Rising young worker despair in the United States
nber.org
nber.org
Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem.
> More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers. Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States. During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment (Feiveson, 2023).
Maximum corporate dystopia as a training bed for overall societal totalitarianism.
Unions are the only counter to this, as depressing as that is. Possibly overreach by corporations combined with the collapse of globalism will reempower workers.
But robotics and AI may completely undercut that.
We can have human rights and capitalism to some functional degree, at least domestically. Okay, okay, IF we had a functioning government and elections systems.
Capitalism is orthogonal. Perhaps we can replace it with whatever..
I'm just on the borderline of Millennial myself, and people older than me have expressed similar frustrations at various workplaces.
That whole "Yeah, I'm gonna need you to complete that TPS report" bit is tame compared to Agile.
- For previous generations, for most jobs (but not all), you had an informal contract: work will be boring, but dependable. You can work through having a young family without fear of getting dumped out. You don't get surveilled, you can deliver on your own terms.
- Since Neutron Jack and others of his era, this has become less and less true. Large corporations in particular no longer really hold up their end of the contract, and now workers see that and are happy to jump ship, for which the response is to prefer already-trained young workers along with keeping a close eye. So it gets very competitive to get a first job, and you aren't going to get the slack you need to live your life.
- If you want autonomy, you can start your own business. Either a little one like a restaurant where you are a very small boat in a very large ocean, or a startup, where you are going to need the help of venture capital, who are going to be wanting their money back. Pick your poison.
Maybe it's finally time we admit markets are a horrible way of allocating resources unless you want to create a system in which some have endless riches without effort and others have endless effort without riches?
Meritocracy claims have always been propaganda to distract from this simple fact.
- strict zoning laws (and nimby attitudes) prevent the free market from functioning as intended. Housing is expensive because we make it hard to build more housing.
- Read up on RealPage, software for landlords thats been accused of inflating rents. There’s a major lawsuit underway, focusing on the issues with its algorithmic pricing. Is that a free market? When the majority of landlords are (effectively) using the same 3rd party software to price-fix?
- the US had a few decades of very racist housing policy, which made it difficult for blacks to get housing. I say this as a white man that’s studied this. Fun fact - the US govt used to mark black neighborhoods as “high risk”, meaning banks wouldn’t loan money money to blacks for buying a house. At one point in US history it was also legal to have HOA’s with bylaws preventing blacks from buying property in the neighborhood. I could continue to list many examples of how blacks got screwed, but that’s not the point. The point is whites had a HUGE advantage for decades, even after slavery was abolished. The government made sure blacks couldn’t compete for the desirable homes, for decades. So whites got nice cheap housing. Today the children of those white families enjoy the benefits their parents received, via unethical housing policy. Me included. Is that how a free market is supposed to work? Temporarily reducing competition in desirable communities, letting whites buy, and then reverting the law decades later after prices doubled? Definition of pulling the ladder up behind you if you ask me.
I could go on, but i’ll spare you. :)
I have receipts:
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
https://longislandadvocate.com/decades-after-redlining-l-i-s...
Citizens you mean. If you are an expat or migrant worker, your choices are a lot different. 3.64 million citizens in Singapore vs a population of 6 million.
The fundamental thing is, housing is expensive because the space in the highly wanted urban areas is scarce. Plots suitable for development of any kind of (dense) housing are expensive, so that alone drives up unit prices massively. And once you have the plot of land, the cost of actually building a building are enormous - the higher you want to go, the more deep you have to go so that the building doesn't tip over like the Tower of Pisa, which is even more expensive when the building is in a region that is sensitive to earthquakes, doesn't have bedrock but sand, a bunch of subterranean tunnels or nearby buildings that might settle as a result of digging the hole for the foundations.
And that's just the cost that the developers have to bear. The local government and utilities have to expend a lot of money for all the infrastructure: roads, public transport, water/sewage, electricity (the electricity demand of even a "small" dense housing unit are pretty massive), internet, schools, higher education, general amenities (e.g. parks), planning for shopping and other venues... that's where all the NIMBYism is coming from because that shit ain't cheap.
The megacity of >10M people is the basic functional economic unit in 2025, the minimum healthy employment market, the level at which we can provide a reasonable opportunity for productive jobs in a specialized role and a reasonable opportunity to hire someone in a specialized role*; Their largesse is taxed or remitted to cover the cities of ~1M, the cities of ~100k, and especially the towns of ~1k-10k.
...
*The example a number of economists like to bring up is: If I'm a skilled sushi chef, how long would it take to replace this employer with a better one? How long would it take them to replace me? A thriving economy is an economy that ensures lots of mutually beneficial employment arrangements, in which no one feels trapped, and in which bad management or bad work is punished with replacement, but also which has the slack to absorb random things like interpersonal conflicts or an employee that needs to move for family reasons.
If there are a hundred sushi places within commuting distance, probably at least one of them is hiring. If one chef gets hit by a bus, the business can be back in operation the next day by poaching an apprentice a few blocks away for higher pay. There is always reserve capacity waiting in the wings, as a megacity encourages economic resiliency.
If there are only two sushi places within commuting distance, and I sever my relationship with this one, the other one is probably not hiring, so I am a slave to their bad management and conversely they are a slave to my bad work because it would be so difficult to find another person like me. The quality of goods and services provided to the general consumer suffers significantly, the material precarity of my life suffers significantly. Things become brittle - if the business goes under for random reasons, odds are pretty good that my town becomes a town without sushi. Even if everything is working perfectly... what's my leverage as far as pay raises? What's their leverage as far as work output/quality? We're stuck with each other.
Sorry, that's nonsense. Smaller cities like Nuremberg, Ingolstadt, Augsburg etc. are perfectly viable on their own. And frankly, I can't imagine that the numbers are that much different in America.
The key thing is, the rents and housing costs in general in hyper-urban areas need to be paid for by the inhabitants, which means that their labor costs have a certain floor (ignoring assistance programs). That in turn makes hyper-urban areas less competitive in a global market. You can't really compete with Romania for developers when German developers cost twice as much or more than Romanian developers (which are equally capable), and a lot of that price difference goes to the greedy German landlord caste.
Shopping centers don’t need to be added in most cases. Existing shops can just get more business, no? And if new shopping centers are needed, _developers_ can bear the construction cost, not you the taxpayer. Don’t forget that more residents means more taxpayer money for the city long term.
If you want to talk “expensive”, i think suburbia is a better example. Most of suburbia has a negative ROI when you factor in roads and other utilities. And so few taxpayers, compared to a city. Suburbia has some pros though, i won’t deny that.
People don’t like change, period. It’s fine to admit it, really. But we can’t have no change AND housing for our young adults at the same time. US population is still growing last i checked.
Thing is, that's not enough. Developers won't touch that shit with a ten foot pole if they can avoid it, too much risk in shopping centers with the "mall death" plague, and too much work compared to just building crap houses out of broken wood and cardboard - look at CyFy on Youtube and the amount of piss poor workmanship he routinely documents. It's bad enough for a house worth half a million dollars, but an actual mall requires much more solid construction.
Besides, it's not just about shops, it's about creating "third spaces" in general where the cost is.
> But we can’t have no change AND housing for our young adults at the same time
Invest into at least semi-rural areas again? There's no hard requirement trying to force everyone to live in SF, LA, NYC or, here in Germany, the unholy quadruple of Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Freakfurt. The government could at least try to get fast Internet access outside of the urban centers, that alone would go a long long way in helping out these areas.
I would posit that truly free markets only exist on paper, in the real world the people that acquire enough capital will always use said capital to distort markets in their favor. Why wouldn't you?
It is the inevitable outcome of the system.
But i do agree that in practice, we rarely see governments try a truly free market.
Even if the market was initially completely free, as soon as anybody reaches the threshold of being able to bribe/lobby decision makers to tilt the market in their favor, that's what's gonna happen.
To me, a free market is at best an unstable temporary state - not something you can plan societies around.
I’m mainly against the term because it’s a banner idea of the neoliberal revolutionaries that got us into a lot of these messes, by crushing collective action and giving so much power to capital. Actually existing “free markets” are a big part of the positive feedback system of capital accumulation.
Someone selling a home with major issues, and trying to hide those issues for passing inspection, is clearly just a scammer.
So yes - i’m talking about a free market where there are honest actors. Not completely free. I do see the difference, but that’s splitting hairs imo.
Debtors borrow. They get money and spend it. The person holding the money gets paid to not return it (interest). It's like the system is maximally stupid and designed to exacerbate wealth inequality.
The fungibility argument is bullshit here and just serves to obscure. Let's say 10% of money holders refuse to return the money, then 10% of borrowers are screwed. The borrowers can play a game of musical chairs to "decide" who is going to get screwed, but it doesn't change that 10% get screwed.
Oh and the best part? You can't escape money, because it's like a public utility and even if you come up with an alternative, you'll still have to pay taxes, in money. Meaning that money is not just a monopoly, it's inescapable.
The surprise on Bay Areans’ faces when I explain to them that this is why Blacks have such a low population presence and homeownership in the most wealth-producing region of the country.
Thats about it.
Now, that goes a very long way in many many aspects of life, but not all of them.
The insistence on using markets as the only tool to determine everything is just as mistaken as throwing out free markets as a useful tool because it’s used in places it never should be.
The problem is that the conditions under which these theorems holds are completely unrealistic: perfect competition (which is predicated on decreasing economies of scale), so no monopolies, perfect information, no externalities, no public goods, etc.
Given that, it is imperative to regulate markets, and provide some goods through the public sector.
We need to distribute fish from fishermen and potatoes from potato farmers to hairdressers and carpenters and so on. What mechanism do you suggest we use instead of markets?
For comodities like potatoes a mixed economy seems to work pretty well.
For healthcare it seems like single payer is the best option.
For housing perhaps we should implement something similar to the Works Progress Administration to massively increase building.
Perhaps internet should be a public utility.
More generally, a combination of private industry and a strong welfare state seems to work well in much of the world.
If you are a doctor and you want to practice medicine to get money to pay for fish, you are engaging with a market even if that market is single payer (ie the government).
If the single payer pays too little to get fish, you will start fishing instead of practicing medicine. If the single payer pays a lot the fishermen will start wondering why you get so much when they are the ones actually catching the fish. And they will increase the price of fish, forcing your one payer to pay more.
A very simplified view of things of course but my point is that it's still a market. I seriously can't imagine a mechanism better than a market so I was curious what the GP had in mind.
The problem with housing isn't markets, it's the lack of a proper market. The economic system in many countries is tied to mortgages in a way that various cogs in the financial machine can't under any circumstance allow housing to depreciate over time. Homeowners don't own their homes, they pay the banks. And the bank is valued based on the assets it has in the form of home loans.
So the value of homes has to go up. It's important for politicians, it's important for banks, it's important for existing homeowners. Which makes it a massive problem for non-homeowners.
If this was a proper market, houses would be built to meet demand. But as things are now, that would trigger a massive depression. We saw a glimpse of it in 2008.
Personally, I like the idea of worker's self-management. [0] (tl;dr only legal form for companies with > 5 employees is worker-owned coops with elected board)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management
You gotta look into Quantitative Easing. We haven't allocated resources with markets for a long long time.
However, there is also an element of unrealistic expectations coming to a head. New grads historically rarely got extremely high paying jobs, which seems to be an expectation especially in the tech sector. There are also a lot of people complaining about not being able to find a job with their degree that is not that in demand. A lot of people want an easy life in their 20s because they are comparing it with their parents lives in 30s and 40s.
They have manipulated the systems to enrich themselves, at the expense of the future, and like all cyclicals in recent history, the economic pieces of it are driven by clever- re-imagingings of money-printing schemes.
Most people are worse off today than they were 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, and its still getting worse. Eventually you have 27 grievances and revolutionary activity when the vast majority of people realize there is no out, there is only through, and that involves chaotically increasing violence which no sane person would wish for, ever.
It does seem like more and more people are giving up on those basic goals. Each of those markets is now controlled by monopolistic platforms, and they're tightening their grip.
If we're going to discuss this problem honestly we need to admit the elephant in the room: it is much, much worse for young men than young women.
In jobs, from FT[0]:
"The unemployment rate for recent male graduates has risen steeply from less than 5 per cent to 7 per cent over the past 12 months. For young female graduates in the US, joblessness is unchanged over the same period, if not falling slightly."
"Most striking of all, recently graduated young men are now unemployed at the same rate as their non-graduate counterparts, completely erasing the college employability premium."
In dating, despite being much more selective, women match with around 40% of men they like, while for men it's more like 2%. Anecdotally I know many women in metropolitan areas can receive hundreds or thousands of likes in a week, while even a hundred is more than many (pretty average) men will receive in a lifetime. The number is zero, very often.
In housing it's more equal, but of course safety nets for young women exist through dating. Living in a HCOL metro area it's not uncommon for younger women to move in with their partners, and not have to pay much or any rent. That option is much, much rarer for young men, so if you don't have parents to save you, no one's coming.
I empathize with my fellow young men, and sadly I don’t think most of my fellow progressives care about young men. It’s certainly not a platform that will get you votes if you run for office.
If I were born post-2005 I doubt that I have been given any major advantage over women yet the messaging is all about how bad it is for the other side. At the same time it’s hard to argue otherwise because the GOP is actively eroding women’s rights.
Young men are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Many of them, indeed, are just whining. And they keep whining without realizing how spoiled they are.
But (at least) a few of them are having good ideas and, especially, implementing them with professionalism and passion.
I think two things can be true at once: that there are many good things to appreciate about the modern world, and that the concerns they are raising are legitimate. There is room to have a bit of empathy here.
(https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2025/07/28/alice-29-an...)
They aren't whining. They have it objectively and measurably worse than previous generations, by a huge margin.
Of course, even increasing salaries ten-fold wouldn't help if they don't actually build enough homes.
https://fr.statista.com/infographie/25111/distribution-des-s...
According to that, she's definitely in the top 20%. Of course "among the best paid people" is ambiguous depending on how much "top" you consider, but I think being in the top 20% it makes sense to say that.
PS: and I suppose (although it's hard to find data) that if we look at people in her age bracket, she will be in a higher percentile.
In France, you are considered rich when your net revenue is twice the median. That is to say, if you get more than ~4000 € of _net_ monthly salary (around 61k gross/year), you are rich. This was very easy to reach in the IT industry, especially in the Paris area, after 15 years at most.
The 1% richest (based on salary) start from 7500 € net/month (115k gross/year).
She certainly isn't "among the best paid people."
But there's no huge corporate health insurance tax, and she won't be spending as much on commuting.
... and on housing. Even Europe's most nuts markets aka London, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and Freakfurt don't come anywhere close to the situation in the US.
Mean house price:
London: $753,793 USD
USA: $369,147 USD
Average rent per month:
London: $2,992 USD
USA: $1,699 USD
Average home size:
London: 705 sq ft.
USA: 1,800 sq ft.
Estimated homeless population (% of total population):
London: 2%
USA: 0.2%
Annoying comments about housing posted on Hacker News:
London: Not seen
USA: Way too manyFrance hasn't had above-replacement fertility since 1980 [1], so it seems strange their housing supply would be stressed.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-f...
Although for the specific case of Paris proper (not the whole region), population has actually decreased in recent years. But there also seem to be fewer people per dwelling. See [1] for some interesting graphs. Unfortunately it's French, but Google Translate should do a good enough job.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/459939/population-france...
[1] https://www.paris.fr/pages/le-boom-des-logements-vacants-acc...
Defenders of urbanism and dense settlements in general love to point out that it is more efficient to serve urban populations with infrastructure, which is true, but completely neglecting the fact that it creates an insane wealth disparity in these urban areas (aka, those who have housing and those who have not), a corresponding death of rental markets (old people can't move out to smaller dwellings because an apartment half the size costs thrice the money or more, and young people with families can't afford sizing up either), and a massive financial pressure on local governments to build out all the infrastructure that dense settlement needs.
But then it does not begin with rural flight, that's only the consequence of.. I don't know, there is not enough opportunity/resources for people on the land. And that's happenning since the start of industrialisation, as Marx noticed, and then he wrote Communist Manifesto when he wanted to build industry outside of the cities but that was tried and didn't work, some communist leaders even sent people from cities into the countryside to 'reeducate', that didn't work either. So everyone is moving into the cities (or to the nearby suburbia) and there is no remedy, even WFH doesn't really solve this.
Anyway just wanted to note there is no known policy that would stop rural flight.
Actually, there is. Industry steering politics...
Look at Eastern Germany for example. After the 90s people fled in droves (and neo-Nazis moved in to pursue their dreams of "national befreite Zonen" settlements that they couldn't have in Western Germany), but "Silicon Saxony" is a lighthouse that attracts industries and talent from all over the world, even if Intel's fab plans shattered due to Intel's often-described internal issues.
The thing is, for this to work, governments and especially their politicians have to be willing to think decades in the future - and they have to put money where their mouth is, and build the surrounding infrastructure as well: roads, rail, high speed internet, schools and universities.
That, however, is where many Western governments utterly and completely failed ever since Thatcher and the emergence of rabid unchecked capitalism, tax races to the bottom, "trickle down" and "small state" ideology. When the government doesn't have funds to invest into developing the industries of the future, you'll get the issues that almost all Western societies have.
China in contrast has used the shitload of money they got from the Western countries over the last quarter century (when they joined the WTO) to do exactly this. For all that I hate the CCP for various reasons, their way of thinking in five-year plans plus even longer macroeconomic planning has proven to be incredibly successful.
You can build new cities. But it will be a city, not countryside. Maybe it will be just suburbs without a clear central zone, but it will still be a city. Anyway, Silicon Saxony is centered in Dresden, which is a city.
> China in contrast has used the shitload of money they got from the Western countries over the last quarter century (when they joined the WTO) to do exactly this.
What exactly do you mean by 'this'? They certainly didn't in any way stop rural flight, quite the opposite.
Building up strategically vital industries. The fact that no place in any Western country can offer anything close to what bunnie described in Shenzhen many years ago is damning in itself, and that's what keeps holding our industries back massively.
[1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2019/essential-guide-to-s...
I'm convinced that it could help, but at least here in France this is half-assed, and many companies are even looking to end it altogether. I would definitely move to a smaller town if I didn't have to come in to the city a set number of days a week. But there's no way I'll endure a multiple-hour commute, so I'll just keep bidding on the limited amount of housing and take up space in the metro, just so I can sit on a worse chair to take my video calls.
Of course you won't just up and leave your city apartment if you're not sure how long you'll be able to WFH.
Now I don't think it will actually fully solve all our housing woes, but even if it helped a bit it would still be better.
Meaning, passenger trains? I can't think of anything else that might be lacking in any rural area you'd reasonably consider living in.
While that did go out of fashion in rural areas some 100 years ago, even that infrastructure is still more or less there and could be resurrected if people really wanted to use it. The old train station around here became the clubhouse for the lawn bowling club, but I'm sure you could turn it back into the train station if the will was there.
But if you are working from home, how much do you really need a train anyway?
Also reasonable bus service to anywhere "intersting".
I was actually thinking about that, and I think it comes down to what you do outside of work.
If you only hang around the house or similar, yeah, it doesn't matter much. My mom loves gardening, so she doesn't need "infrastructure" to "travel" to the back of her house.
But I do like going out, having a drink or two with friends, go dancing. Activities that can end late at night, possibly with some amount of alcohol in the blood. If alcohol's involved, I can't drive, so it's either an expensive taxi to the suburbs or some form of transit, hence infrastructure. Driving is a pain, because these activities happen in the city, and the mayor's policy is to make it as painful as possible to drive - and she's good at it.
However, I figured I didn't do those things that often, so with the difference in housing price, I could pay for a taxi fare now and then if I lived in the 'burbs. I also ride a motorbike, which somewhat mitigates the driving issue if I'm not intoxicated - but that's a separate hassle of its own when going out.
Depending on the activities, these may very well also exist in smaller, more affordable cities, which also helps with the infrastructure issue since you don't have to travel as far and are more likely to be able to bike or similar. I don't have kids, so I don't need a big house. Which means that, aside from my work, which holds me in the big city, I could move to one of those smaller, cheaper ones and not live in the boonies.
I'll point out that the original comment said "small town". The followup comment introduced "rural", but, given the context, we can infer that the same thing was meant.
With that said, why can't you do that in a small town? The small town (population ~1,000) I grew up in has eight bars, some of which cater to the dancing crowd. You can walk the whole town over in like 15 minutes, so there is no need to drive home after a late night drinking session. While not a train, there are buses that run to the nearest large city if you really need something you can't find locally, but I'm not sure what that would be.
It is fair to say that you can't spin a globe, randomly place your finger down, and move to where it lands and expect a good result. Infrastructure absolutely is lacking in the expansive forest, desert wasteland, and across the frozen tundra. But if you carefully select the small town, I wonder what infrastructure one actually finds missing?
> suburbs
That sounds like city living. Small towns or rural areas don't have suburbs. It's an interesting perspective, to be sure, but might have missed the mark around where the original question was asked. That is a very different environment.
Good quality healthcare providers, or sometimes even any healthcare providers that will schedule an appointment before you die, for one. Further down you mention "The small town (population ~1,000) I grew up in has eight bars", well the small town I grew up (pop. around 8000 currently) has no good quality restaurant when I don't want to cook, as another thing we could consider being infrastructure. And so on. Worth noting I live in Slovakia.
Yeah, specialists aren't commonly found in small towns. But it is not like cities are walled off. What's the practical difference between driving for 30 minutes across town to get to hospital vs. driving 30 minutes into the city? From anything I've ever observed, the specialist hospitals are generally located on the arterial entranceways into the city, no doubt for good reason.
If you need urgent specialist care, they have helicopters that can fly astonishingly fast. I'd love to see actual numbers, but I'd venture to guess in an average scenario you could actually get to the hospital faster if you were in the rural area as the helicopter can land more or less right beside you instead of you having to navigate city obstacles to either go to somewhere where the helicopter can land or go directly to the hospital.
> ...has no good quality restaurant when I don't want to cook, as another thing we could consider being infrastructure. And so on.
The original comment was about moving to "a small town", not moving to "a specific small town". Absolutely there are small towns that lack infrastructure, but there is no reason you have to choose those specific ones. If you decided you were going to move to a small town, you'd pick the one that you like.
> Worth noting I live in Slovakia.
And, sure, it is possible that every small town in Slovakia lacks infrastructure, but is staying in Slovakia a hard constraint?
Sadly it is, once you live in another district they can and will refuse to treat you.
> If you need urgent specialist care, they have helicopters that can fly astonishingly fast.
Oh no, my comment was not about urgent care, it's just often people get appointments with specialists a year or more in the future. Or you pay out of pocket and get it much faster but again those specialists are only in big cities.
> The original comment was about moving to "a small town", not moving to "a specific small town".
Sure, and my comment is representative about small towns in Slovakia.
> but is staying in Slovakia a hard constraint?
For me currently it is, but many people are moving away.
Where is it not a thing around any major centre? Every city is ultimately going to have rural area outside of it. I suppose you can find some city that has poor geography or ridiculous suburban sprawl that impede access. There are always outliers. But in general?
Of course there are also rural areas further away, and maybe if you were trying to work in some kind of local industry (mining, agriculture, etc.) you'd need to be further away, but since we're just talking about WFH...
> There's not some abundance of rural areas
How many do you need, exactly?
I used to try to educate them, but then I realized that would just encourage them to move to the country, so I stopped.
High prices will do the trick, though. In Canada — which is said to have the most out of control housing market in the world — the urban population between the latest and previous census only increased by 4.8%, while the rural population grew by 6.5%. Due to periods of data collection, there could some COVID influence in there[1], but a similar trend was also seen in earlier censuses.
[1] If there is, that would be policy-driven, which you suggested isn't a factor, so...
One immediate question would be, how are the suburbs classified, urban or rural?
Certainly there will always be a certain percentage of the population that likes living in rural areas, but all things being equal I think that most people would rather live in cities.
Not exactly. Intolerance is more visible, but that's simply because you end up getting to know everyone. Imagine that 1% of the population is intolerant. In a city with 1 million people, it is incredibly unlikely that you will ever encounter the 10,000 people who are intolerant. In a village with 100 people, you are almost guaranteed to bump into the 1 intolerant person on a daily basis.
> rural areas simply can't have the concentration of amenities that cities do.
What amenities are found in city homes that are not found in rural homes? High speed internet, maybe, but even that isn't true very often anymore. Hell, the rural areas around here have access to considerably better internet service than my urban home does.
Once you leave the home, there is no difference. It is not like cities of today are built with walls around them.
> all things being equal I think that most people would rather live in cities.
People like what is in fashion. City living is currently in fashion. It hasn't always been and it most likely won't be again at some point in the future. Fair to say that right now people generally prefer living in the city. That is why they have no qualms about paying so much to be there.
One sometimes forgotten issue is that being a 45 minute drive from a hospital is really scary when your 2 year old is struggling to breath at 3 AM.
Given the rural areas that have infrastructure, I still wonder what is missing, passenger trains aside?
Those are found outside of the house. Like I said before, there is no real difference at that point. 30 minutes travelling into the city or 30 minutes travelling across the city is the same thing. It is not like cities of today are built with walls around them.
There's also a big difference between 30 minutes on a train and 30 minutes driving. You can relax when you are on the train and 30 minutes of driving often ends up being 45+ minutes once you factor in finding parking.
How, exactly, does 30 minutes of travel often become several hours? Are you stopping for dinner and some shopping along the way?
> You can relax when you are on the train and 30 minutes of driving often ends up being 45+ minutes once you factor in finding parking.
A typically average time to get to train station is around 10 minutes. Another 5 minutes waiting on and boarding the train, especially during off-peak hours when the entertainment you spoke of is most likely to happen. 10 minutes more to arrive at your destination after getting off the train. That is 25 minutes right there. So you are imagining just 5 minutes spent on the train?
Ignoring that you don't necessarily have to drive, 5 minutes of relaxation (let's say 10 minutes; you need to get home too) every once in a while when you occasionally take in a professional sports game or big name concert is what you consider a difference? If you really want to get into such fine grain details, where do we even begin? You are going to gain those 10 minutes of relaxation back in the rural area when you step out into your backyard instead of having to go all the way to the park. Realistically, once something takes place outside of the home, there is no difference.
Yeah, sure, certain situations could see that 25 minutes reduced, but there are also rural areas much closer to the city that can also see that travel time reduced. 30 minutes of travel away from the city can take you a surprisingly significant distance! The earlier comment wasn't trying to find a place of perfect optimization, rather some kind of reasonably average scenario.
The outlier in the world is the USA (and perhaps Switzerland), and even in the USA if you account for cost of living it's a minority of professions that are "well paid".
You are again comparing it against the USA, the very outlier, and in specific places of the whole country even, of course then everything else will be "so bad" except for very few places on the whole Earth...
You're literally doing the "let them eat cake" thing the boomers have been doing for decades. If you keep doing this you will spend your old age in the streets scorned by the younger generations you've thumbed your nose at. You'll probably have a very nice smartphone though and we'll tell you "why are you complaining? you have such nice luxuries, you should be grateful to us you at least have that."
They’re spoiled in some ways, completely lost in others. It’s important we don’t ignore that.
Effectively, societies are Boomers and older generations. These form the majority of the population that is of voting age and they hold most of the financial (in stocks and real estate ownership) and executive power.
So yes, it can be said that society fails the younger generation.
The vast majority on this planet believe in a perverse expected value calculation:
probability of becoming a billionaire * billion dollars > assets in fair society
where "assets in fair society" is higher than it currently is, maybe 2x or 3x, but it pales in comparison to the chance at 10000x and the optimism that distorts the "probability of becoming a billionaire" to be higher than it really is.
There is a perceived equilibrium between the remote possibility of undoing all the bad things that happened during the course of your life instantly and a more just society that merely gives you a little bit more money, but otherwise keeps most things the same, but with less stress and conflict.
I was born in 82 so I had the experience of life without mobile phones, cheap travel, Netflix, etc. Life wasn't harder in practice, because you don't miss things that aren't basic needs and that no one has or don't even exist. We had plenty of fun with what we had, we weren't thinking "oh, my life is so hard because I can't choose what I see on the TV or book a plane ticket from a tiny device in my pocket". If I went back in time and had all those things, I don't think my life would have been happier or easier.
(As an aside, the exception to this is medicine. For example, many cancers that could kill you easily back then have now a much better survival rate. That of course does make life much better for people who have such problems. But for those of us that are/were healthy, life wasn't worse back then).
You know what you do miss if you don't have it, and can make your life more miserable? Not being able to afford a home, raise a family, etc. Basic needs, and things that your parents and other people that you know had. That's a real problem. Not having Netflix or a smartphone when it wasn't even a thing is just not a real problem, it was a non-issue, and using it as an argument to minimize young people's complaints is dishonest.
So one part of this generation being unhappy is thst their life on average got objectively harder than those of their parents. Who hasn't heard the story of a boomer who as a 20-something bought a house from the money made in a job that wouldn't even pay rent these days.
But that isn't all, since happiness is relative the youth today sees a fictional image of what they are supposed to live like every day in the internet and most of them are nowhere close to that. So it both became objectibely harder and the bar moved up at the same time, so if more people whine, it is because they have reason to.
I don't say life wasn't hard in the past decades, but people had the sense that if they worked hard, they could potentially reach a state that felt good to them. This is less true today. Even in my generation (Millenials) many have given up even considering the image of retirement, because our retirement is a value that we know will be sacrificed to the capitalist gods, like the whole damn planet.
Too bad today's 20-something people would just scoff at the house the boomer grew his family in!
Care to explain why stating that this generation had it easier would constitute "scoffing" at the house?
If anything I'd love it if any generation would get the same chance. Society isn't a zero sum game where you have to make it worse for others to have it better for yourself.
I feel like I am constantly reading about the problems facing young men. Every article about loneliness - young men. Every article about political swings - young men. Every article about economic anxiety or wages - young men. Every article about declining birth rates - young men.
It'd make a dangerous drinking game at this point to take a shot any time the top comment on any piece of news is "young men". Moreso if we take another on claims said "young men" aren't being talked about / cared for.
And this bleeds into life. Nearly every discussion on politics or social ideas or religion somehow hones it's focus on young men.
> we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining"
And to specifically bring up this part, young men are choosing at an alarming rate to follow people like Andrew Tate and Charlie Kirk. They are becoming less compatible with equitable society and, notably, the women in their age bracket.
The complaint often isn't that they're "whining", it's that they push against ideas like equality with women and those are non-negotiable. And, as a result, they're exacerbating the problem, as those women would rather not date anyone than date someone who actively campaigns against their interests.
This, in turn, makes it harder to be empathetic. "Dating is hard" is true in the modern world. But it's even more true when you just posted a joke on social media that blue haired women have mental illness or a "western vs Asian woman" meme or retweeted some hyper-masculinity influencer.
When this gets talked about and women directly state "I don't like how men my age talk to/about me", people often act like the women are being unreasonable and unempathetic - as if the men are owed relationships and women just need to compromise and see things from the other person's shoes.
But rarely is the answer that young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects. And they simply aren't willing to change that. What is anyone supposed to do about that, exactly?
You're confusing the symptoms for the cause. The question people are asking is what about our society is driving these behaviors. What is making someone like Andrew Tate appealing to a young men? These are young people, why are you blaming them for not knowing better instead asking why they aren't being taught better?
Which is what exactly?
To be frank, I wouldn't like to be an American young man nowadays, nor would I like to be an American young woman.
Everytime this kind of debate pops up on the internet, you seem to see two very vocal camps, one pushing the most absurd reactionary non sense about what men should be openly exposing the grossest misoginy I have ever had the displeasure to read and the other one barely containing its deep seated misandry. People really like to reduce this topic to a for them or against them position preferably erasing any kind of complexity in the process.
I feel like normal people have exited the discussion on this topic a long time ago and the young who live most of their social life on the internet nowadays are just exposed to what remains.
>People really like to reduce this topic to a for them or against them position preferably erasing any kind of complexity in the process.
I think you want to shrug this off as some kind of "both sides" situation while ignoring the simple and irrefutable facts on the ground.
>I feel like normal people have exited the discussion on this topic a long time ago and the young who live most of their social life on the internet nowadays are just exposed to what remains.
Do you know many young or old people who are unaware of what goes online these days? Is misandry coming out of your TV, popular books, or magazines more acceptable than misogyny on some website or video online? I have met countless women poisoned against me personally without even knowing me. If you try to talk about men's issues, most women just don't want to hear it. They've been taught for decades that men are keeping them down, they deserve everything they want, etc.
No, it's not.
Thankfully, my country has been sparred pretty much all the discussion about transgender and bathroom and most of the religious reactionary non sense. It's very much a problem of the USA and by extension countries which consume media in English like the UK.
> I think you want to shrug this off as some kind of "both sides" situation while ignoring the simple and irrefutable facts on the ground.
Which are? You are turning the discussion into a for or against irrefutable facts by the way. Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
South Korea, Japan, and even Russia would like to have a word with you.
>Thankfully, my country has been sparred pretty much all the discussion about transgender and bathroom and most of the religious reactionary non sense. It's very much a problem of the USA and by extension countries which consume media in English like the UK.
The bathroom and pronoun stuff is definitely originating in the anglosphere. But this is being pushed out to all corners of the world. If you managed to avoid it, be thankful and continue to live in your bubble and don't lecture me about it. By the way, resistance to this garbage is not "religious" in general. Even atheists hate the propaganda and woke moralizing.
>Which are? You are turning the discussion into a for or against irrefutable facts by the way. Thank you for nicely illustrating my point.
I don't have time to write a dissertation on this topic. But the facts I refer to are the ones that everyone has to deal with in their daily lives. You can try to tell me it's this way or that way but you're a foreigner telling me my experience of decades is actually just the imagination of a terminally online weirdo. Tell it to someone less committed to trusting their eyes and ears.
If you think anything happening in Russia is somehow linked to the discussion in the USA, I can’t do anything for you.
> By the way, resistance to this garbage is not "religious" in general.
Who said anything about resistance? I’m just listing two nauseous things the US currently exports.
There's always been an issue with mixed signals when it comes to these topics. Polite society says one thing, but the things you hear from your parents, role models, and jokes between friends are different.
It was true when I was in that age range, and I don't really see what's happening today as an aberration so much as a continuation of trends. The reason things feel materially worse is...because things _are_ materially worse in other aspects of life.
The outlook of young folk in my country is a lot worse than it was in my generation, which was already worse than my parent's generation. On top of that, there's also a sick social media algorithm that rewards controversy and ragebait. I feel like those two things were the ingredients needed to turn the embers of issues I was experiencing first-hand as a teenager into a raging inferno.
I'm engaging in a bit of reductionism, but from my personal experience this comes after 2-3 decades of targeted marketing that shifted pretty much all concepts related to femininity or polite society into the lens of "gay and weird" for boys. Then, that lever is applied to push the ideas of a return to a (fake) hyper masculine past, and that women (who are "gay and weird") need us (the hyper masculine men) to survive.
When reality and the progressive values of women meet these beliefs, the figure heads use that conflict itself as a lever: "See? Everyone is against you and preventing your happy life."
Then they try to sell them supplements or religion. Or sometimes just a Nazi / crusader Pepe meme.
And the result of this is crushingly sad. I am empathetic, I have personally experienced the pull of this vortex as a child and young man. It's genuinely hard to swim against it's pull because it offers such easy answers.
But these men are less socially capable people, have worse education outcomes, have to overcome gross beliefs and a sense of entitlement that comes along with them; and, of course, the identity crisis of never meeting such expectations. This has rippling effects for society which are equally upsetting.
Anyway, I'd recommended the video series "The Alt Right Pipeline", which also has some good information and resonated with my experience growing up. They're better at explanations than me anyway.
This and the another commenter who mentioned the social media algorithms tuned for rage-bait. People get sucked into this deeper and deeper in-group rabbit holes with targeted content suggestions. Its incredibly insidious. While I think this is a major major factor, I still think there is another issue for young men that make them more easily susceptible to falling down these holes in larger numbers than would be the case if things we're going better for them. I think there is an underlying hopelessness there that various actors are exploiting. It is this hopelessness* that is the true cause of this problem.
* Maybe that's not the right word. Alienation? Looking forward and seeing only barriers? I don't know.
At the heart of what Tate, Kirk, etc. preach is a story that gives an illusion of control. They oppose the popular "your life sucks because an authority figure in a far away place is keeping you down" with "your life sucks because you suck — but you can change". This can be appealing as it offers a (perhaps false) sense of hope.
> why they aren't being taught better?
Teaching requires understanding. But nobody really knows. Virtually everyone agrees that there is a problem; that young people are truly feeling like their lives suck. The contention is really only centred around what the solution is to improve upon it, and people fall into whatever brand best fits their speculation.
If the only obstacle is yourself, there is no limit to the things you could archive if you removed that obstacle and just got your act together. Make a billion dollars? Become the next Jeff Bezos? Get the hottest girls of the planet? Piece of cake, all just a question of Grindset...
It ain't no different how low quality secular governments in the middle east drove a generation of young men to religion 50yr ago, or how the catholic church stifled europe so thoroughly that it created an explosion of various flavors of christian extremists, or when the extractive European colonial empires drove the nations they ruled toward nationalism.
People don't say "f this" and find a new altar to worship at when the current god is serving them well (metaphorically, but sometimes literally). Young men are always the tip of the spear in these transitions because men as a demographic don't put up with shit and the young ones don't have a bunch of accumulated obligations forcing them to.
>When this gets talked about and women directly state "I don't like how men my age talk to/about me", people often act like the women are being unreasonable and unempathetic - as if the men are owed relationships and women just need to compromise and see things from the other person's shoes.
Every time men talk about their problems, I have to hear about how it affects women while they have essentially zero interest in how it affects men. That includes your whole comment. You piped up just to say men cause their own problems. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe women don't know more about what men think or experience than they do? I will admit that some of the figureheads of the manosphere are bad influences and not likeable. But nobody else more reasonable tends to get mindshare with the mainstream media. The mainstream is all about blaming men and pushing its agenda, and showing the most awful view from the other side is basically setting up a straw man.
>But rarely is the answer that young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects. And they simply aren't willing to change that.
The only role models put forward by "polite society" are absolutely terrible in other ways. As far as attention to appearance, a 7 out of 10 man has about the same amount of options to get sex as a 4 out of 10 woman. They get endlessly lectured about emotional maturity by women who can't figure out (or don't care) that the hot guys they can sleep with will NEVER settle for them. They are expected to be on the same level of "emotional maturity" as women who have easily 10x as much romantic experience as them on average. Men are blamed for everything wrong with women's lives. As for education, college increasingly costs more and pays off less, especially in the DEI era where men (especially white ones) are actively and blatantly being discriminated against.
This is the more interesting observation. Why is it that boys are struggling in school? Why are we not doing anything about it?
The blue haired woman won’t date the fisherman and the farmer girl won’t date the metrosexual city boy.
Somehow you’re getting stuck on one side being universally correct, which in some extreme cases might be reasonable, but generally you are just looking at a societal split rather than one side moving hard.
IME, as a mid 30’s bloke in the UK in a stable relationship, guys haven’t significantly moved right wing, society as a whole has feminised (mostly in large cities). If anything it’s the women moving away from the previous norms - polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative.
Unfortunately, their perception of "what was normal 30 years ago" is generally inaccurate as well as biased by their own personal experience, because it's hard to get an objective picture of their society as an 8 year old. You're growing up raised by a particular family (who, statistically, shares your tendency for conservativism) in a particular community, watching media made a decade ago by people who formed their values two decades previously.
Which isn't to say that the past was great or anything or that the conservatives are broadly right, just that your generalization is overly broad to the point of absurdity. Pretty much every ideology tries to pick and choose things from the past that ought to be revisited.
Edit: The sarcasm in a certain sentence in this comment is obvious enough that I'm not gonna feel bad for anyone who didn't get it.
Both obviously need to happen regardless, but I don't see either happening in my lifetime short of a (probably bloody) restructuring of US government, and even then, only if we're lucky.
Blanket statements that frame the problem dishonestly are a large contribution to the division. I'm speaking from a USian perspective here, but the people calling themselves "conservative" these days are imagining rosy snapshots of the past in a range from 30 up to 80 years ago (depending on the specific issue), decidedly not what most people "grew up in". And they aren't even rallying behind constructive solutions that might undo or at least mitigate the problems we're currently facing, but are rather just pushing some vague idea that tearing down our societal institutions will automatically cause those problems to be fixed. That is really the polar opposite of conservatism, and we should stop calling it such. I'd say it's more like anger driven accelerationism.
The message of Bernue Sanders gained a lot of support in 2016 and 2020 from young men. They were denounced in an Atlantic article as Bernie Btos. A New York Times article painted them as crude. Bernie was asked why his supporters were (supposedly) sexist young men on a debate. He was denounced for being interviewed by Joe Rogan.
Some young men were leaning toward the Democratic party and were denounced by the Democratic establishment and corporate press. Meanwhile Trump and his cadre encouraged such support.
Now the talk in Democratic circles is how to gain back the massive losses they've seen from young men. They've been going out of their way to alienate the support from young men they had over the past nine years. Now their polling numbers are at historic lows.
I honestly wouldn't expect any more than a neutral, if not negative, response. I'm largely targeting things they themselves have some amount of belief in or benefit from.
Are they though? This sounds like a huge blanket statement.
I don't mean to say a majority of them are like this, to be clear.
Where are these reports?
Wikipedia’s summary of Gen Z political beliefs do not support the assertion that young men are increasingly alt-right leaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Generation_...
It's literally always the stale "You just hate women.", "You just hate women.", "You just hate women" drilled into you over and over again.
My main point is that they receive lots of attention. And that a perceived lack of empathy comes from many of the conflicts being incapable of compromise, and lead to a reinforcement of beliefs that cause further conflict.
The reality is that having a shitty rigged system (for everyone, men and women) while also telling men that they're oh-so-privileged and should shut up whenever they complain is going to drive young people towards Andrew Tate, because he's the only one they're hearing that's actually acknowledging their problems. It's easy for me to recognise that guy as an asshole scammer, but I'm also in my 30s and not 15. I don't like that, but that's just the reality of it. And honestly, this is really not that hard to understand.
- Men aren't inherently bad and the majority of men don't fall under this group being discussed.
- Other categories of people can have problems too? Who said they can't?
- Of course the problems facing men have societal factors. Tens of millions of boy's across the world didn't wake up and suddenly decide to be regressive and self destructive.
- The idea that the system is rigged against men is absolutely absurd. In pretty much every metric, men still have a positive bias. From education to healthcare to politics to employment. That does not, to be clear, mean will always succeed or cannot be discriminated against.
- Andrew Tate isn't "acknowledging the problems" at all. He creates a conflict by pushing a worldview incompatible with basically any moral person - sold on easy answers and an idyllic hypermasculine past that did not exist - then leverages the social damage done to the boys who experiment with those ideas to push messages as profound as "it's gay to hang out with women, even your partner". He's already sex trafficker, this is more of the same. It's just this time he's grooming young men for fascist ideology as opposed to grooming women for sex work
It's funny how there is never a discussion of problems with young women in this way.
Young women are often seen as victims to society. The "Patriarchy", unreasonable social media beauty standards, etc.
Young men are seen as failures to society. Something that they did was wrong or incorrect, and that's why they're in the situation they're in.
Even as (what I would consider) a well adjusted man, this seems unreasonable to me.
For instance, your example, unreasonable social media beauty standards, is an issue largely perpetuated and enforced by women. Men telling women they look pretty without makeup does not solve women feeling pressured to wear makeup, just as women telling men that it's attractive to be more feminine doesn't suddenly make men stop wanting to have big muscles and a chiseled jaw.
But women do suffer the ripple effects of historical patriarchy and the fact that they have been, until maybe the last decade, almost entirely unrepresented in health studies, economic and political steering, etc. There remains a systemic negative bias against the success of women.
They, just like men, can be both a victim and an aggressor. Heck, this discussion is focusing on young men, but the exact same pipeline also exists for women! See the homesteader influencers, anti-natalists, or dedicated subreddit for misandrists as examples.
These problems are not unique to a single demographic, it's just that young men are the largest affected in the most outwardly obvious way.
I digress a bit. Young men are not failures - that's silly rhetoric that doesn't belong in an honest discussion - most young people are good people just doing their best in hard times. We're talking about a specific subset of them that are statistically relevant enough so as to create meaningful sociopolitical impacts. Single to low double-digit percentage drifts.
And for that subset, I'm still fully capable of empathizing that they are victims of external forces that have abused identity politics and social media algorithms to indoctrinate them in beliefs they likely would not otherwise hold!
In my initial post, I pointed out how men are seen as failures with respect to how they fail to meet the standards of women.
In your response you talk about how women perpetuate negativity onto themselves. You also point out how women can fall victim to systemic negativity in society. However, you didn't say anything of the responsibility that women have to men to make things work (in the same way that you pointed how men fail to meet the standards of women). That's the point.
Women have no "responsibility" to men who don't believe they has equal rights? Heck, women have no responsibility to men they do not know because they're too deplorable to form a rapport at all.
This just sounds like victim blaming that women aren't just taking it lying down and letting men get whatever they want.
To take this to it's logical extreme, as a man, I'm not compromising with racists or sexists. Its wrong. I don't owe them patience or understanding or compromise. I feel empathy for the circumstances that brought us here, but I'm not their therapist and they pose an existential threat to the polite society I want to live in.
The fact that so many men have the response to that of, fine… we’ll take away your reproductive freedom, and next we’re coming for divorce. We want you trapped.
Society changes, people have to adapt, and right now society is failing men, and they aren’t adapting on their own. I’m not sure what the answer is, but Andrew Tate for sure isn’t it.
Each topic hits only certain types of distribution, so if you’re reading and social media sources, are all pretty similar, or you aren’t trying to make sure you click / positively influence the feed to what you want it to be, you might be missing a huge swath of information.
- bad influences - slob - not disciplined enough for education - insane politics - emotionally stunted - slob again
This imagined incel reprobate comes up every time this discussion happens, which is fairly often now that the whiffed messaging and slipping numbers among 18-29yo men (including young black and Latino men) in 2024 somehow has the DNC and progressives scratching their heads. The fuckup you are describing is fairly rare. People imagine that man to feel better about how ineffective the current progressive messaging towards that demographic is. Log off of Discord and 4chan and you'll find plenty of young men that don't listen to manosphere shit, do take care of themselves, went through higher education, held fairly progressive political beliefs until quite recently, handle themselves emotionally exactly the way society has asked, and take care of their living situation just fine, but still feel like their three options are work, work, and blow their head smoove off.
While you're busy swinging at the air, a significantly more dangerous cohort of crypto-deathcultists is forming. They don't not have a girlfriend because they're a freak that says and thinks awful things about women. They don't have a girlfriend because they can't really afford it, can't imagine anybody would want them, and even if they did, in a hyper-atomized post-social-media world that experienced a massive overcorrection in regards to what is appropriate courtship behavior, have no idea how to get started. They just don't really think much about them at all, positive or negative, not because they hate them and want to actively disregard their needs and wants, but because it's effectively like worrying about what an astronaut in space is thinking about right now. And for them, that's all good, maybe even great! They got the little they were owed and Good Men make do with what they have, which is often a reaffirming "yeah dude this life shit sucks lmao" from their buddies, and a generous serving of either infinite distraction if they want to stick around for a bit or self-destructive risk-taking if they don't. The only delusion required is that despite society's massive investment in them that was made in hopes that they would continue society, they in particular don't strictly need to continue society because it would be a good thing that could possibly make them happy, and they're obviously not OWED good things. Nobody is.
To be clear, in some perfectly equal world, this same thing could be happening to women, or men could handle the current situation the way women do. This is not one of those worlds. With the way people in the US are currently socialized, men don't like dealing with dead weight (this unfortunately often includes displaying perfectly reasonable emotions) and women don't like dealing with overly emotional manchildren (this unfortunately often includes displaying perfectly reasonable emotions). Men nut up, women have a lot of platonic friendships that they're emotionally intimate in. Shifting this will take generations, you and your children and their children will be long dead before this ever happens.
Men who are alone and running on fumes can't be lightly brushed aside just because boogeymen like Andrew Tate exist. If you don't let off the throttle on that idea we're just going to keep getting husks of men that are entirely indifferent towards tearing at the fabric of society with a net-negative contribution.
The structural problems that contributed to the current situation are not improving. I am approaching the conclusion that they will not be addressed until the position of one or more broad socioeconomic brackets becomes entirely intolerable.
To massively oversimplify for the sake of brevity, the actual solution is create an economic and social environment that's conducive to the greatest number of people being able and encouraged to engage socially and in-person, instead of the endless scrolling on Instagram or having their social activity consist almost entirely of talking over Discord that became mandated during COVID. That shouldn't be controversial unless you presuppose that those who are struggling are all maladjusted incels who deserve what they got, and not generally normal people in a soulsucking environment. It's why I find comments like the one I initially responded to so gross. The reality of this situation is so obvious and so dangerous that I have to assume that those participating in the mudslinging are writing off an entire demographic for the sake of not having to back down on participating in a moralizing political trend that is losing steam.
It is better to understand than let frustration give way to despair.
With women, the problems and inequality definitely exist, but there is also an enormous movement and a large social and institutional support infrastructure. The same doesn't seem to be the case for men, as far as I can observe it.
(On the other hand, I would take some indicators with a grain if salt. Yes, women get more likes - but they also get more unpleasant and creepy interactions. Even then, the dynamics online also don't directly translate to offline life.
Finally, I think especially for people who spend a large part of their life online, there is a risk of developing unrealistic expectations on things like dating or relationships - for both genders.)
In fact, she's flying across the country and staying with a friend for the next four months just to do an internship at a state park after being ghosted by all of the several hundred other opportunities she's applied for...
- in what fields?
I'm not going to give too much more detail here. Obviously not STEM but nothing fluffy.
Which letter? From my (probably mistaken) perspective
S usually requires a PhD to get into the field and if you get that far, it’s a battle for a handful of poorly paid positions waiting for you
T doesn’t need too much explanation here. Not great right now
E alright, but seems to be pretty sparse. A lot of actual engineering positions seem to have been outsourced long ago. Might also be hard to compete with just an undergrad.
M probably the most valuable right now IMO. Wide range of jobs you could have available, often decent if not high paying, but outside of those (if you can get them) you might as well be a philosopher.
The STEM push seemed to be a grift through and through.
For woman it's usually a cry for help that's why there suicide methods are less lethal. They know there are whole industries focused on supporting them. Meanwhile majority of men know they are alone regardless of there despair.
That's the real reason for the high number of drug related deaths IMO.
Housing unaffordable, pay-later bs, pervasive advertising, degree useless, family unaffordable, AI replacement, gig economy, social media dopamine nonsense, talk of another great conflict, national debt issues, climate change, weaponized media, offshoring, political polarization, lack of third place etc
Prior generations faced arguably bigger ticket challenges (stormy beaches in Normandy) but there is a relentlessness and pervasiveness to the problems now that I think may be new and cumulatively more psychologically impactful.
They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%)
This is all US data BTW.
Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time.
But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers.
So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...
I imagine if you studied this is a less discrete, non-binomial method you'd see even sharper trends. I don't know a single person my age who feels the future has anything for them.
it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc
Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?
Trump and Gates were the two stand-out boomers I found during a quick check. Plenty of powerful people are either younger than the boomers or older than the boomers (e.g. Elison, Biden, Buffett).
The rich in the US are taking advantage of it, by making the US pay for all welfare while they barely pay any taxes.
If you are an American young professional which needs to work in order to survive, you are being ripped off everyday by just existing.
It's very unlikely the federal governments future obligations will be met in real dollars. I've said before "at the end of the day all retirement plans are effectively market driven." I wouldn't want to be depending on social security right now.
From the conclusion:
(I paraphrase) Mental Health has worsened rapidly in the last decade in the US, especially for young women.
It goes on:
""" It does not appear that the declining mental health of young workers is driven by a decline in the
youth wage compared to the wage of older workers; this ratio has increased. Real wages have also
been on the rise. As Feiveson (2024) has noted the relative prices of housing and childcare have
risen. Student debt is high and expensive. The health of young adults has also deteriorated, as
seen in increases in social isolation and obesity. Suicide rates of the young are rising. Moreover,
Jean Twenge provides evidence that the work ethic itself among the young has plummeted. Some
have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs.
There is a good deal of supporting evidence from a variety of surveys including from Pew, the
Conference Board and Johns Hopkins on the parlous state of young worker well-being in the USA
that we documented here. The concern is that we are observing the consequences of past well-
being shocks. We should note that 10.1% of workers aged 20 in 2023 said they were in despair.
They were aged 17 when COVID lockdowns were implemented in 2020. They were 10 years old
in 2013 as the smartphone and the internet exploded. In addition, of course, they were in high
school ages 14-18 in 2017-2021. We know from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that the well-
being of high school students deteriorated sharply around that time.15
Jean Twenge suggested to us that an explanation for this, maybe that childhood and teenage years
with low levels of in-person interaction and more time online, such as have occurred since 2014
or so, results in depression and pessimism and dissatisfaction across many domains (including
work). Social media glamorizes others' lives plus online news and social media encourage
pessimism about jobs and the economy in general. This likely results in dissatisfaction across
many domains, perhaps especially work. With an additional side element perhaps of "the whole
system is rigged anyway, so why try?"
This rise in despair/psychological distress of young workers may well be the consequence of the
mental health declines observed when they were high school children going back a decade or more.
Increasing access to the internet and smartphones seem to be the culprits. """
That is such crazy level of spin it would make electrons orbiting atoms ashamed.
So the young are expected to be happy to waste their life doing something they know is even less than worthless so that they can afford to survive.
That is pure "let them eat cake", "children yearn for the mines" pure raw unadultered bullshit.
I don't necessarily know how that would help economically, but spiritually I think it would be lifting to have a different socio-techncial contract; I think tech could offer some dignity & open doors in a way that escapes the plight of rank consumerism that's eating humanity's collective soul away.
It's really so so sad thinking that the US is so quickly developing such a similar "lie flat" hopelessness. I thought we had a lot more years before the mill of capitalism ground us down to this.
I think the US is "as little as 10 years" away from a significant skilled labor shortage.
People forget that our skilled labor force exists here because we have the resources to demand it. If we actually run this country into a ditch like it looks like we're trying to do, there is no reasons those jobs don't go to higher demand countries like the Nordics, China, or even just Canada.
I think we'll be okay, but everyone is treating this outlook like it's a speed bump, when the consequences of wrecking your economy is a cascade of politically difficult problems that create incentives against investing in the future: see Argentina and Japan.
For those with the means to do so, try hire the Gen-Zs out there who want to succeed despite the circumstances - especially the ones skipping college. They’re some of the most capable, self-motivated people you will ever have the chance to work with!
Some people are too absorbed in their own selfishness to see this. But as an individual you can do all the "right" things and still be casually steamrollered by larger social trends and pressures.
I'd intended my message to be one of actual hope and optimism - that those in the position to do so may affect a small positive change in the world at the individual level. This might be myopic by ivory-tower standards, but the intention was to empower and encourage people not to give up, and that their actions do have a measurable effect on their destiny.
We might not be able to change the circumstances easily (We certainly should be trying to do so), but parallel to this we can support and encourage those going through the tough times.
Many Gen-Zs are demonstrating remarkable resilience - this post was intended as a celebration of that, not to downplay the severity of the society-wide issues at play.
Thanks for the fair critique.