drinking/smoking/drugs prevention made a difference?

As 1 data point, I have a cousin who is 17, and I am 35.

As a 17 year old, she's been taught the dangers of cigarettes, that drinking is bad, and to avoid drugs for a number of years already.

I'm not saying this is bad... it just feels like previous generations (Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, etc) did not really go into the informational side about the risks of drug use from a personal level, and moreso approached don't do drugs like an episode of COPS, which focused more on the risk as a scare tactic.

I'm one of those people that growing up, was bombarded with negative talk about drink, drugs etc. So I took more. And will continue to do so.

Guess my age?

I give my kids my* advice. One had a 6 month period of getting fucked up, and now doesn't touch anything. Another, 'doesn't inhale', and has never touched alcohol.

They have also learned to shut the fuck up when being lectured by some teacher that is parrotting (sp?) the party line, and they howl at the 'touch drugs snd you'll become an addict' government bullshit.

My conclusion?

1/100: Scientists need to be young now to understand,

not that surprising given how everything is laced with fentanyl nowadays

It says what but fail to explain the why. Some hypothesis in the comments about technology being the new 'drug' for teenager so they don't seek drugs, some other about how now everything is recorded so they can't go nuts, ... I don't buy it at all

For me it's just a cultural shift, it's no more cool to be that guy that smoke weed or is drunk. That's all.

Might be a projection, i.e, you think teens do drugs to be cool. My group of friends we were legit curious read books like The Doors of Perceptions where we thought we would meet God or Aliens travel to astrospace. Any recent books like that? That made teens curious about drugs?

Yeah, cause they're all on SSRIs, mood stabilizers, legal meth via ADHD drugs, and beta blockers.

There are now very visible examples of drug use consequences in pretty much every Downtown of a large city.

Presumably it's related to increased conservatism in gen Z males: https://www.axios.com/2024/09/28/gen-z-men-conservative-poll . Conservatives generally have more negative attitudes to drug use.

That poll is really confusing. There are multiple types of conservatism—one is very media-driven (e.g. "omg they did a gender wokeness in my game") and then there's the global variety (liking traditional values). The poll presumes these are the same social phenomena when they're very obviously not. It doesn't help that the way our political parties (which is what the poll seems to be based on) differentiate themselves map extremely poorly onto how americans differentiate themselves.

edit: political -> media-driven

Nope, women are getting less conservative and this applies to them too.

> Conservatives generally have more negative attitudes to drug use

That is categorically false.

I think it would be interesting to look at whether the rate of physical / sexual abuse has changed, since that's significantly correlated with use of hard drugs.

Not really. Don't conflate octogenarian-guided party and community policy with what people actually do.

Do they actually have lower rates of drug use, though? They also have more negative views of homosexuality, but their gatherings can still make Grindr crash.

Attitudes are not the same thing as behaviors. Source: I’m from a really red state with a higher rate of overdose deaths than California

Inflation. they cannot afford. This is happy news. not surprising news.

Blame the homeless for this win. Seeing the outcome so blatantly all around us is pushing a net positive. Next big shift will be from the legalization of more recreational drugs.

I don't know about that. I feel like the cat is out of the bag with cannabis and that it actually has the net effect of making the population more docile and accepting of the status quo which is good for power (individual experiences may vary of course).

Isn't there research showing that people are smoking less weed in the places it's been legalized? It lost its "cool factor" after that.

it's been SWITCHed to another addiction. Pun intended

Two things:

Even the “cool kids” are staying inside and using their phones all day. Cool used to mean you were at the party, now it just means you have a high snapchat score.

Other thing is genuine fear of accidental fentanyl consumption. They’re making fake Xans with fentanyl in them, fentanyl is being found in coke powder. Plenty of people aren’t taking the risk with street drugs anymore. Jelly Roll said so in an interview, he’s a big recreational drug user but doesn’t trust the supply anymore. Good job dealers!

> Even the “cool kids” are staying inside and using their phones all day. Cool used to mean you were at the party, now it just means you have a high snapchat score.

Eyebrow raise.

At what? This is clearly true by experience. As long as you remember it’s a rate and not an absolute statement. Cool kids still go to more parties and are less terminally online than their lamer peers, but it’s a lot less parties and a lot more screen time for the cool kid as well.

I think the eyebrow raise is due to the fact that nobody cool uses Snapchat anymore. It’s like Facebook now.

For millenials and older gen z yeah, but it's my understanding (and my complete surprise as a millenial) that snapchat is actually big again amongst actual children.

Can anyone who better knows the reality here chime in?

Children aren’t cool.

Try convincing the other children of this.

Yeah one of my younger brothers falls into this category, his Snapchat streaks have been going for years - from middle school to mid-university so far, and that's not an exaggeration.

Can confirm, Gen Alpha is all about Snapchat, and their DAUs bear this out:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/

As an 18 year old, this sounds untrue, and oversimplified. Nobody cares about their snapscore.

Why would anyone put fent in cocaine? It’s more expensive and has the opposite effect.

Drug selling is all about repeat customers I don’t really believe this happens apart from accidents.

I wondered about that too. The most likely answer is that a lot of dealers aren't meticulous about cleaning work surfaces between batches.

Search "speedball drug", this has been done for decades.

TL;DR: If fentanyl could be evenly dispersed in cocaine at a tiny percentage of the weight, there’s a theoretical reason for a dealer to add it. However, it’s likely rare and more often accidental.

I agree with kstrauser—most cases of fentanyl in cocaine are likely due to contamination from preparing multiple drugs in the same space. Accidental fentanyl poisonings usually involve people using other downers, like heroin or counterfeit benzos, rather than cocaine.

That said, there’s a theoretical motive for intentionally adding fentanyl to cocaine. While cocaine is highly mentally addictive, it doesn’t cause the same physical dependence as opiates. A low, undetectable dose of fentanyl could enhance the high and subtly increase physical dependence, potentially leading to more frequent use. It’s an unethical but plausible strategy for some dealers.

Regarding cost, fentanyl is cheaper than it might seem. While per-gram prices for cocaine and fentanyl are similar, fentanyl’s potency makes it far more economical in effective doses. A gram of fentanyl can be diluted across hundreds of grams of cocaine, making it cost-effective for someone aiming to enhance or manipulate their product.

The real challenges are: 1. Mixing: Distributing fentanyl evenly in cocaine is extremely difficult without specialized equipment. Uneven mixing could make some doses dangerously potent. 2. User safety: Even tiny, “safe” doses can become deadly when combined with alcohol, benzos, or other opiates, all of which are common among cocaine users.

In short, the risk and complexity of mixing fentanyl properly likely outweigh the benefits for most dealers. But that doesn’t rule out less ethical or less cautious individuals attempting it.

(I first wrote a too-lengthy reply of ~800 words as I'm too sleepy to write well atm, so I got ChatGPT to condense it which got rid of 70% - https://pastebin.com/raw/khm2VFxN )

Interesting how I could instantly tell that this was written by AI. CharGPT has a very distinguishable style and reasoning.

That's why I included a pastebin link of my original reply that I asked it to summarise - I hate when people comment "here's what ChatGPT thinks on this subject", but hoped people wouldn't mind a lazily-shortened version of my own writing!

I don't know but a very close friend's x-wife died that way, coke laced with fent.

> It’s more expensive and has the opposite effect.

Nonsense, fentanyl is waaay cheaper than coke or heroin or any other street drug, like nearly an order of magnitude more per dollar when buying dealer-level quantities. The depressant/stimulant effect stuff is somewhat true, but different people are effected differently by different drugs, most people aren't drug connoisseurs, and a large part of the high is psychosomatic, so experienced and knowledgeable people might have some idea of the purity but it won't really stop others from buying.

It’s accidental cross-contamination. The amount of fentanyl that can kill you is literally invisible.

There just isn’t just one type of “cool” anymore. Media is extremely targeted and everyone interacts within their own bubbles to the point where they don’t know about the other bubbles. There are artists with 1B+ streams that I haven’t heard of, because none of the algorithms ever recommended it to me.

Same applies to “cool”ness, as there aren’t a handful of tastemakers that decide on “what’s more or less cool for a given environment”.

>Other thing is genuine fear of accidental fentanyl consumption.

This is a huge contributor, I think. Many people at risk for drug use have older friends/family who have overdosed on fentanyl -- "accidental poisoning" is the leading cause of death for Americans age 20-44 and #2 for ages 15-24; virtually all of those deaths are from opiates.

> But, according to data released Tuesday, the number of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders who collectively abstained from the use of alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine hit a new high this year. Use of illicit drugs also fell on the whole and use of non-heroin narcotics (Vicodin, OxyContin, Percocet) hit an all-time low.

From an unexpected conversation with some younger people not long ago (though not this young), they may have just switched to LSD.

They switched to smartphones

This. And what about the psychosocial consequences, will it be an improvement compared to the other substances? I doubt it.

While I don't think smartphone addiction should be taken lightly, it's still a far cry from substance abuse.

I'm not so sure, especially if you look at the sum societal impact, and not just the worst outcomes.

My personal take is that the net social impact is positive for alcohol, marijuana, hallucinogens, and maybe some of the party drugs. For most people, they tend to be a social lubricant, tool for exploration, and source of fun.

I think that smartphone use probably balances out negatively. I think for most people, they have a pretty severe negative impact on their lives, and for some, an extremely negative impact.

The worst outcomes for drug use are probably worse than those for smartphones, but not by too much in my opinion.

Substance abuse is pretty much universally understood to be wrong (including by the addicts themselves, but they lack the help to get out of it).

Social media usage on the other hand has been normalized and now humanity's social fabric is in the control of a few companies who are happy to rent it out to the highest bidder. This has obvious implications regarding democracy, surveillance, misinformation, etc.

From a society perspective, I'll take substance/alcohol abuse any day because it appears to be self-regulating at a level that while is higher than we'd like, is much lower than what it takes to destabilize society and democracy.

> will it be an improvement compared to the other substances? I doubt it

Smartphone addiction beats having cirrhosis.

Therapy's cheaper than a liver transplant.

You don't use LSD habitually. If they switched to LSD, then that's very interesting.

Some do, and that's fine too.

“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.” ― Alan Watts

Even Alan Watts wasn't right about everything.

This is fine as far as his personal preferences go; as for everyone else, none of his business.

LSD is not a drug that you can develop an addiction to. Habit is one thing—some people take it regularly—but it doesn't work very well if you do take it frequently.

Which is not to say that LSD can't potentially be harmful. Of course it can. But it's not very analogous to the typically destructive drugs (alcohol, amphetamines, strong opiates) and it's not going to mess with your dopamine the way they do.

You can develop a psychological addiction to any experience, and some like LSD.

Once every week or so for a while is perfectly doable.

Agreed, very different kinds of substances.

> Some do, and that's fine too.

And those should learn something from Syd Barret's life

Could had been a millionaire rock star, women, expensive toys, children. He could had everything for the rest of his life. But he choose LSD. As a lot of people claim, LSD is a cool and harmless funny drug, right?.

His life instead was: living in his mum house since 24 Yo, with his brain like a car crash, and all the time in the world to think on his boy room about how he managed to mess up his life so badly.

So thanks, but no way.

I don't think you can speak authoritatively about Syd Barrett's life, or his mental health issues.

Those that can, do not agree that LSD was causative.

Syd was not the only person doing LSD in the 1960s, and if your argument boils down to "people with life-long major neurodivergence, who are living multiple years of extraordinarily stressful life, should not do huge amounts of psychedelic drugs" ... then OK! That's a good rule of thumb!

But the vast majority of people are not latent schizophrenics. And the vast majority of drug users could not approach Syd's consumption in quantity or duration.

So an argument from the same data is that occasional or even moderate use of LSD by almost every adult human, is perfectly safe.

...

Reframed: Every adult can make their own decisions about their personal level of risk tolerance. Hopefully the decision will be an informed one. Syd Barrett can be a huge terrifying red flag, or a bright illuminating green light, depending on the decisions you've made.

On one extreme of risk tolerance, you'd never leave the house. On the other extreme, (with some bad luck, some excellent luck, and a great deal of effort and resources!) you might approach Syd Barrett's lifestyle. Neither extreme is appropriate for most people.

The stories of what acid did to Syd Barrett are vastly exaggerated.

Not in the same way as alcohol, weed or cigarettes. Not even close.

Weed comes close at high doses but no two drugs are the same.

Maybe you don't, but, speaking for myself 20 years ago, some people do.

Notably absent from those stats is nitrous oxide, which has had a resurgence in popularity lately.

https://archive.is/wRa3Q

wowowowow

Ketamine too. Mine comes in the mail from doctor that's conducting a 'safery trial'. They've never asked for feedback from me, and have never pushed back on me requesting a higher dosage.

Anyone that has experienced LSD would know that what you are saying is impossible and makes zero sense. Other than both being chemicals, the effects are so radically different that they have no interchangeable purpose. Specifically LSD cannot be used to escape trauma or negative emotions, if anything it does the opposite and makes you confront them head on, often terrifyingly so, and as such LSD has something like negative addictiveness. It’s like saying someone switched from using staples to orange juice- it’s an incoherent statement.

The study makes no distinction between that and recreational use. "Getting drunk with friends" counted, for example.

Besides if anything I'd say current generations have less trauma to avoid so they're more likely to use it than past generations.

It's remarkable to me that many of the top-level comments on this story are all positing that something (i.e. the damn phones) must have replaced drug use and we're just not accounting for it. And if it isn't the damn phones, then it must be that the kids are just too scared of modern-day drugs and the dangers lurking within.

I'm not saying it's not phone addiction, or fentanyl in the weed, but is it really that hard to believe that the youths just don't want to do drugs as much as your generation did?

Drugs of one kind or another have never been unpopular. So yes, it is hard to believe.

I guess I'm primed to believe it, because I'm a teetotaler who's never done drugs and never drank a bit of alcohol in my entire life. I'd like to believe that the younger generations are more like me. Of course, I'm just one data point, and a millennial so not even the article's subject demographic.

Oddball theory:

COVID hit credulous / non-technical people harder, because they refused to believe in it and didn't take precautions. So a lot of people who might have turned to drugs died for an entirely unrelated reason, leaving teens who are "smart" enough to avoid drugs. ("Smart" here is not intended to mean just IQ.)

From 2020-2024, the UN recorded ~17,000 deaths among children in all measured countries combined. The share of that that is among older children/teens and in developed countries like the US is vanishingly small.

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