I'm a father of teen kids, teacher and educator. I don't think that there is a single reason here. All mentioned things contribute – social media pressure, climate problems, economical crisis etc. But I'd like to add another one – declining quality of education. I see increasing number of teens depressed because they don't have teachers and their education isn't good enough for jobs they'd like to get in future. And at least some of them are certainly right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32539424
I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb.
I think it's social media, that's what's really changed: Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local peers (and maybe a few grainy MTV stars over 525 scan lines). And of course the "popular" ones they're comparing to are the most successful, most good-looking, most privileged i.e. the most "perfect" ones (because that's how they got to be the most popular). It's a terrible yardstick for anyone to measure themselves against, let along impressionable young minds.
I think social media - which is not so much about media but about performative competition - is just part of the problem.
Reality for kids seems so much more competitive and ruthless in every way. And there are so few resources available to them to help them deal with it.
At the same time opportunities are shrinking and pressure to perform is increasing. It's not enough to be adequate, you have to be outstanding in looks, talent, ability, work ethic, party ethic, lifestyle, income, and education.
But you can't be. Because you're not competing with a small group of relative peers, you're competing with the entire online world.
At the same time there's incoming doom in the form of climate change, Covid mismanagement, outrageous and crippling economic inequality, various wars, and now the threat of AI.
It would be strange if kids weren't getting depressed under these circumstances.
It's actually even worse than that: you're competing separately in each field, in parallel. But you only see the others in the context of that which they are good at, which is why you see them in that space in the first place.
You get used to it though. It is the same with development. You put much work into something and are proud of the result and then some 12 year old, that grew up in the swamp and was risen by wolves, comes around and has a faster and more elegant solution.
I believe a large amount of the negative effects is that people take themselves too seriously. Every quote on social media is put on the scale and becoming a pariah is basically random. The haunting is mostly done by people with a lack of self-worth and confidence themselves.
But some values also changed for the worse in my opinion. Confidence is valued much more than humility and seen as leadership material. I don't believe it prudent to encourage people that actually do look for strong figures out of fear.
when my kids were born i was amazed how competitive getting into a good pre-school was. Then i was amazed how competitive getting in to a good elementary school was and now middle school. One year out and we're already discussing strategy for getting in to a good high school.
When I was a kid you went to whatever school was in your neighborhood. On the other hand, when i was a kid my parents had no idea what a good school event meant.
It would be interesting to plot the Asian percentage in the OP's area vs the time when OP became aware of this competition. Remember: import enough X and you will become X.
It's not about reality for kids, it's for everyone. It's not enough to be a good teacher any more, parents expect you to be on Veritasium level of engagement in every single moment. If services from locksmith is used, LockPickingLawyer is expected all around the world. Every doctor is compared to Dr Varshavski and anything less is not good enough. And the list goes on ...
Veritasium has an entire team and releases 1-3 videos a month. Perhaps the lesson in this is that more should be invested in making education more engaging.
Dr Varshavski can project charisma but i don’t know how well that translates in one on one interactions as his patient. He also doesn’t really seem to be at the top of his field in knowledge and skill, maybe in bedside manners.
Ngl I think that's basically it. There's insane competition at basically all swathes of life to become elite at a young age, look at how far elite college acceptance rates have dropped. This has created generations of depressive workaholics and burnouts. It's a lot worse in Asian countries where these cultural forces are stronger.
Probably the icing on the cake for me, looking like no job prospect and potential for serious consequences ranging from mass scale disinformation to extinction.
We need to get our priorities straight as a species.
20 years ago, when you finished your school day, week, or semester, you could go home, on vacation, etc., and not have any contact with your schoolmates unless you wanted to. Nowadays, you see them and they can interact with you or talk about you 24/7 on social networks. There's no escaping your bully by hiding at home anymore, as you can be publicly bullied on social platforms all the time. This is likely a terrible experience for many young people. Additionally, the constant feeling of inadequacy due to having fewer likes, comments, or friends on your profile compared to the popular kids can be quite disheartening.
Totally agree. Social media built on top of collecting Likes and Followers, causes brain damage not just in kids but in adults too. That architecture has to be dismantled.
But parent comment abv has a point teaching is a big factor here. And teaching in the current environment has become much more complex.
There is endless over stimulation and distraction which ruins environments where learning is possible. And secondly information has exploding. Kids can easily get overwhelmed just looking at a Wikipedia article. Teachers have a very hard job keeping things on track.
"I'm not sure you can blame problems such as climate change, economic issues -- every generation had its own existential crisis: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, numerous recessions and until 1990, recent generations lived under the specter of the atom bomb."
All of those issues felt less existential (or at least had very clear points of no return that we managed to avoid going over the brink on), and climate change for many, maybe quite reasonably so, feels like we will be the proverbial boiling frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
It feels different because of the complexity and scale is no longer definable or predicated on a clear discrete set of objects (e.g. Nuclear powers, key banking systems, a hot war with defined participants) but is by global definition....everything.
It's abstract yet ever present (e.g. all the recent climate weirdness, and the disasters that have followed, both in terms of pure environmental impacts as well as economic and overall regional stability as byproducts thereof) and that becomes much more difficult to "manage"
this 100x. And in the young brain, every single person looks amazing because that's how everyone is posturing constantly. Image filters can even literally make someone better looking. It's basically an arms race to 0 on who can posture the best.
> Every single teenager is now comparing themselves against every other kid in the world instead of just their local peers
This is so out of touch. You might as well be using the "It's the video games!" excuse of yore.
Teenagers and those in their 20s see what their parents were able to do. They hear what their parents bought their house for, they know about their pensions, they see that their parents could afford raising a child into their teens, they find out that college was actually affordable. They know that's now all out of reach.
Some even see their parents struggling, and know it's going to be much much worse for them.
Huge productivity growth doesn't seem to have translated into commensurate wage growth. Meanwhile housing, higher education, and health care are increasingly unaffordable, as you note, and credentialism makes higher education a requirement for more jobs.
I think you're on target about the discouraging aspects of being visibly worse off than your parents' generation, and I think that millennials have that problem as well.
The situation is likely to get worse as AI-fueled productivity increases are unlikely to improve wages either.
I had recurring nightmares about a malfunctioning nuclear warhead that slowed abnormally and spiraled in a flat spin leaving a smoke/vapor trail as it neared its ultimate detonation height.
The movie Red Dawn was the ultimate manifestation of 80's red hysteria and triumphal American exceptionalism.
~625 scanlines (PAL)? We only had ~480 scan lines with NTSC.
My parents had a roof-mounted VHF/UHF antenna that could be electrically rotated with a dial. Looking something like this
I agree that social media is a huge factor, but I suspect other generations dealing with the crises you mentioned had high rates of mental illness as well, but it wasn't tracked, or wasn't tracked the same way, or there were different but equally serious manifestations of it than self-harm and suicide.
There's also been a corresponding dramatic drop in the number of teens who have had any sort of job. Not many things are as fulfilling as doing a job and getting paid for it.
I remember when I realized I was making enough money that I could pay all my bills and no longer needed anything from my dad. It felt really good. For me that was the dividing line between being a child and an adult.
That and there are also fewer jobs available to teens / young adults. The types of jobs that we are making obsolete, whether through automation or regulation, are the types of repetitive, "unskilled" jobs that were previously offered to people just starting out. I'll take a chance on my 16 year-old nephew if I can pay him $5 / hour but if I have to pay him $15 / hour by law I'd rather have someone with more references. I'm also likely to ask that person to take on more responsibility, too, since my overhead just went up and my margins were paper thin to begin with. So now I need someone with additional experience.
Or you get an unskilled immigrant who has his back against the wall. I read an article claiming this is where teen jobs went, not sure how well supported it is.
It is an well-known secret that the largest and most successful farm in my area extensively uses illegal immigrants for labor. They say that citizens are too unreliable and unproductive for them to be profitable.
How do you know they’re illegal? There’s legal immigrants that get bussed in from Mexico to all the corners of the country for seasonal labor. Just cuz they’re immigrants doesn’t mean their illegal. Of course they could be. But I’m not sure I’d trust the rumor mill to know the difference.
They all but admitted to the practice during a tour. I own a farm and was asking lots of questions, and they actively avoided answering some of my questions on the topic. It was clear as day that they do not care about legal immigration status.
The problem stems from the fact that there are not enough legal immigrants to go around. If they limit themselves to legal immigrants, they would not be able to run as large an operation as they do.
Not many things are as fulfilling as doing a job and getting paid for it.
Sorry, I don't get fulfillment from a job, nor do I base my personality on it. A job is a thing that I have to do to live and do some stuff I like.
That's it, nothing more. I'd never do actual work unless I had to, and I'd never work full time if I didn't have to. I'm never going to be motivated to work harder for a fancy car if I can have a reliable, efficient car. I'd like more space, but it needs not be huge or pretty (though, I'd like to cook and make art).
Making art is fulfilling. I enjoy making food - work means I eat more convenience foods. I don't need to be paid to help folks, either. I can get a sense of accomplishment by doing things that are difficult, from projects to playing games.
I DESPISED my first job (I delivered newspapers), but the independence it afforded me, the ability to buy clothes I like, to invest in a computer of my own and to take my girlfriend on dates was extremely fulfilling.
Productive work, in general, is fulfilling even if you don't happen to like your current "job." It is not the job itself, it is the act of taking action in order to achieve your values. If you value producing art, that is productive work even if it's not your "job" and even if it doesn't pay the bills. You are achieving some value from that. If you are truly fortunate you can find a way to monetize doing work that you would do even if it didn't pay ... but if your job is "just a means to an end", that end is clearly a value and the job is helping you achieve it. It's the achievement of the value that is rewarding.
My first job was delivering newspapers, too. I didn't despise it, it was easy work, nobody looking over my shoulder, the pay was good enough to put money in my pocket.
Fundamentally, people value what they work to achieve. Things gotten without effort are not valued.
BTW, having a job does look good on a college application.
Our teens problem might be they only value the number of likes on their profile.
Note that I won't get any credit to what I'm saying : I have less than 10 followers.
Your words, not gp. A part-time job as a teen helps you navigate and integrate into society. Part-time helps you get out of your bubble and interact with the public, who may be different to your upbringing.
It is immediately clear to me who has had a job as a teen (read: service job), and who has not in my experience. This may be a form of reverse-classism on my part, but learning to sweep a floor and take out the trash for a few months during summer is not going to KILL YOUR DREAMS which seems to be the meme. In fact, you could view it as service to your community!
While I was working 10h/w during high school, I was also making DOOM wads and learning BSP algo in my extremely ample free time.
Also note, that many skills gained in these jobs can directly translate to irl skills. For me, working at a deli taught me how to make food, be on time, measure crap, clean things, interact with people not in my generation, and more!
Maybe you don't get fulfillment, but as a teen with nothing going on it was nice to have some extra money and essentially a playground to learn new skills on someone else's time. It wasn't to live, it was to prime the pump for later in life.
> While I was working 10h/w during high school, I was also making DOOM wads and learning BSP algo in my extremely ample free time.
I don't recall having what I would call "ample" spare time in high school. I recall being at school 8:30 to 4 every day, then a few hours of homework daily and/or exam prep for the endless exams ("don't fail" they said, "or you'll never go to university and your life is ruined forever!"). I wasn't even that social and rarely spent time at friend's houses, let alone partying or clubbing. In fact, I had so little time I didn't explore "computers" as an industry until I finally did get to university and could actually spend 6 hours a day after lectures fiddling with a laptop and this thing called "Python".
In fact probably the one thing that got me going on electronics and computers at university wasn't the lectures and assignments as much as the free time and ability to spend whole days on things, not to mention socialising freely and at length.
With the min-maxing of pre-university CVs that it seems you need to do to get into the Right Schools (TM) and then into university, I'm not sure it has gotten better since then.
In retrospect I should have told them all to do one and spent high school on what I wanted rather than another essay about WWII and the endless, endless coursework that would suck up any spare time ("I've got an hour, I'd better polish the portfolio even more"), and even if I'd gotten the dreaded lower grades and so not gotten into the same university it would probably have been better over all.
I think homework overload could be part of the problem.
When I went to highschool in the
Aughts, UC tracked students rarely had homework, maybe 30 min a day, and school got out at 2:15. If you had a good job, you could get 1 or 2 hours of school credit instead.
Young family members I know now talk about several hours of work per day.
Here's the difference: I was a mediocre student who did zero exam prep. I did homework in the classes I cared about and didn't in the ones I did not in high school. My GPA was mediocre, B-esque, high SATs, only extracurricular was Computer Club. I spent my time reading books and fucking off driving all over creation to go dumpster diving to slake my hunger for computer parts.
I did not have a "portfolio". I had a bunch of weak programming experience from books I checked out from the library and a compiler I stole from my high school because I wanted to program so badly. (1998~, open source compilers existed but to my eyes I wanted Borland Turbo C++) Yea that's right I copied that floppy! :D Imagine a time when you had to BUY compilers!!
I wrote an entrance essay that I used for all four of my college applications about how computer games were the next huge entertainment media, replacing movies. I didn't min max anything because I didn't care / had no idea / was stupid. I was accepted at all of them, Case Western Reserve, Drexel, Rutgers, Rowan. I went to a non-ivy competitive engineering school in my area, which I'm repeatedly discovering was a very good computer science program.
I went on to a fruitful research career for 10y, and now industry.
Maybe I'm telling on myself that somehow I have incredible luck or privilege, since compared to you I sound like a failure. I am the first person to go to college in my family, and worked while I was in college as well as paid internship at a research university.
The only skill I had was doing the thing directly in front of me and keeping my eyes on the next thing. The jobs I had were nothing special: a dogsbody at a deli, delivering newspapers, Toys R Us, Staples, Dominos Pizza.
Every job taught me something different:
- something can go wrong and it not be your fault
- if you have time to lean you have time to clean
- some jobs are just fighting entropy, and that's normal (note: this is in service of bigger goals, every time)
- everyone is happy to see the pizza guy
I'm not sure how old you are, I'm ~40, so it is entirely possible we have different eras. Maybe it's possible to over optimize, also maybe I'm too old for this discussion. Anecdotes aren't data.
In short, if you've never cleaned a toilet that isn't yours, it is less likely I will trust you.
I long ago lost all interest in playing games. The problem with them is nothing is accomplished. Play pinball and get a number on the display. Play Doom and - nothing. Although I invented the Empire game, most of my pleasure in it was developing it.
> Although I invented the Empire game, most of my pleasure in it was developing it.
Seems normal enough to me. I found a plateau in playing games, so switched to modding and making them, even as a teen. Everyone has different thresholds and can find joy wherever it suits them.
Also the freedom a job gives a young person will be unlike anything they've experienced up to that point. Prior to a teen's first job their experience of the world outside their home (i.e. school) is highly regimented, with little opportunity to just be a normal human being around other humans. A job provides that outlet.
It used to be good, but my guess is a modern kid, particularly a middle class one, doesn't get as much out of it. Minimum wage has stagnated, but also people these days have their eyes on internships that will secure a career. There's simply no point in pursuing burger-flipping if you can't find a way to hang around a law firm or a hedge fund, and those firms won't care at all that you worked hard in a menial job.
When I was a kid there was never a time when I could pay for everything. The first time that happened was an internship I got during college, and then my first job right after.
$12/hr is at or under the minimum wage in 19 of 54 US jurisdictions (50 states + DC, VI, PR, CNMI), so depending on where you are, that’s…not that significant.
What high school kids are interning at hedge funds? Jobs like life guarding, painting, tradesman’s gopher, fast food, etc are still great jobs for kids to learn a work ethic and make some cash. Trying to kick start a career in high school is beyond silly for most kids.
That’s clearly far outside the norm though. Normal high school kids aren’t aspiring to (or would even be allowed to) be interns at places like that outside of really unique situations.
Yes and thus the collapse in teen employment. No point in working if you don't find that unicorn internship. Flipping burgers is just not worth it, you may as well do exam practice or just have free time.
I wonder about the timing of these social changes. My impression was that the tradition of high school students having jobs started to fade away in the 1990s.
0. How do kids socialize without devices these days?
1a-b. Do they meet new people like them and/or unlike them?
2. Do they go outside and explore the world nearby?
3a-b. Do they get in the same or different kinds of trouble as past generations of kids?
4a-d. What are the fundamental social values they share that differ from 1-4 generations ago?
5a-c. Do they have as much curiosity, work ethic, or resiliency to setbacks?
Here's my neon fuchsia fanny-pack, old personitis for reference:
When I was a kid, I had to wake up at 5:45 am to get ready to walk 1.3 mi (2 km) to a school bus stop when there was a perfectly good school 0.25 mi away. (Supposedly, I was denied a slot due to race-integration busing but I attribute it to paranoid parents rationalizing their lack of resolve.) The bus ride was 90 minutes each way for 3 hours total, depending on traffic. It was a magnet school where there were many kids from broken homes, abuse, poverty, undocumented parents hanging on, and situations adjacent to drug gangs. The non-IEP classroom material was too slow for me and I was often bored. The turnover of teachers was about 50%/year. Many substitute teachers. There were bullies, girls who behaved in age-inappropriate manners, carved graffiti-encased desks, and mountains of scantrons and dittos (spirit duplicator). No school uniforms, but gang colors and teen pregnancy were omnipresent concerns. Hardcover textbooks were worn to where bindings had saggy wrinkles. No computers and no cell phones.
I can answer a some those. Have family members who are teachers, friends who work with youth, etc and this whole thing comes up a lot.
I've used your numbering system to organize answers.
2. Less than previous generations.
There's simply far less places that will let kids just hang out.
Until a certain age its likely CPS will be called and police will be involved if your kids are out exploring, and after that age said kids hanging out is deemed antisocial and undesirable... So private security or the police hassle them.
3a-b: some the same, some different. Underage drinking/smoking/fucking is down, illicit drug use is down somewhat, but smoking's been replaced by vapes, and the drugs are different - often pharmaceuticals (real or counterfeit) such as xanax, etc.
Actual antisocial behavior is way down, but perceived antisocial behavior is up. Behaviours that previously were deemed largely benign (kids hanging out) are deemed unwanted. As per answer 2.
4a-d: the kids tend to be significantly more "tolerant" than previous generations. Make of that what you will.
5a-c: yes? They are still curious as all fuck, but work ethic is a funny animal.
Most traditional avenues for teenagers to "work" (outside of academics) are being closed off due to labour rules, liability, etc.
So a lot of younger people try make money online, have some kind of hustle. This ranges across the board of legality, morality, etc. Be it flipping clothes on Depop, dubious schemes involving dropshipping or selling knockoff designer gear online, selling artwork/crafts, trying to become an influencer/streamer/whatever... There's massive pressure to try monetize any hobby.
Resilience? Its teenagers. Some are hard as nails, some are drips.
I'd like to add some nuance to this. While student performance seems to be clearly declining (at least at the college level, which I'm familiar with), I don't know how well we can distinguish the contributions of poor teaching and poor student preparedness.
I'll give a concrete example from South Korea. For several years, the English proficiency of incoming university students was so high, there was serious talk of closing English language programs as no longer needed. Within the last few years though, student ability levels have plummeted, requiring drastic dumbing-down of the curriculum at the school where I work. I know many Korean primary, secondary, and college teachers, and I don't think the decline in student achievement is due to their slacking off. It seems to be due to something going on in society outside the schools.
Middle class and above kids still do as well in math in public schools as they do in private schools. The problem is that students from more disadvantaged backgrounds don't do as well, and its not like they can afford private schools anyways.
I grew up poor, it has nothing to do with private school to me at all, it's all about struggling parents still convinced their kids to do their best, and put education first as a family group effort.
most of the poor here still is relatively much better off than those from under-developed countries, plus our school provides free lunch, many programs will waive fees if you're economically disadvantaged, etc. It's not as good as those well-off families but it's really good enough for you to do fine in education.
I saw so many economically challenged kids carrying new iphones, dressed well, yet not really into learning at schools, it's certainly not just an economic problem.
> most of the poor here still is relatively much better off than those from under-developed countries
Education wise, middle class in a developing or under developed country will still beat poor in a developed country even if the latter have more money than the former. Culture has a lot to do with it, a lot has to do with the latter's parents not teaching current parents the same thing that the former's were taught. Home situation is much of the problem, and you can't just throw money at the problem, unfortunately.
European countries might do a better job at this by either (a) having less poor people (immigrants) or (b) putting in more resources to ensure that these kids get more support at home and in school to make up for their disadvantage. But often, you'll find in European countries that they have the same problems with kids from disadvantaged background being behind middle class kids, they just work at solving the problem better than we do in the states.
I also observed there are many economically disadvantaged parents driving their kids to charter schools for better education, that made a huge difference, as their home campus is filled with lots of students that are not that into education. point is family might be the key for success, more than private-school or giving-more-money,etc.
As a longtime educator, I see a lot of experienced teachers leaving. In fact, I'm leaving this year, though I'm unsure if it's permanent.
It's a mixture of reasons, from low pay to high demands, but I think a large part is a lack of respect from students, parents and admin. Teachers have been stripped of most of their power to do anything about it. The last year I taught public school a student was verbally abusing others and threatening them in class and I couldn't get him removed. It ruined the class and scared other students, but because he had documented issues they said they couldn't do anything.
I teach in overseas private schools now, and the kids are fantastic and the pay is decent, but the job has an increasing amount of non-teaching related stuff which detracts from the what matters, the kids. Also, the syllabus for CS is so outdated, and I find myself apologizing to the kids since I need to to teach it to them for their exams. I teach around the syllabus as best I can, but you still need to get results.
TLDR: Experienced teachers leaving, lack of autonomy, curriculum suck
One of the most important things we can teach kids today is how to teach themselves. I wouldn't have graduated college over a decade ago without Wikipedia and there are far better resources now.
Out of those i m trying to understand climate problems. They dont affect daily life in a visible way. Climate anxiety however has become a thing because of too much media fixation around it. It s so prevalent that some psychologists think it should be classified as a disease
The article has a point, but there's no proof for cause & effect.
A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously - while in the past people just had to 'function', no matter what.
While I agree there is no statistical proof in the article, it's a very strong hypothesis: we somehow only 'listen' to the mental problems of female teens, who see geometric increases in self harm, suicide and various disorders, twice or three times the pre-social media levels. Yet other categories see linear or token increases.
Could it be just a coincidence that young females are exactly the demographic that is constrained by a gender role where aesthetic appeal and social interactions are the most valuable assets? And those are exactly the type of things that social networks exploited, monetized and massively gamified in the last decade?
What's more likely: a rapid change of the cultural norms and roles associated with growing up as a woman or of those related to recognizing and treating mental health issues (all in a single decade!); OR: a purely technical revolution that put interactive screens in the hands of each kid and made the former much more effective in harming their development and leading to the latter?
At least for the young female demographic, I think there is a massive burden of proof for anyone claiming the epidemics is not social-media induced.
"that is constrained by a gender role where aesthetic appeal and social interactions are the most valuable assets?"
In theory we should have seen a spike and then slow decline as gender norms and roles continue to become less segregating.
"Yet other categories see linear or token increases."
Yeah, because other categories may manifest their problems differently. Such as young men turning to violence and drugs more than intentional self-harm (almost the inverse of young women). That doesn't mean it's not the problem, just that it's not such a great proof.
In my opinion it seems like there is more institutionalize going on, but that's only a subset of restrictions that are being rolled back. Eg. If 25 states roll back restrictions (or implement protections) and the other 25 reinforce those restrictions, then you still have a 50% reduction. On the corporate side, I've seen a ton of protections/benefits being increased which didn't exist anywhere even 10 years ago.
> A significant part of the trans movement is a reactionary reinforcement of rigid gender roles
This is an anti-trans talking point and not remotely representative of actual trans communities.
Source: am trans and nonbinary, and I have never heard another trans person complain about me not fitting into specific gender roles. The only people who complain are cis people who think my gender or lack thereof is either a ruse or a mental illness.
> I have never heard another trans person complain about me not fitting into specific gender roles
That is a straw-man of my position. A large part of the trans community believes hormone blockers should be liberally administered to teenagers and children, for example. That is by definition an attempt to steer healthy biological development into pre-established expectations of body conformity. The entire "transwomen are women" mantra is a vehement call for binarity: transwomen can't simply be transwomen, i.e. free people living their lives how they see fit, they must be externally recognized and validated as this social defined thing called a woman, which they were born into.
So while, of course, a community member would never comment or object to another's degree of conformity, popular variants of trangederism exhibit a strong conceptual agreement that gender objectively exists, as opposed to being an entirely made up thing used to pigeonhole people into social roles according to their biology.
This is in perfect opposition to traditional feminism, which seeks to dismantle oppressive gendered institutions. And in fact, in perfect opposition with the liberal tradition that pursues individual sovereignty and de-marginalization; just imagine using the same discourse of "being born in the wrong body" and "getting the treatment they need" for any other social class that is discriminated against for minor biological variance, such as skin color, height or weight.
Hmm, I was going to write something that disagreed, but I do see a point there. Although you left out some of the connections and it's not specifically what we're talking about. I'm not sure that it was this article, but a different one mentioned that the self harm and suicides were 2x-3x higher for LGBTQ teens. Basically, we're seeing a much higher rate in one subgroup which could account for the bulk of the increase as their representation in the overall group rises.
So I can see the pressures associated with acceptance or challenges of LGBTQ teens as a possible increase as they make up an increasing part of that demographic. However, I don't think that gender roles specifically play a part since more things are continuously becoming available and accepted regardless of gender.
> And it's no coincidence young female teens are by far the most susceptible to transition to the opposite role: social media tells them "they were born in the wrong bodies".
Um, statistically, trans women are more common than trans men.
> Um, statistically, trans women are more common than trans men.
I think it is somewhat more common for people who are AFAB to identify as non-binary than for people who are AMAB to do so, which if you consider it part of the same broad class of things might be sufficient to tip the balance back to that side.
Not that I endorse the “social contagion” theory GP is spouting, in the least.
In the old days trans people weren't shooting up christian schools out of frustration. I wonder if perhaps society made a mistake by so many members giving them the false impression that society should accept them for who they identify as. In the old days they pretty much had to learn to accept themselves for who they were and not worry about what other people thought, both because no one was encouraging them they deserved acceptance and because few would have budged.
Young white progressive teens in general seem to be following a path that advances the idea society should be progressing towards acceptance, inclusion and mutual progress. Sadly lip service doesn't overturn human nature. Boomers for better or worse seem to take an attitude of "fuck you, on your own" and at some point perhaps it's lower stress just to not be thinking at all times you can control the thoughts of others.
re: minortom
Not an advocate against those able to consent doing whatever want with their bodies. Don't think my argument works against that. Although it would be a fallacy to suggest anything other than the current medical standard results in more deaths and thus advocating otherwise is advocation for suffering; the medical studies never claim it's impossible to achieve less suffering some other way.
I'm hopefully wrong but it seems like you may have made some assumptions that I want to control treatment options for trans people. It feels like I've wrongly been presumed as wanting suffering for trans people; in fact my whole premise was to find out why they are frustrated this way indeed with the hopes they can find new coping strategies.
To note, I don't see why justification is even needed for transition surgery. The (hopefully) wrong assumption I made here is that you stated it like it was relevant in the decision as to whether I should be in favor of it being an option. Even if it made them worse off, they shouldn't be stopped. It's a bit terrifying one even has to include efficacy to justify whether a consenting adult is allowed to modify their body, and worrying comment you've made IMO that presents exactly the kind of problems we have with hyper concern over the opinion of others on what we do with our bodies.
This narrative about trans shooters is disconnected from reality. If you take every trans shooter in the last decade, you get less than 10… out of thousands. For context, last year America has nearly 700 mass shootings. Trans people are actually under represented in mass shootings. Estimates put trans people at up to 1% of the population. We would naively expect 7 shooters last year to be trans, but none were. Saying that the recent shooter is part of a trend of transgender shooters requires outright ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
The desperation to argue against a straw man is real. If trans people went from no school shootings to one in 2020 and one in 2023 there may or may not be a "trend" but it's still worth finding out why that is happening.
Edit:
re pupptailwags: Yes we should be examining whenever people are engaging in violence, factors behind that happening. I'm quite certain, unlike assertion made below, that people indeed have studied the qualities of males in particular engaging in this kind of violence.
rethelopa: I was replying to a comment talking about why something (male disposition to this kind of violence) hadn't been studied; it has.
[note I'm rate limited, which is reason for replying this way]
I’m assuming I’m the “assertion made below”. I made no such claim. Let me rephrase it.
There have been 8 mass shootings in America in the last 7 days. No one was running to twitter to speculate about their causes. No politicians were raising concerns about troubling trends. The shootings were going completely unremarked on in national politics… until a shooter happened to be trans.
If you want to speculate that commentators and politicians are giving the other incidents the same attention, we would literally never hear the end of it. On average, almost 2 mass shootings happen per day. But, for some reason, those incidents weren’t given national attention. Curious.
We didn't apply this standard to all men when we went from no school shootings to one school shooting in 1840. I don't see a reason why we should apply it to another gender.
You optimize for the common case, not the uncommon one. Shouldn’t we figure out why shootings in general are happening rather than fixating on a specific case because it involved an unpopular minority group?
I think searching for a general common solution is precisely why we are getting nowhere. It may be there are some "unpopular" opinions that turn out to be factors. Many small pieces make a large one, and important hints often come in unexpected places.
But, again, why are you focusing on a group that is statistically less likely to commit mass shootings compared to the average person? Even if you find some root cause for trans shooters, you’d be, at best, eliminating what amounts to about 0.1% of cases. Why not look at groups that are over represented?
One day I'm in a coal mine and 1 canary dies, the next day 100 canaries die. I probably think the coal or some mineral in the mine just kills canaries.
Eventually a dog dies. Now I start wondering "Well dogs are only 1% of the dead animals, may as well not focus on that..." I may miss out on an important observation.
If your presumption is true, that trans are more robust against these kind of acts, now I'm wondering. Maybe unhinged poorly socialized young males are the canaries and trans are yet something new. What's wrong in the coal mine and what can I learn by focusing on the newest subjects.
(I'm not trying to convince you of anything, just making this clear for anyone else reading. also: comment talks about suicide)
> In the old days they pretty much had to learn to accept themselves for who they were and not worry about what other people thought, both because no one was encouraging them they deserved acceptance and because few would have budged.
According to scientific research, around 1/3 of patients with gender dysphoria have attempted suicide in the past. The only medically accepted treatment for gender dysphoria is transition. If you're advocating against that then you're advocating in favor of preventable suffering & deaths.
Also, using human nature as an argument is fallacious.
I understood your comment to be against social acceptance of trans people, (and honestly still do. Admittedly this isn't a best-faith interpretation of your comment, but it made sense in the context I read it in. )
Therefore, my comment wasn't intended to be only about available medical treatment options (including surgical), but also about social acceptance of trans people, which is a kinda important part of all of this.
If that's not how you intended to mean your comment, that's great, because I agree with you on the medial/surgical side of things.
I've replied above (due to rate-limiting timeout, had to capture my thoughts there earlier).
I have no interest in stopping consenting adult trans or any other person from any surgery/treatment, regardless of how efficacious or not it is. But do not make the mistake of believing because it is the only medically accepted treatment of gender dysphoria (which is curiously a treatment for something that is not even a disorder or illness), that it must be the path to least suffering and death.
(I wrote this reply as a comment edit originally, but I'm making this it's own comment.)
I understood your comment to be against social acceptance of trans people, (and honestly still do. Admittedly this isn't a best-faith interpretation of your comment, but it made sense in the context I read it in. )
Therefore, my comment wasn't intended to be only about available medical treatment options (including surgical), but also about social acceptance of trans people, which is a kinda important part of all of this.
If that's not how you intended to mean your comment, that's great, because I agree with you on the medial/surgical side of things.
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(Reply to the parent comment:)
It is the best-currently-known-path for least suffering and death. And a lot better than the currently-known alternatives. I'm not trying to say that no better treatment might become available in the future.
(Aside: gender dysphoria is listed in the DSM-5, which is important for health insurance purposes, amongst other reasons. It was previously named gender identity disorder, but was renamed due to the stigma associated with the term disorder. There was also the diagnosis of "transsexualism" (which included homosexuality, amongst others) and the inclusion of these issues in the DSM remains a topic of debate.)
I have to admit I've had to try really hard to not get sucked into this side debate on the efficacy of transition. I've found conflicting data here, I'm willing to acknowledge it may be true that it leads to better outcomes for many individuals. In any case, as I've said, there's little I can act on there as I have no right to impose that kind of control on others.
I am intrigued by the intersectionality of transition and social acceptance. You seem to have been following some research here, what have you found regarding the social acceptance of trans persons before and after transition? Are they finding more social acceptance after treatment?
That's not what I meant, exactly. I'm just trying to argue that we should allow people to transition (from a social perspective, not just a medical one) and respect them and their new gender.
(I don't think they're finding more social acceptance after transition, with some light exceptions as the realization and acceptance of their dysphoria allowes them to find more accepting social circles, and some probably are less accepted by their environment after.)
(I'm also not an expert at this, I've just been parroting some well-known takes but I've looked at research to back them up, as "Source: Reddit" isn't the most convincing)
I actually don't think it's wise to make a claim that more than one trans person has shot up more than one christian school at this point, or even to attribute the terrorist act by a single trans person to the acceptance of transgender people more broadly.
I've specifically said they weren't shooting up christian schools in the old days, with no commentary on the (non-zero) number of schools shot in modern days, so I have no idea what you're even arguing against. Your whole comment is a side-step strawman.
Although for the record it doesn't even make sense to say "trans person wasn't shooting school in the old days." Pluralization is an appropriate use of English here.
My comment is that I don't think its reasonable to attribute a terrorist action to the lessening of oppression that that demographic has received overall.
It's funny when they bring up that Simone de Beauvoir quote "one is not born a woman, but becomes one", as the rest of the passage it is from completely undermines what they assume it's about - Beauvoir talks about "the figure that the human female presents in society" and then goes on to critique this:
« On ne naît pas femme : on le devient. Aucun destin biologique, psychique, économique ne définit la figure que revêt au sein de la société la femelle humaine ; c'est l'ensemble de la civilisation qui élabore ce produit intermédiaire entre le mâle et le castrat qu'on qualifie de féminin. Seule la médiation d'autrui peut constituer un individu comme un Autre. En tant qu'il existe pour soi, l'enfant ne saurait se saisir comme sexuellement différencié. »
To Beauvoir, "woman" is a harmful social construct that is forced upon all females, so this doesn't apply to males who call themselves women, because firstly, they are not female, and secondly, they are not forced into womanhood. It's comical how so fundamentally they've misunderstood her point.
The argument appears to be "wanting to change your gender posits that gender is part of objective reality and not a social construct, which is sexist", which is analogous to "trying to create racial equality implies the races are unequal now which is racist".
If you ignore realities of present society and pretend that things like gender roles and racial discrimination don't exist today, you can make it look like people are fighting to create those things instead of to reduce them.
The analogy is deeply flawed since nobody is changing their race to fight racist social roles. Just imagine going to a classroom and telling the audience that some children are born in the wrong body that does not align to their real, deep race.
Rather, we fight racism by rejecting racialized social roles. There is nothing racist in acknowledging current racial inequality, but it's deeply racist to suggest there exist a "real", inner race that influences our behaviors, and if society pushes us into racialized roles, it's because they don't afirm our "true race".
Similarly, we fight sexism by rejecting gendered social roles, biological sex is a minor anatomical detail that - aside from well specified domains, such as reproduction and raw physical strength - should have no bearing on someone's ability and right to perform any social role they desire.
To do anything else for pragmatic reasons is as if the suffragettes would have dressed up as men on election day and attempt to vote that way; ie, recognize and reafirm the restriction instead of attacking the fundamental inequity of the male-only vote.
Your first sentence suggests you're trying to argue, but I don't see where the contradiction is. Even the transmeds would agree with what you've written.¹
Trans people don't be trans in order to fight sexist gender roles. They're trans, and (often) fight sexist gender roles.
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Some pedantic notes that may or may not be relevant:
• The two different domains you list are influenced by different dimensions of biological sex, which can vary independently.
• A social gender, while culturally-influenced, seems to represent something fundamental about human experience.² Many societies' social gender categories do not align 1-to-1 with biological sex classifications, but 'most all of them have them. Meanwhile, race isn't seen outside racists and those influenced by racism: it is a recent³ invention.
• Some people's brains, for whatever reason, do care about the sexual characteristics of the rest of the body. This isn't much of a problem if that "preference" matches what the body is, but it can cause people significant distress when they don't.⁴ ⁵
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¹: Though transmeds would dispute the (perfectly valid) implication in your second sentence. "Born in the wrong body" isn't an entirely accurate explanation: it's more of a lie-to-adults, only required if you've got a stodgy old binarist model in your head that can just about conceptualise the existence of gay people. It's up there with "lesbian relationships are butch/femme": not something we need to be teaching children, though probably better than acting like LGBT people don't exist.
²: Disclaimer: I'm not speaking from experience. My intuition is that gendering is bad. From observing other people actually liking, and gaining value from, gendering themselves, I suspect there might be value in keeping gender around, for their sakes; however I have not really taken the time to square this with the clear and obvious harm caused by our society's obsessive gender-all-the-things-and-people tendencies.
³: Dating back at most 1400 years, with its European-coloniser incarnation probably not much more than 400 years old, and the modern eugenicist version less than 200 years old.
⁴: This doesn't necessarily even line up with gender! I know a cis guy who went on feminising HRT, and he says it made him a lot happier. (I don't have access to the inside of his head, but I'd be inclined to believe him.)
⁵: Personally, I don't see why someone should need to have a medical condition to get to choose what their body is like. I get the rationale, seeing as these are semi-permanent choices that one's future self might disagree with – but we could apply the same logic to tattoos, nose rings, or earlobe stretching. (Perhaps we should!)
Regardless, the fact remains that many people do have such a medical condition.
> A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously
I lived in the Eastern Europe of the 1980s and the 1990s, not the best of times, economically speaking. I used to play football with Rroma children that were walking strange, at least that's how it looked to child-me, only later to find out that most probably they had been afflicted by polio in the past. All this to say that things were tough.
Even so, as a kid back then I had no acquaintances of my age who were harming themselves or, the worst of all, who were off-ing themselves. We would have known, kids used to know this sort of stuff because we were almost always outside, playing together.
Suffice is to say that things are now totally different. I've heard of kids harming themselves at 11-12 years of age and I know of a young lady who took her own life (at 16 or 17). Again, that was unimaginable 30 to 40 years ago.
Is it at least partly a case of getting what you incentivize?
I was a teen in the 1980s, never knew of anyone who harmed himself other than accidentally. But we also didn't have doctors and counselors incessantly asking if we were depressed, or thinking of hurting ourselves. A kid today who says "yes" to either of those questions is going to find he's getting heaps of attention all of a sudden.
I have been thinking about this because I was at an orthopedist this week for an orthopedic isssue and I had to answer their "depression screening" questions. Trying to decide if these are being pushed by big pharma to get more people on antidepression meds or where else this might be coming from. The whole time I'm jsut thinking "you people aren't mental health specialists, or even general practioners, why are you asking me these irrelevant questions"
One possible contributing explaination that I don't see addressed is that our lifestyles and opportunities have peaked in prior generations and are backsliding. Technology and politics are so invasive that you can't necessarily get a fresh start somewhere else. Young people realize this and figure "why even try". The difference in boys and girls with the graphs are that boys tend to act out and girls tend to self harm.
Who knows if this is a possibile contributor or not. Would be interesting to look into.
Statistics like that don't always make sense.
Prior to the 1960s you will barely find incest in any official report because society wasn't ready to talk about it.
To me that seems like a purely post-hoc argument with no evidence to justify it.
For instance, imagine that the data were showing the opposite effect, that is, adults having a significantly greater increase in depression and anxiety than teenagers.
If that were the case, one could just as easily argue that it fits with the "our societies are so advanced that we can listen to mental illnesses" hypothesis quite well, because adults have the autonomy, resources, and maturity to get the attention they need to tackle their issues and symptoms. Teenagers don't, on the other hand, as they depend on their teachers and guardians and older adults often dismiss kids' symptoms as “not real illness” and just angst and moodiness.
I can only speak to my own experience but I suspect there is some generational component to the increased awareness of mental health issues.
I was in high school during late 90's and early 00's. I was not diagnosed with anything until 2009 (around the articles timeline) looking back in hindsight I struggled with issues for years, lack of energy (some days just dragging myself out of bed was chore), lack of motivation to do anything, I avoided socializing with people I had no energy to stay in touch with friends I would make excuses to avoid hanging out with people all of the time because I never felt up to it.
If I spoke up to family members etc I was told what I was going through was normal, everyone feels tired, in essence to suck it up and stop being a wimp. It got to the point I just assumed everyone felt the way I did all of the time.
It wasn't until by chance I saw a different and younger doctor one day for an unrelated health issue I mentioned (again) how tired I felt all the time lack of energy I had it was explained to me that what I was experiencing very much not normal. That was the first time anyone took what I was saying seriously. My life drastically improved afterwards. I was 24 at the time.
When I was a teenager no one talked about mental health it just wasn't done. So I would not be surprised if some component of the statistics is an increased willingness among medical personnel to notice and diagnose the issues.
That being the case, the point remains that a dismissive adult is much more likely to get in the way of a teenager from getting a diagnosis than that of another adult. Furthermore, the fact that doctors are more likely to take men seriously than they do women would explain why the increase in diagnoses is so much higher in male adults than in female adults, even though the base rate of women suffering from mental health issues is actually the same as that of men.
Obviously, the part in italics is fiction. It is referring to the alternate world I mentioned in my comment above where the effect was the the opposite of what we're seeing (with the added extra of adult men appearing to be seeing a greater increase than adult women) and how it's so easy to come up with post-hoc explanations using what seem like reasonable and factual premises.
Would a decrease in such dismissal would also explain the increase in hospitalisation rates for self harm? I personally doubt it.
(Edit: and whoever downvoted me would help a great deal by explaining how exactly an increase in hospitalisation rates are an indication that we take this stuff more seriously. A wound remains a wound.)
I think it might. I firmly believe that mental issues can be compounded by too much empathy and care. Too much 'awareness'.
Sometimes sucking it up is, psychologically, the right answer, and results in a more resilient individual. (Not all the time, perhaps not most of the time. But sometimes.)
Your argument also applies to toddlers (1-10), Young students & workers (20-30), established workers (30-40)… pretty much any decade actually.
So no. It might not. Not for the reason you say at least. Improvements in diagnosis, self awareness and hospitalisation rates would have to happen specifically to teenagers, and unless someone can cite a specific reason why this is the case I just don't believe it. The increase is real.
Not necessarily; teenagers are 1) still under parental health insurance and therefore can get medical care, 2) broadly have adults looking out for them in a way adults don't look out for other adults, 3) are capable of self-introspection and increased communication capacity as well as self-identification in a way children are not, 4) have the agency to advocate for their mental health needs in a way children cannot..
Broadly if we are going to respect mental health more, the one cohort that is broadly capable of receiving mental health assessment medically, has enough agency to introspect to their own mental health, and still generally have adults responsible for their wellbeing, aka teenagers, are most likely to reveal this.
I guess it makes sense… the difference in how much other people are affected however is so stark that this does suggest a generational thing.
And then there are the hospitalisation rates. Did we lower the seriousness threshold to get our kids to the hospital? Unless they were talking about psychiatry hospitals that doesn't seem likely.
Frankly it might just be that children's desire to kill themselves wasn't considered something to hospitalize for in the past. I knew when I was a teenager I participated in all sorts of nonsense and said all sorts of shit to adults around me, and most of the adults just told me to man up and stop being a pussy about it. Now that I'm an adult, I can see times where I definitely should've been considered to evaluation as a suicide risk.
Everything has changed. You can’t look at one thing in isolation. Todays teens are not the teens of the Boomer generation. Was t that long enough that many were married by the time they hit 20.
Just like divorce rates in some ways. It’s because it wasn’t really an option for many (typically women) until recently. The social and financial repercussions were too severe.
To some extent just functioning no matter what is protective against certain mental illnesses. Exhibiting the overt symptoms of a mental illness can sometimes cause the illness to become more severe in a feedback loop. Cognitive behavioral therapy has been proven effective in treating many mental illnesses and works in part by giving patients the mental tools they need to just function.
I may be old fashioned, but learning to "just function" instead of constantly crying and expecting the world to listen to me and be the way I want it to be is just called growing up.
I would like to see this conversation turn from "Did phones cause these problems" to "Here's exactly how phones caused these problems". There are many ways to use technology, some better than others. We need literacy in these areas for both parents and children, and things are moving so fast, it's the companies that are getting to write the rules, not the culture. It's time for the culture to push back but we need to know how, specifically, the harm is being caused.
If we take the approach of not overthinking it, we might notice that many of these mental illnesses feature dissociation, and what does an iPhone do if not dissociate you from your physical being?
Teenagers (and younger) in their formative years are pouring a significant part of their lives into virtual environments and identities. Their digital lives are literally disconnected from their physical lives. Their sense of self is tied up in a system that has completely different rules and exists in some nebulous otherworld.
The physical basis for being is deprioritized and a new way of being is sitting uncomfortably alongside it.
Why doesn’t this affect everyone the same way? Some people are able to keep a lid on it, and reintegrate their iPhone lives into their real lives. Some people are not.
I can relate - in my late 20's and spent my teens and most of my early 20's online-only, just going outside long enough to go to college courses for IT.
I don't really know who I am as a person because I spent all my time online and not spending a lot of time with people. Not developing as a person, not realizing who I am and what I want to be. No social skills, etc.
Is it some kind of ego-death or personality-death? If not death, then something that hadn't been developed and is now far out of my grasp as my brain cements itself as I head into my 30's?
It sucks and I constantly remind myself of it, but maybe there's hope for the younger generations now that we've lived through the early stages of social media and know how it can harm the younger ones.
First though, we need to establish with enough certainty that whatever we are doing with phones is indeed the main culprit. I don't find it hard to believe to be honest, but we need something a bit more solid that this one correlation.
If it is phones, we'd have to have different experiments to investigate different possible methods of action. Is the content being consumed, is it something related to lack of physical interaction, is the anonymity promoting more hostility, etc.
Not entirely scientific, but I am sure you know many parents with kids. Mentally split them into 2 groups - those who let digital and social entertainment run free so they don't have to raise kids because its annoying and hard for them (any fool claiming raising kids today isn't hard didn't actually raise his/her kids) and those who often painstakingly severely limit/block screen time.
My friend, I can tell you from my personal perspective that the difference is staggering and very consistent. Anybody I ever talked about this shared same opinion. So there you have it, some opinions.
I want more specifics too, it would help tremendously to fight against it compared to 'technology=bad', but we still have no fucking clue how our brain works, how our personalities form etc. Without time machine, I don't think we get much further in this century (nor millennium). Just bunch of theories, some wilder than others, with variable amount of proofs out there in the wild. While people often can't have rational debate about basic aspects of life.
In your first paragraph you say that there is a huge difference but don't say what those differences are, which approach is better and what are the differences?
(Seemingly) Inevitable climate change and ecological destruction, growing income inequality and falling standards of living, a deathly pandemic that's still killing people while we pretend everything is back to normal (+ long covid probably bringing about a disability crisis in 3-5 years), increasing tensions between various nuclear-capable states (Russia, China) and the West, changes in the age distribution in most western states meaning that most young people will probably work until they die (retirement? lol) etc. etc.
This is a multi-faceted issue and let's face it, part of the problem is that the world is just getting depressing as hell for young people who see less and less of a future for themselves.
This is really easy to say for someone who doesn't experience these issues firsthand. Not reading the news isn't going to make your existential anxiety go away if you or your parents give it to you, either by helicoptering or living paycheck to paycheck.
Also, you really don't think that, in between building aqueducts and nuclear missiles, nothing has changed? You really think we have the same problems today as we did N years ago?
We can look back at history and say that there are times that are worse than now. For example, the second world war was worse than now. Cuban missile crisis also.
We can look at other countries and see that being in Syria or Ukraine right now is worse than in my more peaceful country.
By looking this way we literally gain new perspectives. Perhaps part of today's crisis is one of perspective maybe the internet narrows our vision.
I don't know which reductionist framework you're working with to make these comparisons, but they're wrong, because they're reductionist. Some people like war, maybe things were awesome for them? Not to mention that humans are very social creatures. You can't just say 'medicine is better', 'crime is down' and neglect the erosion/transmogrification of every single social institution that has been around for XYZ decades just because there isn't a number or well-defined historical analysis associated with it.
I'll put it this way. We know exactly what happens when wars are started. We know very little about the effects of having an attention economy. For every thing you can give me that we know has changed for the better, I can give you another thing that's changed probably for the worse but we really have no clue. If people are living longer, more miserable lives, is that really an improvement?
Agreed the world has always had problems, but it feels more like a megaphone than a lens these days (found not only online, but also at work, school, and among friends). These problems also eventually reach people's doorsteps where they cannot be ignored by disconnecting from social media or socially isolating.
Isn't it the opposite? For all those topics with even a bit of research they are not even close to as concerning as the media presents it as. If people were more informed they'd have less issue it's this weird in-between state where they know about the issue but don't know enough to understand it's not really that big of a deal.
Well, if you had completely ignored the news circa Feb 2020, you would have had an unpleasant shock when you ran out of toilet paper and tried to buy more.
Funny, because I mostly heard about the state of store shelves by my friends and neighbors who visited those stores, rather than national news outlets trumpeting a bunch of irrelevant crap.
to contribute to the architecture of solutions is hard indeed...
However, to contribute small everyone in most countries can, simply by choosing what and how to consume and by voting, wherever that is possible
Everything is relative. My grandfather's biggest dream was to live in a city, that's it. Now young people dream (and envy) of way more.
So I'd say there's more and more future for youth. They can afford, at least once in one's life: travel abroad, snow skiing, parachuting, going to a restaurant. It's just baseline jumped.
The disconnect might be wasting young peoples lives having them spend hours looking at influencers, reminding them of all the ways they might die from things, and keeping them busy scrolling and up on the latest trends of today.
When you stop paying attention to the deluge of alerts and articles, you can focus on your own tasks and get to experience some neat stuff and wonderful people in this world.
Cultural optimism is likely to follow periods of growth and abundance, like buying a property in the 1970s for $5K and selling it in the 2000s for $2M. The last couple of decades have seen a reversal of this effect, so I don't think it's unreasonable that more people are feeling pessimistic about the future and their place in it.
World events and economy aside, there are also clear trends with teenagers (and people as a whole) having fewer close friends than ever - loneliness is more common than ever. Our culture and society as a whole is declining in its ability to foster community and friendship, which really is deadly in its own way.
But it's also very profitable if you're the advertising delivery system, or somewhere sucking money off that pipeline, because you can convince lonely people to spend money to buy things that might help with that!
The whole "isolated, atomic person, only interfacing with the world through a screen, with every interaction intermediated by for-profit tech companies providing a service for a fee" model is very profitable. It's just horrid for everyone who's nothing more than a wallet and set of eyeballs to be tapped for as much as they're worth, then given loans to keep consuming.
I utterly hate the characterization of people as "consumers" these days - I'm trying to be more deliberate about using "citizen" or something along those lines. There's more to life than consuming as many "consumer goods" as possible.
Unfortunately, the wealthy end of the tech industry makes their money from this sort of social destruction, and so I don't expect many changes while people are still willing to pay for the chains of their cell phone. Fortunately, I think that's changing.
Imagine that: a culture that promotes individualism and the pursuit of profit over all else leads to a generation of people with few close friends and lots of loneliness and stress.
The increasing lonliness trend has been going on much longer than that, things are just coming to a head as it becomes more and more obvious that kids were sold a future that isn't going to happen. Real wages continue to fall while corporations make record profits and get bailed out when they fuck up, a college education just saddles you with debt and a job as a barista, housing prices are completely insane, and the consistent messaging is that this is all your fault for not working hard enough somehow.
How do we fix this complete disconnect from reality? I guess in the same vein how did they get such a incorrect view of the world state in the first place?
Teenagers are impressionable and exist in an environment where they aren't allowed to seriously disagree with their teachers. They're also under huge pressure to conform to what seems popular.
A lot of unrealistic climate doomerism is however created by adults. Even climatologists are now realizing they've badly overdone it, but of course the monster they created just turns on them when they try to restrain it. See the fun Zeke Hausfather has been having lately with being called a climate denier.
For teenagers to get restored perspective and realize the future isn't going to end, and will in fact be pretty awesome, it is required first that their parents give up the doomer beliefs too. And that in turn requires people to get skeptical, to start seriously pushing back on those who tell people to never think for themselves. It's a hard social problem that goes well beyond teenagers.
If long covid was real it would have happened already. I had covid a year and a half ago, and am fine as is everyone I know (who have almost all had it at some point). At some point it's the flip side of the vaccine side effects that antivaxxers keep insisting will emerge at some point
Is it possibly because they're not sleeping with each other? Seems to be all over the news lately, the decline of young people having sex. The older I get, the less I see sex as optional for human health and well-being. There's no time you crave it more than adolescence, so going without it then could be even more damaging. Sex is not just a fun experience, it's a basic psychological need. Both the left and right in the US are way too puritanical and I really hope there's a big shift in popular culture to stop censoring sex and maybe think about toning down the violence.
Let's see.. it was simultaneous and synchronized across the Anglophone countries in the early 2010s.
It's sort of peculiar for Puritanism to appear suddenly and simultaneously in widely distant countries that share a common language but have different cultures, right?
No, I think the change in phones and what they enabled in social media is a better explanation.
That started in Japan around 2000, a good ten years before the mental health crisis that struck kids at about 13 years of age in English speaking countries simultaneously.
And limited internet access on feature phone (i-mode, J-Sky, EZweb) was a thing from around 2000. Many students had it. So it strengthen original argument.
The main cause is the proliferation of social media. There's other factors of course, and I'm not dismissing any of the depth of nuance of all the externalities acting on that generation, but it's undoubtedly the thing that our societies and social structures aren't designed for: facebook and instagram.
Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.
> Saw a post on Paul Graham’s twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that’s a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.
That’s…honestly, exactly the combination of race and gender I would expect to be most depressed right now, even thinking only about expectations people have been raised with about the direction of progress for their own conditions and how the reality currently manifesting clashes with it, and that’s without considering how concerns for conditions other than their own might play into it.
Can you expand on your thoughts here? This is not a group whose lives I generally expect to be getting worse (in day-to-day life, barring social media effects).
Not sure if this aligns with what the GP was trying to say, but this is also one of the groups I would expect to be the most depressed, although I would expect white, middle-aged, middle-classed women to be an even larger demographic. Chemicals/genetics have a lot to do with depression, but for other cases I think depression comes from a feeling of uselessness/lack of purpose.
White liberal women have a lot of incompatible expectations placed on them. If they stay home to raise children, they're labeled as lazy, "betraying the feminist cause", etc. for not participating in the workforce. If they work, they're labeled as neglectful of their children (if they have them) or told they're going to regret their choices. They have to outpace their male coworkers to be respected at work, but their career is also seen as a "nice to have". So the standards for women are impossible, but simultaneously so low that achieving them doesn't earn respect.
In a strange way, the group's relative privilege is a contributing factor to depression. If you're a member of a group that is violently oppressed, the act of protest and standing up to oppressors provides a sense of purpose. Because white women's position isn't "that bad," though, attempts to improve their situation are considered too small to celebrate at best and entitled whining at worse. Further, there's been a movement, particularly in liberal spaces over the past few years, to lift up the voices of the most oppressed. So liberal white women have pressure to just shut up and swallow their concerns from both sides of the political aisle.
None of this is to advocate drowning out the concerns of other groups to prioritize the mental health of white women, only a recognition that a seemingly easier life doesn't necessarily mean a happier one. In fact, an easier life can be more depressing.
I could see this being a major factor. It reminds me of wealthy white women's "hysteria" / other mental health issues of the past (ex. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/01/16/eternal-hypochondria-o...). Being neither particularly oppressed nor in the most priveleged group is an interesting position, and I could see this being an important mental health factor. I don't have a strong enough sociological background to connect any shift in social position for white women to the correct time frame in the original post, but it's certainly possible.
I read a theory that this is sort of the roots of the current anti-trans movement out of England - affluent but otherwise politically irrelevant women posting in mothers&parenting forums kind of latched on to this cause of defending their brand feminism from the existential threat of transfolk.
I would imagine it parallels the plight of growing up a middle child. Or another analogy from The Simpsons, "but what to do with poor hugo. Too crazy for Boys Town, too much of a boy for crazy town." - Dr. Hibert
I tend to agree with. A lack of purpose is a big deal for lots of depressed people. Humans need a purpose or they can go down a dark path quite quickly.
I'm not trying to be annoying, but I genuinely don't understand what you mean by huge expectations of "having it all" for women (at least insofar as it relates to any trend starting ~2012, when the large growth in depression and self-harm among teen girls seems to have started).
The only "revocation of rights" I can think of would be Dobbs - which also does not fit the trend (see my response to the other comment).
If (white liberal) teen girls are supposed to actually see their real lives getting worse, I still don't see any reason for this to have become a problem in the early 2010s.
It does fit the trend. These issues are stacking. You can fool yourself into dismissing it if you split it into pieces. In 2012 you can write it off as fear mongering the media. In 2018 you can write it off as “how does this affect your day to day life?”. In 2022 you can say that Dobbs “doesn’t fit the trend” since it started in 2012.
I’m not saying this is the whole story, but it’s possibly part.
“Having it all” is a blessing and curse. The choice to do more, the burden to do more. Now you need a career, family, insta following. And it’s quite likely you’re going to have a hard time finding that perfect husband since men 18-30 as a demographic are doing horribly. What would normally be the backbone of a society is just not functioning well right now.
As far as "having it all" -- female employment has basically not changed since 1990[0], and given the decline in the US birth rate, expectations of motherhood have probably decreased as well. I could see "having it all" increasing stress as, for example, more women were being introduced into the work force, but that seems entirely uncorrelated to the 2010s.
Insta following could be a new pressure and I agree it would fit the timeline, but that'd be a social media effect and not a decrease in real-life quality of living for white liberal girls.
When it comes to emotional well being, “real life” is what’s in your head. If people are experiencing unattainable pressures and that’s causing them stress, it’s real. I guess you could make a distinction for dreams, hallucinations, etc. But social media isn’t that.
It’s actually dangerous to think it’s “too pretend”. My bank account is just squiggles on the screen, but I can somehow buy stuff. Same thing that online relationships can have physical outcomes, even if just by turning it into cash first.
> The only "revocation of rights" I can think of would be Dobbs - which also does not fit the trend (see my response to the other comment).
Dobbs didn't just happen. It took decades to take those rights away from women, and there was incremental (anti)progress along the way. In those decades, a massive political project was created specifically to message that women who get abortions (a lifesaving medical procedure) are murderers, and they should be accordingly punished (life in jail). The result of this political campaign is that women in America have the worst medical outcomes in the developed world, and in some cases it's worse than the developing world. Infant mortality is on the rise, giving birth can put you into debt tens of thousands of dollars, and if there are complications you now have to be literally on your last thread of life before doctors will feel comfortable trying to save you.
So I guess you can see why women in America might feel under threat. There is one political party in America who has been telling women for decades that their goal is to use their power and influence to turn the clock back on women in America.
Even beyond Women in the USA, amongst my friends in Canada, where to me at least the status quo on abortion seems quite safe, they very clearly feel extremely on edge about it.
Existing in the state of being where you're constantly feeling under pressure and attack that your rights may be taken away at any moment, I dunno, maybe that's stressful! If I can sense this tension from my Canadian women friends who are stressed just being adjacent to USA news, I'm not at all surprised that American women would be feeling even more stressed and depressed about the situation.
> I genuinely don't understand what you mean by huge expectations of "having it all" for women
I think the OP meant the whole "lean in" movement. I'm not sure why that would affect teen girls though. Social media and decreased socialization seem like much more plausible factors.
One key element (though not the only one) is Dobbs v. Jackson, subsequent legislation encouraged by it, and the highly visible effects that this has had on reproductive healthcare even where no actual elective abortion is involved.
In terms of cultural expectations of progress and very visceral potential personal impact and perceived position in society, this is a radical reverse for that group (on the second point probably less than for non-whites, but the first and third points probably bite white liberals harder.)
Notably, though, the charts start showing massive growth in depression around 2012, which was long before Dobbs.
And there are some trends in the opposite direction - iirc hormonal birth control used to be much harder to get (telehealth has made the prescription requirement much less onerous), and anecdotally nowadays it seems a lot easier to get info on sterilization or methods for intentionally changing menstruation (ex. skipping the placebo week).
I'm not saying Dobbs doesn't matter, only that I both 1) doubt it's a central driver of the trend, and 2) think [outside the world of news/social media] most women can still expect more rights & a higher quality of care in most US locations than they could a decade or two ago.
> I’m not saying Dobbs doesn’t matter, only that I both 1) doubt it’s a central driver of the trend
Yeah, I’m not saying it (or reproductive rights & health care more generally) is the central driver of the trend, I’m saying its one of the key reasons why if someone asked me, today, what group in American society would be most depressed, my intuitive response would be “white liberal teen girls” (particularly, its a key reason why “female, white, and liberal” are parts of that) – why that element that was called out as surprising upthread would not be.
Though Dobbs didn’t just appear ex nihilo without many years of clear lead up to it that reflected a change in the direction of society, so I wouldn’t dismiss the issue being deeply connected to an important part of the broader, earlier trend.
Interesting. I would much rather be a (white liberal) teen girl today than in ~2012, but I can see how insofar as Dobbs is only a manifestation of existing trends, I might be in the minority.
It's just hard to wrap my head around what this trend would be, or why teens started picking up on it in 2012. I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women's rights except abortion/birth control, and I see no particular link between the causes of Dobbs and that generic time period.
Also, possibly as proof that I'm not a great commenter on the issue, I thought only ~8% of women had abortions, but in looking it up while writing this comment apparently it's more like 25% (so abortion & related issues affect way more women/girls than I expected).
Miscarriages are abortions. Often times if the miscarriage happens late enough, a doctor must intervene to assist in the removal of the dead fetus, which is the same medical procedure as one may remove a viable one.
No, "abortion" is not a medical procedure. There are several medical procedures used for abortion, some of which have uses other than abortion.
The medical procedure you're referring to is dilation and curettage (a.k.a D&C / DnC). The common term "abortion" is imprecise, and refers to several medical procedures, and D&C has multiple uses other than pregnancy termination.
In the case of spontaneous abortion (commonly called "miscarriage"), even in early pregnancy if the fetal remains are allowed to naturally be expelled, afterward the ob/gyn will often need to inspect the uterus and perhaps remove some remaining tissue. So, rather than waiting for the fetus to naturally be expelled following spontaneous abortion and going through the pain and trauma of seeing the blood and tissue being passed at home, the ob/gyn will often advise a D&C rather than waiting for the body to naturally resolve the lost pregnancy.
Unfortunately, my wife has had 3 first trimester miscarriages under 2 ob/gyns, both of which advised D&C rather than waiting for the fetal remains to pass. Also, her ob/gyn performed a 4th D&C to make sure the surface of the uterus is free of tissue that might interfere with pregnancy. This 4th D&C seems to have worked (along with a ton of medications), as we're expecting identical twins in September. Every D&C weakens the cervix, so it's a delicate balancing act.
In any case, D&C has several uses and shouldn't be conflated with "abortion". In our case, my wife's 4th D&C was a fertility treatment, and the first 3 were to resolve lost pregnancies.
> I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women’s rights except abortion/birth control, and I see no particular link between the causes of Dobbs and that generic time period.
2011-2012 was when the major wave of state anti-abortion laws (135 in those two years) and the first notable state executive measure defunding Planned Parent that represented the beginning (well, the visible conversion to a major active push rather than mere rhetoric) of the anti-abortion push by the Republican Party that led to Dobbs occurred.
The abortion changes don't seem to have been major enough for me to easily find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States), but I've definitely become a lot less confident in my initial opinion that it's nearly-universally better to be a white liberal teen girl today, so thank you for the interesting conversation.
I still think social media / smartphones / etc as an explanation fits the trend more simply & cleanly, but I'm much more open to the idea that I could be wrong.
> The abortion changes don’t seem to have been major enough for me to easily find (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States), but I’ve definitely become a lot less confident in my initial opinion that it’s nearly-universally better to be a white liberal teen girl today, so thank you for the interesting conversation.
Prior to the Texas private-enforcement-only hack that occurred just before Dobbs (and was huge news before Dobbs eclipsed it), most of them were either funding/access restrictions that didn’t directly target the Constitutional right just made it difficult to exercise in practice (because that had some chance of surviving the courts), while the rest were struck down (or enjoined, and then struck down later) before going into effect and never enforced, serving primarily as strong social messaging rather than enforced law.
And yet fertility rates had another strong step down around that time.
One conjecture could be that fewer young women with children is correlated with higher rates of diagnosis of mental illness. And if I know I had mental illness, I'd be scared shitless to let it known on the record I had a disorder that a CPS worker or family courts could use against me -- without a child those concerns are lessened. I can also attest having a child means you have way less time for your own personal care, which means perhaps these women now have more time for their own care.
> It's just hard to wrap my head around what this trend would be, or why teens started picking up on it in 2012.
One reason could be they started talking to each other more. Women and girls who had similar life experience shared them on the internet. This is how the whole Me Too movement started; the experiences shared during the Me Too movement were old, but it was the internet and social media which acted as a catalyst to dislodge them from the past and bring them into the present.
> I am not conscious of any major modern debates around women's rights except abortion/birth control
Don't you recall the 2016 Presidential election? There was a huge debate about whether or not a woman was ready to be President of the United States. I don't know about your family, but in my family people thought it very clever to say that a woman could never become president, because her period would make her too volatile. This kind of rhetoric may have flowed right past you, but it wasn't lost on women (especially the very cogent point that men have in fact started most wars in all of human history).
The outcome of that election was that America chose a serial sexual predator who has admitted to spying on women in changing rooms, has raped women, and who has admitted to using his power and prestige to assault women. It wasn't lost on women that this man, with a famously volatile temper, was chosen over a women because he was viewed as more trustworthy and more stable than her.
That man ended his term by waging a violent coup against the United States government with his supporters, who themselves made an effort assassinate the vice president. Yet it was the female candidate that America considered a priori too "volatile".
> I thought only ~8% of women had abortions, but in looking it up while writing this comment apparently it's more like 25% (so abortion & related issues affect way more women/girls than I expected).
As with rape, the number of women who have abortions and the number of women who report abortions are quite different. That number is going to diverge even more now that it's illegal and criminalized in many jurisdictions.
I could definitely see something like MeToo being a cause, but I still would put that as a "social media" effect and not a "women's/girl's irl day-to-day lives get worse" effect.
Most of my family voted for Trump, but mostly for immigration & military reasons. I don't remember anyone I knew in real life saying anything negative about Hillary on the basis of her gender -- though, as always, there was plenty of it online. Pretty much all of the negative talk I heard about her (irl) was about her emails, her policies, or her party.
(My mother is still angry about Hillary's "there's a cold place in hell for women who don't vote for a woman" thing, but that wasn't the main reason for her vote.)
The presidents bracketing Trump (Obama & Biden) seem generally feminist, so I'd be surprised that the trend started during Obama and continued to accelerate during Biden if something like Trump / related to Trumpism was a big cause. Maybe the SCOTUS justices he left behind could be pointed to as a continuing political pain point now?
I agree that our abortion statistics will become less indicative of the actual rate now that we're post-Dobbs; this'll be a very interesting time to look back on.
There was definitely also a lot of misogyny in the 2008 primaries as well, even coming from liberals and especially the media:
Previous research has suggested that news and commentary concerning political candidates can vary based on a candidate's gender or race. Race and gender were especially salient in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. A content analysis of editorial cartoons was conducted to examine patterns in content or imagery related to race and gender. Editorial cartoons that featured Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and/or John McCain and were published during the primary season were analyzed. Cartoons featuring Obama were more likely to be favorable than those featuring the other candidates; those featuring Clinton were more likely to be unfavorable. Clinton was more often presented as ugly and small in size than was Obama. Clinton was shown perpetrating violence more often than the male candidates; she was also portrayed as the recipient of particularly gruesome violence. Some cartoons featured imagery or content that relied on racial or gender stereotypes; a qualitative analysis of these cartoons is provided. Overall, findings support previous research showing the continued relevance of race and gender in media coverage of political campaigns.
That doesn't fit the data though. Dobbs v Jackson was in 2022. The increase starts in around 2012. That's before Trump and the current wave of politicians who are behind Dobbs, etc. In 2012, Obama was President, the Paycheck Fairness Act was passed, Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, Pelosi had recently been the first woman to be speaker of the house, two women were added to the supreme court, etc.
That's just it: 2012 was the high point, from which the decline is measured. Focus turned to Hillary Clinton, and began the long train of abuse that led to her losing in 2016.
Much of that abuse was explicitly misogynist. Misogyny had been deprecated for a long time, but had a resurgence starting right around 2012.
I feel like this could be a reasonable explanation for the race piece, but I'm unsure how it connects to the female & liberal pieces. I'm not sure being a conservative male has gained a lot of social status in the past decade, though I suppose it's definitely possible.
These statistics are almost useless for determining rates of mental health issues. They measure mental health as reported by mental health professionals. Of course groups which are antagonistic or dismissive of mental health will be underrepresented. Folks who receive counseling for mental health issues at their Church will also not be represented in these numbers. That doesn't mean these other groups don't have mental health issues. It means they don't seek help for it or get help via resources that don't report these stats. All this tells me is that young liberal women are the most likely to seek help for themselves from professionals.
The subpopulation that uses alcohol to deal with life stress likely skews male and more conservative.
I recently had a conversation with late '20s guy from a small town in Illinois who said guys in his town at any point in time were either working, hunting or drunk. He felt the need to get out of there.
That account is only the perspective of somebody who obviously didn't feel included and left the town. I bet people who like living in that town would describe it differently.
What else do we really know? For all we know, the guy who left was a teetotaler and would characterize any social gathering with a few beers present as "everybody getting drunk."
I had this conversation with friends. I wondered if they were snorting cocaine because it was fun or if it was a medication to get through the stress of life.
I live in Iowa. I know you’re being downvoted, but you’re not wrong at all here. This accurately describes the hobbies of many people I personally know.
Fantastic point, and I believe the only comment in this entire thread to accurately assess the discrepancy between the groups mental health professionals have a disproportionate access to.
I would be more interested in seeing the rates of mental health professional access regarding these girls, what's the rate both parents are also talking to their own mental health professionals, their male siblings too, how often do they talk to them, etc. If I were to guess, it would still disproportionately skew towards these girls primarily because of how mental health professionals are viewed as "problem fixers". You go to them, they fix your problem so people assume. I can see many parents encouraging their daughters to speak to one ("fix her depression"), but never seeking help themselves while simultaneously being ignorant to problems their stoic male offspring are dealing with.
I would love to explore Reddit's influence on this phenomenon. The timelines seem to sync somewhat and it seems like a perfect vehicle for adversarial nation states to use to influence public opinion.
I highly doubt that Reddit per se has any significant effect whatsoever—which is not to say that it can't be an instance of the overarching platforms that cause the phenomenon.
The reason I'm disregarding Reddit as a significant cause is threefold:
a) Reddit is overwhelmingly male, and the most affected group are teenage girls
b) Reddit is not that big of a platform in the teenage demographic
c) Even if it were, its popularity is not in any way homogeneous across countries. If Reddit itself had an effect, the USA would be much more affected by the phenomenon than the UK, for instance.
Also falls perfectly within what Yuri Bezmenov (the KGB defector who explained the Soviet's plan to take down the West through ideological subversion) laid out.
At around that time, you would have the first batch of fully indoctrinated (trained by Socialists from childhood to adulthood, with no oversight or counterbalance) graduating.
That is also the group that sets the stage for the demoralisation phase of the plan and allows for the next phase: destabilisation.
I don't think this is purely a Soviet ploy working out, but you can't help but look at the Western education system and realise that's a big part of the problem.
In that interview he also talked about how the USSR was imminently going to take over the West because everyone had been indoctrinated to communism, so he's not exactly batting 1000. It seems to me he lays out a culture bleakness Rorschach test about "kids these days" that's easy to see ourselves in, and will be able to any point.
Because being a teenage girl was already hard, and now to be a good liberal teenage white girl you are supposed be some kind of self-loathing culture warrior as well. As opposed to, you know, enjoying life and being kind to the people you interact with.
Mainstream psychology is basically a more popular version of scientology with "therapy" instead of "auditing". Can you guess what my politics are more likely to be based off that sentiment? If so, then that tells you all you need to know.
Comparing a science with a cult is quite a far fetch. Pyschology comes without the secrecy, the Xenu bullshit, Führerkult, body thetons, exploiting clients for all their money and quite often the disconnect from members who leave, even close family members.
Those are the demographic criteria that I'd expect to maximize time spent on social media. White + liberal => probably middle class & have some time for leisure; girls => see the number of likes as a measure of their worth, i.e. "girls are pretty" ideology
Give me an angenda you want to promote and a segment of the population you want to propagandize to and I can intersect the population by age/race/wealth in such a way that the statistics work and it helps you signal all the virtues at once.
That’s not surprising at all. Each of those groups (white, liberal, female) is individually correlated with being more depressed. It’s not surprising at the intersection of those groups is the least depressed: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to-understand...
Precisely, I don't know. I would not expect such a specific group, or any other, to significantly differ (might be a sampling issue, or something with a reason). Hence my question, but that may also be a translation issue.
One could form hypotheses of course, but they won't be much of relevance here I think :)
> Precisely, I don't know. I would not expect such a specific group, or any other, to significantly differ
Do you mean for this specific item or in general? The former makes sense, but the latter I'd find a little weird given how publically well-known it is that there are group differences (take educational attainment in the United States for example).
Yes. A lot of depression about the world is driven by left wing views. Women are more left wing than men, liberals are obviously more left wing than conservatives, and young people are more left wing than older people. So being young liberal and female is the intersection of all those categories.
I don't know how important being white is there, but I also don't see much discussion of race in this line of articles, only gender geography age and politics.
The article and related articles in the series are a pretty good place to start! They're laying down a lot of rigorous evidence that depression is strongly clustered in the most left wing segments of the population.
Now correlation isn't causation, but in this case the causal path is pretty clear. If you believe that the world is systemically racist, sexist, unjust, doomed to extinction and that half your friends/family are secretly evil fascists/Nazis, then we'd expect you to feel depressed. When people with those beliefs turn up more frequently in ER for self harm and suicide attempts, we have both a correlation and a plausible cause.
I don't know how you leapt from the only group with a negative in-group bias to wanting to expand the in-group. Hating yourself isn't intrinsically inclusivity.
One of the odder changes in the behavior of people on the left in recent times is going from "I'm a person, not a label" to "Look at all the labels I have!"
I don't think it ever got to the point of "we aren't ever allowed to clap at events", but it certainly seems like there were people who were pushing for that
>In a statement, the University of Manchester Students’ Union said that they are not outright banning audible clapping at all school events, and are instead encouraging “the use of British Sign Language (BSL) clapping during our democratic events.” These events include meetings where members are invited to participate in decision making, the union said.
It started (in modern times) in the 60's at poetry jams. You can do it one-handed (i.e. while holding a drink) and you can also do it during a particularly impressive part of a performance, rather than waiting until the end.
Some groups have definitely taken it as a preference (sorry for the daily mail link, but it was the most succinct): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3323166/Some-colleg... and tried to tie it to clapping as "triggering", but they're pretty uncommon.
Yeah I’ve definitely been to events where quiet or no clapping is preferred (ex: poetry readings) but the OP claiming we aren’t aloud to clap at events anymore because it’s too violent sounds like someone who hasn’t actually been to a public event in the last year.
Not sure I understand you. Nor do I understand why I've been downvoted into oblivion.
Also - I have watched Hypernormalization. Found the facts that it presented to be highly interesting. Worth watching just for that. But the overall narrative I found to be pretty unconvincing.
I wanted to say that, basically, life is so easy now compared to previous generations. In the West, we have mostly all that we need. As a result of human psychology, our brains seem to create "non-problems" in order to occupy themselves, or at least the mass media are exceedingly good at this...
Gotta look at which way the cookie crumbles or the beam shears - how stress is distributed in a system.
If you take for granted that there is a large amount of emotional strain floating around, where are the outlets?
Men bottle it up and retake control (school shootings, as an extreme).
People with precarious lives can express the stress as worry and fear (mostly women).
Depression is a luxury version of stress - not happy, but also physically safe and not worried for your well-being. "White liberal female teens" = privilege.
Depression is a spectrum of presentations, and severe cases render you entirely unable to work. In turn that means your physical well being is at risk if you depend on salary to keep yourself housed and fed.
To me the theory seems to not fully explain the data, at least not the switch in phone types and instagram. IMHO it takes some time for a mental illness to form and the right circumstances are needed. It's nothing you catch like a cold.
I think the causes are multifactorial.
First, you need a social structure that promotes or at least not inhibits mental illness. That I think is given in industrialized countries because of high stress for parents, little commitment among people and always increasing speed of life. In addition the middle class got smaller and smaller. Three are only two outcomes, poor or rich with little in-between.
Then you need some awareness of mental illness. Even today mental illness is highly stigmatized, but back then it was even worse. There are a lot of older people who are visibly not well but won't get treatment for whatever reason and thus won't show up in statistics.
And then, yes the media in general. My mum told me that back when she was young the sentiment of the media was more positive, there were articles about achievements without a critical differentiation. More negative news more frequently.
All of that set the stage for young people to feel the need to get ahead to survive combined with a larger group for comparison results in a feeling of hopelessness in many.
Its interesting that this cites a "mental illness epidemic" but only seems to cover anxiety/depression. I want statistics on ADHD, PTSD, autism, eating disorders, psychosis, and personality disorders too! If there is a major rise in ED (primarily women) it would explain why there are so many hospitalizations, because EDs are deadly.
I assume that would undermine the argument, as ADHD and other disorders are underdiagnosed in girls and women compared to men. And in fact anxiety and depression are most likely underdiagnosed in boys and men, which also helps their argument even more. Both of these make me sceptical of this "epidemic", plus Haidt isn't someone I trust to be impartial or accurate nowadays.
Eating Disorder, but in general it's more commonly used to mean Executive Dysfunction and (in a different context) Erectile Dysfunction. Bad idea IMO to use it without first-time expansion in such an ambiguous context.
I graduated high school around 2010, before all of these dramatic declines in mental health seem to take place, and even back then I remember there being a lot of unhappy people in my peer group. Maybe a certain % of miserable teenagers is guaranteed due to the nature of puberty (and humans).
I hope we find a way to mitigate or reverse the trend these studies are highlighting. Schooling is essential and we can't allow it to become unbearable.
There was a ton of depression and even suicides when I was growing up. I felt like 50% of teens at my large HS were suffering from some kind of mental issue. And then you had major events like Columbine. The US school system has always managed to produce a lot of very miserable people, and no one seemed to care or do anything about it.
And now we have these studies all blaming social media, like there is some kind of epidemic that never existed before. But I am deeply cynical. I think these issues already existed, it's just there is a convenient scapegoat now.
In the article, the author makes a point to include objective metrics like rate of hospitalizations, and the data is quite conclusive in showing an actual increase. So these issues definitely did not exist before, at the same scale.
How does the rate of hospitalizations prove anything? Perhaps a growing awareness of mental health made people who were eligibile for hospitalization seek medical care, whereas before they would not be hospitalized for lack of a diagnosis? Or perhaps the same awareness made teens enact the pathological behavior they learned about online, complete with self-harm and suicide atemtps?
Any measure you can think to track a condition that is defined, diagnosed and (especially) self-diagnosed subjectively, is by definition subjective.
Then you could just look at emergency admissions where the patients were brought in after self-harm attempts that left them obviously in need of immediate medical attention. Unless you're going to suggest our standards for judging whether someone might bleed to death (for example) have changed noticeably in recent decades.
Seems to me the idea that teens today are no different to those of prior generations, we're just better at noticing when they've self-harmed (or indeed, committed suicide) and more likely to attribute that to mental health issues is at best wishful thinking, and at worst dangerously dismissive.
This unassailable conviction that everything can always be chalked up to "more diagnosis" for every mental health trend is a thought terminating cliche. What can't be explained away by "oh, it's because diagnosis is easier and/or people are more open about their problems", regardless of whether that's the primary cause?
Indeed, but in the opposite direction. Either that or the sort of help that's provided to teens with mental health issues today is somehow causing them to be more likely to self-harm etc., though presumably that would show up in the data if true.
Hmm. I suppose some people who might benefit from being hospitalized were instead hiding their self harm, although i would assume then that suicides would be way down.
According to the article linked below teen suicide rates declined from 2000 to 2007 and then increased 56% in the following decade. It seems to me the teen suicide rate would serve as a useful heuristic argument in favor of thinking something is amiss. If there is greater mental health awareness today and greater acceptance of getting treatment then this rise is particularly alarming.
I think it is undeniable that that social media is bad for the psyche. I can’t say it is to blame for the current situation but I do believe if it went away we’d all be better off.
I think it's more like social media is weaponised by bullies rather than it being inherently bad.
I was assaulted in public at high school multiple times. Today, that kind of thing can be posted and recorded on social media to make your humiliation be permanent.
Banning social media makes this "less bad", but it doesn't solve the actual problem. It just drives that problem back underground so adults don't have to be held accountable.
The problem, in my view, is that the way we do schooling is itself inherently broken. It enables and even encourages bullying, by both adults and teenagers alike.
Social media is kind of like a weapon of mass destruction in this environment. But why does this environment exist in the first place, and why don't we do something about it as as society?
But is schooling from 7am-4pm sitting a classroom trying to memorize information essential? There are probably much more enjoyable and engaging ways to teach children what they need to know to live in a society.
I don't think it really should come down to a binary relationship between mental illness and "enjoyable and engaging", though. I do get your point. But, also, it's school. I don't remember always enjoying it or finding it engaging, but that didn't mean I was slipping into mental illness because a class was boring or didn't seem relevant when I was a teenager.
To your point, the model of school hasn't really changed in a long time; but, then again, we do see rates of mental illness changing. So, I don't really know if you can put the blame on the model of schooling in that instance.
As a side note, one thing that has changed in schools is the drop in physical fun, either in the expectations of gym classes, or during recess, or in school sports. It's either study like crazy, or focus on an extracurricular (possibly a sport) as if it's a second job to get into a good college; a lot of kids just aren't having good old physical fun as much as they used to, at least from my observation.
I think the smartphone theory is plausible, which I translate as follow: we've become programmable.
I grew up in the 80s with a material wealth that is probably 10% of what modern teenagers have. The era also contained a massive economic crisis with actual record high unemployment and interest rates triple the current "high" rate. Also, the nuke could drop any day.
I don't remember spending much thought on any of it at all nor was I worried about any future. Why would I? I'm a teenager, I spent the early teens largely outside playing with friends and the late teens partying.
However, if I'd replay my childhood in modern age conditions, I'm sure I would have been far more miserable. That's what I mean with it being programmable. Modern teens are far more lonely than I was and spent that lonely time filling their head with garbage at a very critical part in their development. They've already given up before they even started.
Another factor not mentioned: 24/7 news and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine.
Honestly, in my work with kids I'm not seeing social media as being a big problem. Mass media has existed for well over 100 years. Kids have always known kids who were exceptional.
The difference now is kids are much more aware of the news and thanks to the hyper-partisan news reporting they're being continually bombarded with Bad News. Not bad news as in airplane crashes and stuff like that, but bad news with a political spin: the economy is crashing, AI is going to take all our jobs, the left wants Big Government to take away all your rights, the right wants to create a Christian theocracy - the list goes on, and on, and on, and on.
If anything, kids' social media, i.e. where kids actually hang out, gets them away from all that crap. That's why kids love TikTok. They watch videos of kids doing cool and interesting things. No politics.
Next step would be to de-correlate smartphone usage, the prime suspect right now, from other trends happening at the same time. I have two daughters in that age range and I don't get the impression that social media is a big stressor for them in particular but I can easily believe that it is one of the primary stress factors for many young women.
I recall seeing commentary recently from mental health specialists that noted that young people are increasingly facing a sense of existential dread over climate change - that there's nothing they can do to stop it, and will feel the impact more heavily than previous generations.
I wouldn't discount social media and related issues out of hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a contributing factor. I understand there was a similar sentiment in the 70s and 80s where there was a certainty that nuclear war was going to happen.
now imagine spamming their phones with tik tok videos about the end of the world due to ____________. In your example, it's climate change. Maybe it's that, but it could also be that we can now mainline hours and hours of highly provocative content directly into a growing brain.
> We grew up with the threat of nuclear destruction
The difference is that nuclear destruction required some sort of action. Climate catastrophe just requires inaction. "Do nothing and we're OK" vs. "do nothing and we're toast" is a pretty big difference psychologically. The idea that it might be too late for any action to change the outcome only makes it worse.
> as well as global warming
I was old enough to be aware at the time, and the level of concern about global warming then is practically nothing compared to what it is now. People were at least as concerned about a nuclear winter.
Responding to others' concerns with "big deal, I had it worse" is almost never helpful. Regardless of whether those concerns are objectively valid or among those you personally share, an empathetic and curious response would be to understand why those concerns loom so large and what can be done to allay them.
- It was only a possibility. You also knew the nukes might not launch, the world might not end.
- If the nukes did launch, it wouldn't be due to a moral failure of your own.
- Although you may sometimes have felt scared or depressed about the USSR and MAD, you weren't being constantly told by your society that optimism was illegitimate thoughtcrime.
Climate doomerism is pretty much ideal for creating mental health issues. It tells adherents that they have no future outside of some hellscape, that it's all their own fault or maybe their parents fault, the root cause is moral failure, that maybe it can be stopped except SURPRISE no it can't really, and that any deviation from any of these beliefs makes you utterly evil and depraved, absolutely worth of immediate and total ex-communication from your friendship groups.
Personally I think it's more likely to be the phones, but there are enough anecdotes about real young people whose thought processes around the future have been totally broken by climate propaganda, that it's worth taking seriously.
I have no idea what you mean by "climate propaganda".
I just lived in a place that experienced 8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area and which will destroy the regional economic livelihood.
A totally unprecedented event, which we know with quite a bit of certainty will begin to occur frequently.
I have no idea how you expect polite society to accept that without distress.
When people don't even realize it exists, that's the mark of truly successful propaganda!
"8 consecutive heat waves that shattered all known records in the area"
Yeah, where is this? I doubt it's actually true. For sure it was reported as true, but one of the many reasons to call it climate propaganda is that that reporting of "records" doesn't mean what you think it means. Government agencies and other parts of the climate lobby continually adjust past historical data such that records become made and unmade without anything actually happening. They also like to change definitions and seriously truncate datasets at convenient places to create the appearance of endless trends when longer term data exists showing otherwise. This is so dishonest people think it can never happen, but it does.
Here's an example. Retraction Watch is a blog that follows
retractions and bad scientific publishing:
"NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet"
In this way they get to announce "record breaking temperatures" that were lower than previously announced temperatures.
You also have to watch out for lots of other problems and tricks, unfortunately. Even if they aren't doing that specific trick here, there can be others, even simple things like asserting patterns and trends in noise.
You have absolutely no idea about climatology and are just parroting garbage.
You're not a climate scientist, you have no idea how scientists reach the conclusions they have, you don't understand the evidentiary lineages that have brought us to the current understanding of the climate. You cite a single paper yet conveniently ignore the entirety of the research being carried out throughout the globe, by agencies and institutions with no relationship to each other, all reaching the same conclusions.
You haven't even the slightest understanding about the climate yet you claim "propaganda".
It's not a paper, so this makes me think you didn't read the cited document.
"by agencies and institutions with no relationship to each other"
They're all closely related to each other and tend to rely on the same small number of data sources to draw conclusions, which is why the fact that these data sources are subject to continuous retroactive editing is a problem.
Yeah, instead we had our teachers reassure us that if we saw a nuclear explosion that we should hid under our desks and that would protect us. We ran drills practicing this, as if it were expected to happen any moment now.
I agree with you that it's worse these days. Now, the kids practice active shooter drills. It turns out the USSR never did launch the missiles, but kids shooting up their school is so common it barely makes the news anymore.
It surprises me that folks (presumably technical) regress to the "same thing as the old thing" logic. I'm not downplaying the end-of-times drama every generation surely went through, but whatever drill you can think of, it ended, and kids went home, and they most likely played outside. At worst they sat in front of the news which didn't have to compete with the Internet and YouTube thus was very different.
Now? They go through a drill, leave, check their phone 4,000 times between that drill and dinner time which gives them a constant stream of a) the world is terrible, b) the other side is evil, c) your peers are all better looking, smarter, richer, and more popular than you.
The example you're referencing was mentioned in the article, and I think is part of the reason Haidt took the time to prove that this phenomenon is _not_ isolated to the US, and that US specific issues (like school shootings) are unlikely to have an effect elsewhere.
> And it certainly can’t be caused by the most popular theory we hear in the USA: school shootings and other stress-inducing events. Why would school shootings or active shooter drills implemented only in the USA lead to an immediate epidemic across the entire English-speaking world?
Is that obvious? Or do the immediate, simple things - I have to see everyone at school tomorrow and they all think [something bad about me] - create anxiety more? I think it's probably easier to distract yourself from "ice is going to melt into the ocean and kill a bunch of people eventually" than from "people are having fun and didn't invite me RIGHT NOW"
Learned helplessness is a thing that leads to depression, and depression in turns demotivates and deepens sense of helplessness. They do mutually reinforce, and either could be the starting point.
The evolutionary purpose of dread is to motivate people to leave dangerous situations. When you hear about people surviving dangerous animal encounters, they tend to notice that something is "off" before they actually spot the hungry bear or mountain lion. Feeling dread for something you can't control is completely irrational, however. It's inevitable that you'll succumb to age related illness, so it's logical to be concerned about it to a certain extent, and it can be good to channel that into motivating you to be healthy. However, the fear of death is motivating you to doomscroll WebMD and causing pain in your daily life, you have a psychological problem. The same goes for human climate change. Unless if you live in a place like Micronesia, climate doomerism is a product of social media more than actual climate change.
Coming to the conclusion that there is nothing you can do serves no evolutionary purpose either. You should continue looking for an out as long as any possibility remains, no matter how remote.
What gave you the impression that I think nothing can be done? You can drive less, eat less meat, vote for certain politicians etc. What's a waste of mental energy is worrying that everyone else is going to do the same thing. This is often counterproductive to the problem it's trying to solve, like Greta Thunberg inspiring millions of kids to skip school in the name of "raising awareness."
What do you think mental energy is for? If none of those things seems like solutions to the existential threat, which, let's be honest, they don't. Then the problem is not yet solved.
In any robust system, components are responsible for more than just their own personal contribution to failure. There needs to be a certain amount of redundancy.
Convincing other people to care more about climate change, and to be more willing to force society into common sacrifices for aggregate benefit takes a lot of footwork. It is not mental illness to participate in this process.
> Convincing other people to care more about climate change, and to be more willing to force society into common sacrifices for aggregate benefit takes a lot of footwork.
If they actually worked to make progress on this aspect, they would feel a sense of purpose rather than dread. Instead, what you're mostly seeing is virtue signalling that targets their own in-group and then being disappointed when that doesn't accomplish anything.
Climate activists can learn a lot by looking at the Civil Rights movement in the past. Before the big wins, there were voting drives, legal challenges, and organized carpools to encourage participation in the bus protests. This costs a lot more energy than telling people to skip school on social media, but participation is also significantly more fulfilling.
And all of the things you just listed, do absolutely nothing compared to demonstrating against using oil and coal.
Instead they just make your life worse, much more than it helps the environment.
Virtue signaling if you will.
You don't just develop existential dread about climate change out of nowhere. First comes awareness, in this case the younger generation grew up being educated about climate change.
Then you get exacerbation/increased attention - in this case social media and traditional media which have fuelled doomsday rhetoric and alarmism in general. Not to say that it isn't a big issue, it's massive; but doesn't help that we're feeding young minds with constant negative stimuli about how we're all going to die and there's nothing we can do about the problem.
I had no phone as a kid, I tinkered with PCs and programming, but spent most of my time outside, with friends. Riding our bikes or skateboarding till the sun came down. We played basketball and met new friends at the mall. We explored abandon buildings and found places on the map we wanted to visit when we got cars. None of us had ADHD, depression, or were on SSRIs. Nobody made up mental illness or gender identity. This is so obviously a result of our screwed up culture and social media, and prevalence of phone usage from a young age. I have several young cousins and they are in bad shape. Fat (like real fat), sedentary, addicted to anime, rarely play outside, and of course, have all the mental illness acronyms.
> In our 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and I presented evidence that the same trends were happening in Canada and the United Kingdom—not just the rise in depression and anxiety, but also the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.” It seemed that all the Anglo nations were setting up their children for failure in the same ways at the same time.
And there was exactly zero evidence of this having anything to do with it, and none of it really fits the bill of having "switched on" around 2010 or a little before (hint: facebook).
That’s interesting data. I wonder: is there any possibility that part of the change is because we’re telling kids that it’s okay to admit to depression? I.e., are we just reporting more accurately now?
That also raises the question of whether increased focus on these issues can negatively affect at least a subset of people.
We know that severe mental (and even physical) symptoms can "spread" in social groups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness), particularly among young women who are now experiencing the sharpest rises in mental illness. There is also strong evidence that affective states (e.g. happiness or depression) spread socially, with even next-door neighbors of depressed people being significantly more likely to be depressed than those on the same block but not next-door (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830455/).
While the TikTok Tourette's phenomenon is clearly an extreme example, it seems possible that something similar could be happening to kids constantly hearing about anxiety and depressive disorders as an immutable trait that everyone around them seems to have.
There is also a feedback cycle - people open up about it more, reach a larger audience who sees this modeled/discussed, making it more likely for them to A) be aware in their own life and B) mirror and amplify.
Bad metaphor - if we think of ideas spreading between people like neurons, we have increased the interconnectedness (social reach) and decreased the activation energy (removed stigma/provided language/triggered introspection).
Yeah, this doesn’t seem totally implausible, although postulating it doesn’t mean it’s happening. More generally, there’s no doubt that we’ve vastly increased communication bandwidth and that could easily have effects. For a few years now I’ve been thinking about gatekeepers in old media as damping rods that prevented new ideas from spreading quickly. There are both positive and negative ramifications to removing those damping rods.
It is kind of depressing to realize we all inevitably will die, our world will turn to dust, the sun will expire and everything will freeze into a profound and eternal coldness. So, maybe it's Wikipedia's fault?[1]
That’s a powerful part of the narrative for sure. But … ugh, I need to be less lazy and dig into the supporting material, actually, some of my questions may be answered there.
The big one is “does that mean there’s more self-harm, or does that mean parents are more willing to ask for emergency help?”
If the latter then it'd affect boys and girls equally. The simplest explanation here is likely the right one i.e. the increase in mental disorders is real.
I don’t think that’s true at all. There are real differences between how we treat men and women. And the actual effect we’re seeing isn’t even addressed — if it’s because college campuses won’t tolerate dissent, why wouldn’t that affect men?
Yes, women are treated much better in general especially at that age. Not sure where you got the college campus thing. The article is about teenagers. They mostly haven't gone to college yet.
That article (i.e. the author) seems to have a weird understanding of mathematics:
> "Note that there are two ways to calculate increases. We can measure an increase in absolute terms, e.g., a rise from 5% to 15% of teens with a diagnosis is a ten percentage-point increase, or we can report it in relative terms, e.g., a rise from 5% to 15% is a 300% increase, relative to the anchor point"
Uhm… maybe in an "alternative mathematics" universe? Where I learned math, an increase from 100% of the anchor value to 300% of the anchor value is not a relative increase of 300% but of 300%-100%=200%.
In contrast, A "300% increase, relative to the anchor point" would be adding 300% of the anchor value to the 100% of it that it already has, i.e. resulting in an end value of 400% of the anchor value. So in the case presented by the article quote, to come back to the absolute terms, it would be a rise from 5% to 20%, not to 15%.
I think you've mixed up relative and absolute differences. Both of your examples are in terms of absolute percentage points (pp, sometimes ambiguously labeled %), but relative changes are measured in percent (%). 300% relative difference just means 300/100 = 3x.
> Both of your examples are in terms of absolute percentage points
No, they are both about relative increases. I didn't even write about absolute increases because (unlike relative increases, where the article makes a mistake) absolute increases were the part that the article got right: a rise from 5% to 15% would be an (absolute) increase of 10% … just like the article says.
> 300% relative difference just means 300/100 = 3x
…My point was: 300% relative INCREASE (i.e. positive relative difference) means that it's the DIFFERENCE (increase) between the initial value and the end value that is 300% RELATIVE TO the initial value (thus the end value being 400% of the initial value), not that the end value is 300% of the initial value (which would only be a 200% relative increase).
Let's take, to better illustrate the point, an example with a relative increase below 100%. Let's go with an example with 40% relative increase. So let's say:
* in the reference year, your company made a profit of 5 million dollars out of a revenue of 100 million dollars, i.e. a profit margin of 5%.
* the next year it still made a revenue of 100 million dollars but managed to be more profitable, making a profit of 7 million dollars i.e. a profit margin of 7%.
* The ABSOLUTE increase of the profit margin is (7%-5%)=2%,
* The RELATIVE increase of profit margin is the absolute increase of profit margin divided by its initial reference value i.e. (7%-5%)/5% = 40%.
And my point is: having a 40% relative increase of profit margin means that your end profit margin is 40% higher relative to your initial reference profit margin and is thus (100%+40%)=140% of your initial reference profit margin, not that your end profit margin is 40% of your initial profit margin… which would be a 60% relative DECREASE (i.e. -60% relative increase) of the profit margin.
These always come up and there's always this internet-commenter tendency to be like "I KNEW IT: SMARTPHONES/INTERNET/LACK-OF-RELIGION/ABCDEFG ANYTHING OF THE LAST 20 YEARS I HATE", which is fine for a hypothesis and worth somebody saying once.
But it's really just a hypothesis.
Another hypothesis is that it's environmental. There's a lot of research showing depression and stress are correlated with inflammation. There are a number of other health biomarkers that are going bad fast (sperm-count, testosterone) and it's known testosterone levels inversely correlate with depression for example. Pollution is also correlated with health and mood.
So rather than declaring it over before the research even begins, let's at least consider environment.
Another hypothesis is electromagnetic fields. There are more now than ever. Cell phones, 5G, Wifi
Sounds stupid right? There's a plausibility scale, and despite various hypotheses being possible, it's reasonable to rank them by what fits best with out prior knowledge, and social media is way more plausible than some post 2010 rise in inflammation, even if that could causally lead to depression in the first place.
You're assuming that depression and other mental illnesses only started in 2010, which is theoretically possible, but not an established fact.
We've actually seen a drastic rise in most mental illnesses diagnosed going back at least 50 years. There is a hypothesis that it's diagnosis, but again, merely a hypothesis.
Some of the cases which clearly aren't "diagnosis" (e.g. nearsightedness) we have no explanation for.
Speaking from my family history, bipolar just wasn’t diagnosed or treated unless it was quite severe. It’s unlikely I’d have been diagnosed 50 years ago.
It's also possible that there are multiple confounding factors at play. It's reasonable to investigate multiple angles as well as how they interact with each other.
I suppose there are different pollutants all the time, but the areas I'm familiar with (SF Bay and LA) have gotten much less polluted in the last few decades, at least by how they look and smell. I suspect our air and water is safer now than 20 years ago, and much safer than 40 years ago.
Solitary entertainment has grown drastically more engaging in the last few decades, and it seems reasonable to think that it has contributed to increased isolation and sedentary behavior.
Even though it's not absolutely certainly the cause of all ills in the world, I think it's worthwhile to be cautious about digital entertainment.
> I suppose there are different pollutants all the time, but the areas I'm familiar with (SF Bay and LA) have gotten much less polluted in the last few decades, at least by how they look and smell
I want to point out that pollution can be invisible. As a thought experiment - the amount of lead in your water it would take to permanently damage your brain would be invisible, untasteable, and miniscule. It's worth remembering how fragile we really are.
Is it water? Most water supplies only test for about 8-10 chemicals. Who knows? Is it the microplastics we eat?
As for why it would be worse now when our environment is getting better -- perhaps the damage is accumulating each generation (like sperm counts are going down each generation). There are a lot of cases where pregnant mother being exposed to something can have severe effects on the child, and sometimes even the grandchild (look up diethystylbestrol).
Anyways, this is just a hypothesis, but it seems to me it should be given as strong a starting consideration as anything else. I'm sure it's not too hard to take blood samples from a few thousand people to look for health correlations to these mood issues.
Humans might be fine with some form of pollution but not others, so "there's less trash and the factory isn't dumping glowing sludge into the bay" doesn't really rule out that there's some pollution that's less visible but problematic for a subset of people (or problematic when combined with other factors, e.g. veganism or listening to mumble rap).
The first thing I thought of when they said pollution in this context was plastics. That's something that people have an increasing exposure to that also has a history of chemicals that are hormone disruptors. I don't think it covers the entire increase. But it could be one of many factors on the longer scale (not just the shorter term increase).
> There are a number of other health biomarkers that are going bad fast (sperm-count, testosterone)
Which one caused which? Does hanging out on Reddit 8 hours a day not have an effect on sperm-count; or is the decline in sperm-count part of the reason you are on Reddit?
Unfortunately, you have now stumbled on the extremely politically sensitive elephant in the room.
If it is environmental (microplastics anyone)... do we need to stop producing certain clothes (stretch clothing is particularly bad)? Could this actually be part of the increase in youth identifying as LGBTQ [1]? Is it a greater threat to our survival, health, and well-being than the more palatable issue (but still an issue) of climate change?
[1] Note, I'm not making a hypothesis or taking a position here. However, just admitting that these microplastics and other things are having effects on humans could easily lead to "were these people born this way, or were many of them poisoned that way"? And so, no surprise, nobody wants to talk about it and so the question of if it could just remains unanswered.
It's such a shame that scientists were figuring this out but the wrong person[0] spoke up and now it's a conspiracy theory. That's a weird dynamic. Wonder if it possibly happened with anything else we now call a "conspiracy theory."
> Even beyond the strategic perspective, it’s just sort of embarrassing to have two good theories of how society and politics work that make opposite predictions from each other. What are some heuristics for when one would work rather than another?
What's embarrassing is that Scott Alexander is unable to answer that question himself. Maybe he should ask ChatGPT?
I mean "RELIGION" in and of how it normally goes hand in hand with stronger and closer communities it disappearing is probably a large factor in the current issues. I'm not religious but even I can recognize that for the vast majority of the population this support structure going away with nothing to replace it hasn't been great for a lot of people.
Nothing dramatic has changed in terms of pollution in 2010 though, especially in developed western nations. If anything, it's been getting better as we've been transitioning to cleaner burning natural gas and renewables.
You'd have to show that the "general state of things since the mid 2000s" has gotten appreciably worse than the time period prior to 2012. Rewind a decade and we had 9/11 and the Iraq war, so it doesn't seem immediately obvious that things got significantly worse.
At least in the US, the public was more united in its support for the wars in the middle east at their outset in the early 2000s than they have been for anything since. The war in Afghanistan initially had 88% support[1] and the war in Iraq had 76%, though it fell to 72% shortly after[2].
Social media and phones are environmental factors. Increasing obesity is definitely a factor. Whether sperm and testosterone are decreasing is still speculative because the old data being used for comparisons is pretty poor. I think air pollution has actually gotten better since the 80s last I checked. Maybe increases in 'forever chemicals' are having some effect.
Did anyone look at the case histories? Was there a second opinion on the diagnosis?
Maybe big pharma trying to push even more medication may be part of the problem. Interesting that the no one is mentioning this possibility...
How would big pharma pushing medication achieve such a consistent and simultaneous effect across different countries with radically different healthcare systems and policies? And why would their lobbying have a greater effect on diagnoses in the teenager demographic, which due to the risks and side effects involved in psychiatric medication make youngsters less likely to be prescribed them than fully developed adults?
If this is true, then I believe it will unfortunately get worse. Given the curve of technological progress and social media trends and the overall turn humanity is going right now I believe the future is going to be increasing polarized in terms of happiness. Half of the popular will be extremely happy while the other half will be extremely depressed. Not exactly like this but the psychological well-being bell curve is going to get away from a normal distribution and become more distorted.
Huh. My impression is that a preponderance of HN agrees with his conclusion. Stories about it from a variety of sources (not just Haidt) routinely make the front page; ditto techno-negative stories in general.
But true or not, he hasn't come close to supporting his claims.
HN is basically just reddit with slightly more dissent with the prevailing bias to be found in the [flagged] [dead] section. When the hivemind encounters data that causes cognitive dissonance it downvotes and flags it.
Just like with autism, this is unlikely a change in the true rate of mental illness, just more awareness of and less social stigma against mental illness.
Note that this isn't an unbiased source. This is working with Jon, the co-writer of The Coddling Of The American Mind, which uhhh is not without its critics for inaccuracies and stretching of truth. Check it out:
He's also known for hinging a lot of what he says on the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria (the idea that kids are spontaneously turning trans with no previous indicators due to a "social contagion"). The original study for it is a survey of posts from parents who don't want their kids to be trans. It shouldn't surprise anyone that those parents weren't in the best position to catch any hints when their kids might have caught on to the idea that their parents might not like them being trans.
You are way overstating this. Haidt might have been one of the early ones raising alarm bells, but it's well established now that the cohort of people declaring themselves to be trans has shifted dramatically to young girls only very recently [1].
Your article doesn't seem to be quite authoritative: It shows there's actually a lot of debate about this subject. There's even a responses section that shows there's some significant issues with the article and claiming it's not neutral, leaving out significant statistics like a less than 1% regret rate of trans affirming procedures (less than a knee surgery). I think it's still up in the air, frankly.
What is authoritative is the evidence. The cohort WPATH was familiar with before 2010 and for which we have considerable data was older male-to-female transitioners. This cohort has changed significantly per the article, which is why some people are raising concerns about the lack of quality safety data for minors.
Furthermore, only the US has really pushed gender affirming care for minors to this degree. Every other country has backed away from it due to low quality evidence. You know what else those countries have that the US doesn't? Universal healthcare that creates wildly different healthcare priorities. Consider that when when evaluating neutrality.
> leaving out significant statistics like a less than 1% regret rate of trans affirming procedures (less than a knee surgery)
The article and the responses make clear that transitioners are not followed consistently, so this evaluation is based on very spotty data. The fact is we don't know how common regret is.
Even the responses that are pro-gender affirming care acknowledge that the data supporting long-term quality of life improvements is poor.
I'm not sure what you're claiming is up in the air. My first claim was about the changing cohort, so if that's what you're referring to, the statistics are clear. Here's how it breaks down in Canada:
Transgender women were dominant and stable for a long time, as I said (male to female transitioners), and then trans men and non-binary cohort have shot past those levels like a rocket over the past few years.
Some of the increases are doubtless more acceptance of trans people, but it's not clear why that would affect the genders differentially in such a dramatic fashion.
It's fair to say that this falls under the current "culture war". Any criticism may or may not be politically motivated. Any support may or may not be politically motivated.
The results of this data gathering exercise is alarming regardless.
Linking a podcast isn't very good sourcing. I'm very intrigued to hear how the cuddling that's happening college campuses isn't happening, since anyone can see it in real time.
Interesting reading this sentiment, after first reading the recent thread about Stanford's "war" on students. The prevailing attitude there seemed to be that Stanford was in fact antagonizing their students by banning drinking, when in fact they should be providing an environment that is insulates students from real-world consequences to allow for experimentation. Now I guess this opinion is that doing so would be coddling, and that is a problem in itself. Seems like a complex issue where people can have a reasonable difference of opinion. So maybe it's not that people are denying the coddling, but they just think it's not a problem.
It's not much easier to engage with ten articles of varying quality and varying levels of disagreement than with a podcast.
>The Miseducation of Free Speech
Does not focus on Haidt.
>College and the “Culture War”: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes
Does not focus on Haidt.
>The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis
"This is not one of those laudatory reviews. Although I agree with many things they write, and share their general outlook in opposition to safetyism (protecting people from any possible harms, including offensive ideas) and in favor of free speech, I want to focus on my disagreements because dissent is more interesting and more important."
Dissents on specific political implications while agreeing with the wider point.
>What 'Safe Spaces' really look like on college campuses
Does not mention Haidt at all; focuses mostly on "safe spaces" in the narrow sense of support groups.
>Are College Campuses Really in the Thrall of Leftist Censors?
Tabloid piece; focuses primarily on political bias and not overall censorship; does not mention Haidt.
>Speaking Freely: What Students Think about Expression at American Colleges
From FIRE, whose leadership worked with Haidt on the book; presumably not that critical of Haidt. Skipped.
>Not all cultures are created equal’ says Penn Law professor in op-ed
Focuses on Amy Waxman, an infamously racist professor whom even "anti-woke" firebrand Norman Finkelstein has denounced. A bit of a strawman.
>Right Wing Media Has Tried to Stifle Student Speech at Evergreen State College
Does not focus on Haidt; essentially agrees by highlighting censorship on college campuses, but disputes whether it is primarily leftist.
>I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me
Skipped. You know why.
>In College and Hiding from Scary Ideas
Paywall; title indicates that it agrees with Haidt.
Nowhere in this Gish gallop of links is there a serious critique of the analysis in The Coddling of the American Mind, except in the third link, where the author is explicitly saying he agrees with Haidt on most points. Using this to discredit Haidt as he discusses a completely different subject is not a very helpful contribution to the overall discussion.
The Amy Waxman point was explicitly used by The Coddling Of The American Mind to prove its point, while the book completely ignored the context that Amy Waxman was racist, which is why it's referenced here. It's clear you haven't even read the book you're trying to defend here, so why are you doing this?
Edited to add: A gish-gallop? I'm just linking a set of references that the podcast uses because of the critique that podcasts are apparently bad to listen to? Do you want a transcript or something? I'm just wanting to let folks have some context to this article dude, that isn't coming from a source without its own biases and to keep that in mind when reading. Why are you being weird about this, man?
Haidt's book argues that students and faculty denouncing Amy Wax is stifling a culture of freedom of speech, while purposefully not addressing what the students and faculty were denouncing. This is one of the few examples he provides.
I agree with you about ad hominems but unfortunately your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological battle, and also is arguably breaking the rule against trollish usernames here (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). I've therefore banned it. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future - they're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. If you want to do that, we'll happily rename your account to something less trollish.
(If you didn't intend your username to be trollish, I apologize, but I'm seeing signs that other people are taking it that way.)
This is pretty lame, given that there's a good amount of users who are basically only commenting to say "capitalism bad, mhkay", yet for some reason that's not "primarily for political/ideological battle".
Applying rules evenly makes the rules seem better.
We've been applying the rules evenly for years, or at least have put in years' worth of effort to do so. The problem is that no matter how evenly one applies the rules, people with strong ideological passions still feel that we are biased against their side and secretly favor the other side. I think this is because everyone is more likely to notice and place greater weight on the cases that they happen to dislike.
If you're aware of accounts using HN primarily for ideological battle who we haven't asked to stop, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen them. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging such posts or, in egregious cases, emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
I find the "both extremes are mad at me so I must be doing something right" defense not really useful, as it really doesn't say much about how evenly you apply moderation. You could be a hair's width away from being a fascist, and some full on fascist would complain that you're too left wing, and both a centrist and a leftist would complain that you're too right wing.
I don't want to complain about people doing it (but I have commented on it, and taken the punishment), I'd just prefer the moderation to be "either there's none or we keep our hands off".
I understand that it's not an easy position to be in, as you have to keep people happy, and enforcing the rules sometimes doesn't vibe with everyone, but I do believe that Facebook got that right (one of the few things!): if you say that you can't make sexist comments, you also can't make sexist comments about men. Twitter and Reddit got that wrong, and I believe you've got it wrong as well, as you'll ban someone like the person here, but you wouldn't bane someone who is the opposite.
> "both extremes are mad at me so I must be doing something right"
I haven't said that and try to be careful never to imply it. Rather, my point is that these complaints about moderation bias (which come in from all political angles) are so isomorphic that there must be a common mechanism underlying them. (People sometimes interpret this as an argument in favor of centrist politics but that's a misunderstanding. It's an argument about social psychology on the internet.)
> I believe you've got it wrong as well, as you'll ban someone like the person here, but you wouldn't bane someone who is the opposite.
That's quite false—we've banned countless accounts on both sides of that divide—so I think you're kind of making my point here. You've assumed something that isn't true, for reasons that have nothing to do with our actual practice. Moreover the users with opposite politics to yours make exactly the same false assumption, just with one bit flipped.
I'm sure you've banned others, too. I read with showdead on, and I'm seeing a pretty clear bias in who's banned and who's not. Sure, it may be that right-wingers just can't behave, and I certainly see some of those. But others are perfectly fine comments, and checking their comment list, they write plenty of those, yet they still got banned. The communists don't get banned, and I can't recall seeing an obviously left-wing comment that was reasonable (aka not "you and all other rich people should be shot") and dead by default.
Maybe there's a secret part of HN where they're posting and they're all banned, but I doubt it. Your house, your rules, but it certainly looks like these rules are a bit bendy, and having banned some crazy person with a Bernie quote on his profile makes you believe that you're applying them evenly when you also ban someone like this here, who just comments from a somewhat right-wing position and is rejected by some part of the community because of it.
Can you link me to specific examples of accounts that you think should be banned and haven't been? or of accounts that have been banned, which shouldn't be? I'd like to take a look.
I'd also look at links to specific comments (i.e. dead and shouldn't be, or live and shouldn't be). But that's less relevant because we have to evaluate these things at account level, not post level. For example, banned accounts can post good comments (and we hope users will vouch for those - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch, and we unkill them whenever we see them), but it doesn't follow that the account should be unbanned. That depends on the overall behavior of the account.
I can't imagine how anyone thinks that HN has a left bias, I've seen open transphobia that doesn't so much as get flagged, when doing it on even centrist platforms would earn you a permaban.
Second, you've linked to a photo that says something about Netflix, Twitter, Airbnb, Apple, Stripe, Lyft, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Tesla, eBay, PayPal, and Microsoft. It's not clear to me what that's supposed to have to do with Hacker News moderation.
It's not at all true that ideological battles are fine here for one side but not the other, as anyone can see for themselves if they want to look back through the thousands of moderation comments I've posted. You feel that way, not because you're perceiving moderation accurately, but for the same reason that led https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238927 to say "Literally anything left-of-right-of-centre immediately gets flagged (if not outright banned by the mods)".
Seeing as how my daughter has gone through ten years of therapy due to depression I'll throw my hat in the ring and tell you what I think at least part of the problem is:
Late stage, winner-takes-all & loser-gets-nothing, Capitalism.
Those of us who are well-entrenched in our careers may not understand how vicious the world is for the entry-level and those aspiring to launch careers. The secondary schools preach and harp about college nearly every single day. If you don't go to college then expect to work meaningless jobs and live in squalor. I'm paraphrasing, but only a bit.
If you don't know anyone going through today's college admissions process then whoo-boy! There have been a recent spate of articles here on HN complaining about developer interviews and how insane they've become. Multiply the insanity by 10x and then re-label it as college admissions. You'd better have made sure you played the right sport, had the right extracurricular activities, volunteered for the right organizations, and be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. That should at least guarantee you a spot at your state college, maybe even a scholarship or two.
And speaking of scholarships - you need money for college. Lots and lots of money. More money than your parents could have ever possibly saved - and that's if your parents are in the top 10% of wage earners. You're going to be taking out loans, maybe spending a significant part of your adult life paying back those loans.
Why would you do this? You don't want to have a menial job and live in squalor do you?
Meanwhile while killing themselves to get into college they're watching billionaires literally buy the government and pass the laws they want passed. They watch politicians gerrymander so that the majority doesn't actually have a say. They watch a moral minority strip them of every personal liberty they have and tell them how to live their lives.
Oh, and all these assholes are completely destroying the Earth, and their future, without a care in the world for what will come after them. In fact they don't think there's going to be a future because Jesus Christ is going to float down on a cloud and save them all and leave your sorry ass behind to suffer.
And we're wondering, actually wondering, why an entire generation is depressed and apathetic and looking at the older generations with derision.
Meanwhile the depression will continue until they rise up and burn the place down. That is if they're not so downtrodden they can't even lift their heads any longer.
I agree with this take. The biggest difference I see between the world I grew up in in the 80s/90s and today is how everything has moved to this horrible "winner take all" mode. Not just in education, but everything. Every aspect of life has turned into this zero-sum slugfest where very few win the lottery or kill their way to the top, and the remainder are expected to live with nothing. Used to be there were careers available for A students, B students, C students, D students and so on. We're very quickly moving towards this bimodal: ultra-luxury standard of living for a tiny few elite who ended up #1 (or lucked into it through their parents), and squalor for everyone else.
My kid asks me what career she should be when she grows up and I honestly don't know what to tell her. Every job category is fighting for its life against the capital ownership class's unquenchable need for more of the pie. The truth is that it probably doesn't matter. Unless I'm a multimillionaire and pay her way to the elite club, she doesn't really have anything besides downward class mobility to look forward to.
The US is so close to a near ideal mixed economy. If the cartels holding oligopolies on housing, healthcare, and education were disbanded life would be dare I say pleasant in America. Today GDP keeps rising because of a few free money trees, while quality of life for many is deteriorating. Becoming middle class is stressful here, and while it shouldn’t necessarily be easy it should at least be formulaic. Young people seem to sense this formula is disappearing before them.
The formula is disappearing before them and the formula is getting harder and harder to execute. Failure, or what's deemed as failure, is seen to carry more dire consequences than ever.
What we're seeing is exactly what you would expect to happen if the middle class is indeed disappearing.
>If the cartels holding oligopolies on housing, healthcare, and education were disbanded life would be dare I say pleasant in America.
These are three of the most important things one needs in life, though. If there are cartels holding oligopolies on these, how can you possibly conclude that the US is close to a near ideal mixed economy?
You're downvoted almost to flagged, but nobody has really responded to what you wrote. And what you wrote amounts to: kids these days see multiple trends that their quality of life will never equal the prosperity of their predecessors, and they're being lied to about it, and there aren't any real ways out of that reality. There is no rebuttal because downvoting does not rebut the truth.
American society has always been ruthlessly capitalist, I don't think that explanation holds for why there is a recent increase in depression. People have gone through much tougher times and seemed to thrive once the bad times ended. I refuse to believe today is any tougher than what past generations went through.
I think what is going on isn't that complicated. The biggest problem is that internet and smartphones have reduced the meaningfulness and weight of local and in person interactions. When we hung out as kids and teenagers the people around you were all you had. They mattered much more to you because what else was there to do?
Also, we measure our social status in a relative manner and the comparison group is no longer the people in your town or high school. It's the whole country or world in some case.
You meet a new person and find out they are really good at an instrument. In the past that would garner a decent amount of respect. Now using your phone you can instantly pull up thousands of people who are better.
Thirty years ago imagine the ego sustenance a person would get from being the best guitar player or artist at their high school.
Basically the social value of the younger generation to each other has decreased. How would that not cause widespread depression?
> People have gone through much tougher times and seemed to thrive once the bad times ended.
If I were a teenager I'd wonder when the bad times were going to end. In most previous "bad times" we've had an exit condition - usually beat the bad guys. What is it now? What are we fighting against to rally in commonality with others? Also, we didn't sample mental illness previously, so we don't really know how teenagers weathered the great depression. Thriving once the bad times ends doesn't indicate how they were doing during the bad times either.
The internet has simply exposed the BS of the ruling class. Their lies are plain for all to see. In the past it was much easier for them to use smoke and mirrors to hide what they were really up to.
Also kids today respect the abilities of their peers, just like they always have. After all, mass media is over 100 years old.
How do I know? I work with kids outside of work time, and I have kids of my own.
> People have gone through much tougher times and seemed to thrive once the bad times ended.
My theory is that in fairly recent memory, in America you had relatively good times that went from the '80s up to 2008, with the '90s being a particularly tranquil time at that (no major war between Desert Storm and 9/11). So to regress from a time of security and prosperity into a bad time provides a sort of trauma of its own. Especially since, as others have pointed out, there seems to be no exit condition.
I've been trying to post less online because it's, well, depressing. But I agree with you 1000%.
The main way to curtail late stage crony capitalism is to raise taxes on the wealthy. We're at about half the tax rate that sustains a healthy middle class, which is directly correlated with wages being half what they should be, the lack of personal savings for the bottom half of the population, etc. It's been well-understood since the Great Depression, but empires have always known that there's a limit to what workers will accept before they revolt. I believe that we passed the point of stability around the Dot Bomb and 9/11 2001. But a strong argument could be made that the writing was on the wall by 1990 when the USSR separated but world powers kept funding their own militaries to create new bogeymen like terrorism to control the population.
Everything since has been theater: from the way we reward financiers and penalize employees, to how our legal system protects status quo players like the RIAA/MPAA, and how threats to our environments are just treated as externalities and not addressed directly because that goes against "free market" capitalism.
I learned about the situation we're in today with looming global threats like nationalism and fascism in high school AP government class back in maybe 1993. Back then, guys like Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh were curiosities, and Newt Gingrich was just getting started. Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that Fox News would dominate all media, thanks to bitter old men like Rupert Murdoch. They created such a dark reality that I feel awful for young people today who think that this is how it always was and always will be.
The silver lining is that every bully eventually realizes that everyone is laughing at him. I think we're in one of those moments now with stuff like the TikTok ban hearings illustrating how comically out of touch bitter old men are. Their time is ending, and I still hold out hope that when Gen X attains power in government, we'll pull the plug on the fear mongering. But I'm generally wrong about these things, so I also expect the powers that be will prevent us from ever gaining any power whatsoever. Which is why it's so important to organize outside of whatever circles the mainstream media deems appropriate. Thankfully Gen Z appears to be doing just that.
Add increasing concentration of wealth in less and less people, increasing job insecurity due to technological advances rendering many jobs completely useless (and transfers even more wealth to those that are already haves and removes it even more from have-nots), the instant access to compare yourself to millions of others around the world...
I seriously can't understand why some people scratch their heads around the youth's mental health crisis. I'd be baffled if they weren't depresesd.
These were all the things the kids were talking about in group therapy - and this was nearly 10 years ago!
BUT - I wouldn't expect people who haven't been paying attention to the environment to be paying attention to their children. Or maybe it's the other way around?
We've seen much worse wealth inequalities in history, we've seen much worse job markets, we've seen much worse wars and pandemics, history was a lot more violent.
Really the only thing different there is that "instant access to compare yourself to millions of others". Which is essentially social media.
I'm sure there are other factors and everyone can speculate what they are, but "the world is terrible today" is hard to argue because it was much worse before, yet this didn't happen.
Things may have been worse in the past but in the past everybody was in the same boat.
Famine? It affected everybody.
Plague? It affected everybody.
Drought? It affected everybody.
War? It affected everybody.
Nowadays the systemic problems that are an artifact of modern life do not affect everybody. The richer you are, the less your affectation. This a winner-takes-all and loser-gets-nothing is a byproduct of the neocon ideology that has dominated our politics since the 80's. Forty years on and its causing grave psychological trauma.
Famine (often with Drought)? What do you think the alleged "Let them eat cake" came from? The nobility and the bourgeoisie weren't affected, only the peasants.
Plague? The motto was cito, longe, tarde: quickly travel far away from the city, and return late. Guess who had that option to leave the plague-affected town for their country estate?
War? While not as clear as the others, it's similar: besides a few sons of nobility, it was the peasants that did the dying, not everybody.
When is the last famine that saw millions dead in the USA while the rich lived lavishly? Because that's what the past looked like, so "winner takes all" was obviously much more true back then. Society used to be much, much more unequal, capitalism was much harsher.
I might be mistaken, but judging that you're on HN and likely work in tech/STEM and had the money to pay for years of therapy for your daughter, I assume you're part of what would previously be called the bourgeoisie -- so there's really no factual reason for you or your daughter to be worried about an increasingly unequal wealth distribution, because you'll have more than your "fair share". I'm not judging, and I don't want to say that her pain isn't or wasn't real, but maybe it's not a rational response to the state of the world and her role in it.
If you look to Western Europe, we have similar issues, yet "winner takes all" couldn't be further from the truth here, we have strong welfare states, we have high taxes, yet teens are still struggling, apparently more than usual. We have very few school shootings, we're lifting any restrictions on abortions, we're constantly making it easier for trans people to transition etc etc etc, so lots of things are fundamentally different. Yet we still see something very similar, and we do have cellphones and social media.
Maybe you should actually listen to the kids. After months of group therapy I can attest to they're telling us. We're just not listening. Continuing to blame social media is all the confirmation they need to know we're not listening.
Oh, and the active shooter drills they've been doing at school now for the past 10 years isn't helping anything. Now they worry about going to school and getting shot. Thanks to Uvalde they now know that the police who are supposed to keep them safe in an active shooter situation will just leave their asses flapping in the breeze getting shot it.
But hey, let's blame social media. Better yet, let's blame TikTok. We don't like them being Chinese-owned anyway.
I repeat myself: we have a similar outcome in Europe, but we have a wildly different situation, and the things you listed don't apply here (and many of them applied in the US even stronger in the past when the kids were alright).
Group therapy is for helping people deal with something. It's not a process to understand a phenomenon, that's not its goal.
> But hey, let's blame social media. Better yet, let's blame TikTok. We don't like them being Chinese-owned anyway.
You're mixing things up. Calm your emotions, I'm not attacking you, and I'm not attacking your daughter.
> Group therapy is for helping people deal with something. It's not a process to understand a phenomenon, that's not its goal.
Yes, and I have ears - and use them. I listened to what the kids were saying. I listen to the kids I work with in the youth organizations in which I'm involved. I listen to the kids on the teams I coach. If you haven't figured it out, I'm around a lot of kids.
You wanna know something none of these kids have ever complained about (and boy do they complain a lot!) - social media making them feel bad. I don't know a single kid that was like I may as well quit since I can't do X as good as some social media darling.
I can tell you what they do complain about, and I wrote about that elsewhere on this thread.
But I do know politicians love blaming social media so they can use it as fuel for their TikTok ban. They can use it as fuel to reign in "Big Tech."
Being a Gen X'er I can tell you in the 80's and 90's it was video games and heavy metal music they were blaming for the kids' woes. Today it's social media. All I can say is they were wrong then, and they're wrong now.
> Being a Gen X’er I can tell you in the 80’s and 90’s it was video games and heavy metal music they were blaming for the kids’ woes.
Yeah, 80’s heavy metal music (and D&D, though politically that was more at the local level, though like heavy metal it tied in with the Satanic Panic), 90’s video games and rap music (though obviously there was no clear cut over, just a gradual shift of focus.)
And the arguments were pretty much the same as with social media, including a whole lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc without good evidence of causation and where there were alternative and stronger causal explanations.
Well, it also has been a tough decade - global financial crisis, wars and flood of refugees, political turmoil partially as a result of these, worries about climate change. Social media certainly amplifies these news and makes it hard to ever unplug, but we could also use better news. As for progressive teens, well their ideology is getting some serious pushback worldwide, so that's one reason to get depressed. Another is that their ideology is degenerating into self hatred and catastrophizing. To be fair Florida is going in much the same direction about different things these days, so I expect conservative teens to get depressed as well.
Pretty much every decade could be called tough. Post-WW II in the US we had:
- 1950s: Civil Rights, Korean war, dawn of the Cold War
- 1960s: Vietnam war, more Cold War
- 1970s: stagflation (high unemployment + high inflation), Watergate, even more Cold War
- 1980s: more stagflation, worries about AIDS, environment (ozone layer, acid rain), urban decay and crack epidemic, rise of Japan, Greed is Good
- 1990s: amongst the more optimistic decades in the US, but there was still lingering AIDS anxiety, dim employment prospects for the over-educated coming off age ("Generation X"), domestic terrorism bracketed by Waco and Columbine High. Abroad there were the Rwanda and Yugoslavia wars.
- 2000s: 9-11, war in Iraq and Afghanistan, financial crisis
And there's probably tons more anxiety inducing events in each decade that I forgot.
This is true, times are always hard for those living in them. Life is hard, after all.
Which lends credence to Haidt's suggestion that smartphones/widespread Internet is a primary factor. People tend to associate that with social media, which I would think is certainly part of it, but simply just being exposed to ideas can inculcate sympathetic ideas in people.
All your friends are depressed? Hey, life is hard for me too, and I'm kinda sad, maybe I'm depressed too. It sounds trite, but people en masse do work that way.
Social contagions were around before the Internet, but the Internet is an excellent medium for social contagions to grow quickly and spread widely.
Before there were good times and bad times. The 40s saw the worst destruction imaginable, practically apocalyptic, while the 50s were all sunshine and automobiles (depending on who you ask of course). Now we live in a world of constant low level turmoil, never disrupting the flow of information and goods, but seemingly irresolvable too.
Social media. Overly medicated. Sold a raw deal with college tuition costs. Social justice and their desire, and ultimately heavy mental weight of trying to change people and systems. Intolerance of those that think differently or disagree. The Media divisiveness machine. Their own families dividing themselves over political differences. All these things are incredibly sad.
I think social media is the main culprit, but there's a lot behind that.
I think PG's identity essay comes into play.
"Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you." [1]
As teenagers pick up all these various identities and labels, it makes them dumber. And it's also exhausting for them mentally to defend them or champion them.
A teen may have as part of their identity: atheist, climate change activist, transgender rights activist, feminist, liberal Democrat, goth, aspiring influencer, etc.
Back when I went to school, you might just be a jock or a nerd but it wasn't anything you felt compelled to defend. There weren't that many identities or groups organizing to recruit you to their cause. You didn't have the weight of putting all your time in so many things AND maintain some bullshit presence on social media.
So how do you address this? Only thing I can think is to help our young people develop a mindset or philosophy for dealing with bullshit. How to be resilient in a dynamic world that really gives zero fucks about you. Once you accept that as a fact, I think it is infinitely easier to be happy.
I had a professor say once something like "nobody gives a shit about you except maybe your family and a few close friends" and that you need to be compelling and memorable. The class was about helping students reflect on that and how they wanted to tackle the world.
I already had that kind of outlook at the time, but you'd be surprised at how many students had a completely stunned look on their face because they were raised in an environment where they were the center of their parents' lives and were told that everyone loves them, that they are super special and that if they go to school, do this, do that, then they'll be good. So the professor shocked them with that statement.
In my opinion, that's part of the core issue. We aren't preparing our youth with this mindset. And they get frustrated when they take their identities and dreams and run into the world's brick wall. It overwhelms them. As Neil deGrasse Tyson was told by his father - it's not enough to be right, you must be effective.
If we teach them to accept that the world gives zero shits about them and that they need to develop skills to be compelling, then they can be more effective and get more reward.
I'm not advocating for that message to just be dropped on teens as is, although I think all universities should have that course along with personal finance. But when raising kids and in our elementary and high schools, we should be challenging them in a way that let's them know that if they want their way in anything, they should think of compelling reasons and they should be able to articulate those reasons without raging on others, to be effective.
Ultimately it's the fault of the parents and society. People are showing kids that it is ok to just rage on your friends and family when you find out they disagree with you. Defriend, talk shit behind their back. Constantly comparing themselves to others. We've been grooming citizens with strong identities with every form of media and built systems around divisiveness and social outrage. It's a nefarious engine that rips families, friends and communities apart. And this leads to mental illness with teenagers and their parents too.
The only solution is to try and disconnect from that engine. It's extremely powerful though. May take a generation unless someone or something with major influence is able to connect with the youth in a meaningful way.
It's funny. Somehow I don't think the standard of evidence[RCTs] we get calls for in nutrition studies(for example), will be applied equally here. It's an epistemological double-standard that's rarely given serious consideration.
I wouldn't give correlative studies much thought. It could be just as likely that people who were more anxious or depressed were found to be mobile phone users or any number of other things causing both anxiety and depression and increased mobile phone use. Critique of causal errors should be no different here than any other conclusion made from correlations.
Psychology is fundamentally not science. I don't mean to devalue it as a discipline, but it is incorrect to call it science for a pretty simple epistemological reason.
Science depends upon the reproducibility of experiments. This means if I perform an experiment twice, then the second experiment (up to relativity) is done in the context of the experiment having already been done once, so the outcome of these experiments can be thought of as a fixed point of performing applying the have-done-the-experiment context (often with respect to all other experiments). Science is made up of these fixed points, which we can think of as the "set" of properties of the capital-W World.
Fundamentally, however, what it means to observe the outcome of an experiment, is to be able to condition your behavior upon that outcome, so if your own behavior is the thing that you are observing, there aren't necessarily any fixed points of this process.
This isn't merely a technicality either. For example: I measure that people experiencing insecurity about their performance are mostly pessimistic, and dub this phenomenon "impostor syndrome". I publish my results and, as a result, people assume that the insecurity they feel about their performance is explained by impostor syndrome, rather than being an honest evaluation of their performance. The next time I try to measure this phenomenon in the population, I might indeed find that it's the other way around, that people are optimistic about their performance, as a result of the previous experiment.
I'm straying a bit off topic, but while agree on some of the premises, I reach a different conclusion.
I agree with you, and probably more broadly that studying systems which aren't fully isolatable is particularly challenging, but I think there is more than a single simple explanation for this. One we need to get out of the way is that there are things under the psychology umbrella that are science and ones that aren't and what is and isn't science isn't simply topic-based, it's approach-based.
For example, reaction-time is a psychological measurement. Is reaction time scientific? I think that's an ill-posed question. It's, like you mentioned, an epistomological question: specifically an ontological question[1]. In the sense that reaction-time is measurable and largely repeatable with respect to specific stimulus, yes, measuring it and analyzing the results can be a step in the scientific path toward knowledge. I'd find it surprising if most people disagreed with this.
Let's take a more difficult example, is behavioral psychology science? Again, an ill-posed question. Can we ask scientific question of behavioral psychology? Sure; Does the intervention of CBT in anxiety-diagnosed subjects (as opposed to a non-intervention control) result in lower post-treatment hospital admittance? That's a valid scientific question. Does it say anything about how CBT works? No. It relates a treatment to a result, and if we want to be more specific, a treatment at a point in time, for a specific group.
Anticipating the test-retest issue you mentioned above, it's being loose with assumptions and isolation. These things can either be controlled for, or assumed. We should be honest with ourselves that far too many times, they haven't been in practice, but let's not conclude from that that psychology has an essential characteristic of not being scientific. It has a social problem instead.
I think we can all be more transparent about assumptions, conditions, and generalization, but I think that's a benefit, not a disadvantage. It enables us to be more precise in our ideas, concepts, and language and that's a good thing.
Specifically regarding the fixed-point framing. It's an assumption of time-invariance. I'm not exactly an expert on the philosophy of science, but I'd be surprised not to find stronger and weaker versions of that assumption and that's a reasonable thing to be transparent about when communicating validity.
1. As an aside, it's funny that "Is reaction time scientific?" is itself not a scientific question.
I don't think there's no value in making observations of human psychology. I was arguing that RCT does not address the epstemological problem, since the subjects observe the outcomes.
I don't think that there are no properties to observe about humans, but simply doing science isn't sufficient. You need to add in some math. Game theory and computer science come to mind as disciplines which are also not science which can be used to reason that an observation might be invariant with respect to repeated observation. Experiment alone is not sufficient to establish this.
> How do you propose to use RCTs to test the claim?
I'm not proposing to use RCTs to test the claim. I'm proposing that the conclusions be scrutinized to the same degree we scruitinize other claims made without RCTs. Nutrition studies are a great example that get routinely criticized here because they also rarely backed by RCTs. I'm proposing the same standard of critique.
> As an aside, do you think that the data, not the hypothesis, is accurate (i.e., that mental health has declined in teens)?
I haven't seen the data nor the data collection methodology. Even so, there are basic concerns that relate to health and specifically mental health that we can ask.
Did reporting standards remain consistent throughout the study period? If we assume they did, this assumption becomes "baked" into the conclusions. Assumptions don't merely vanish once we reach a conclusion.
Secondly, mental health(/illness) is both an umbrella term and one subject to operationalization errors more than say(extending the analogy) weight is. We would be suspicious if a nutritional study measuring health outcomes relied on self-reported bodyweight. We should be equally suspicious when mental health studies rely on self-reporting. I'm not arguing here that we should instead fMRI subjects, just that having an appropriate level of self-reporting suspicion is healthy, rational, skepticism.
Finally, unlike weight, measuring mental health has unique and different operationalization characteristics. The connection between weight and physical health, as far as we can both agree, has a different associative-conceptual connection than self-harm admittance and mental health. We should reasonably rule out basic alternative hypotheses. Were there factors (economic, social, institutional) that could explain(even partially) the change in admittance rates? Did admittance standards change during the timeframe? Even a beneficial change, like awareness-raising campaigns could result in increased admittence. See Logic's song “1-800-273-8255”[1] as a good reason hotline calls increased after it's release that is arguably a good thing rather than indicative of a negative effect.
At the end of the day, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit left to explore. Coupled with the previously mentioned skepticism, I wouldn't exactly put my faith in this. Let's be mature and say that's different from saying it's wrong. We're all invested in finding out the exact nature of this phenomenon.
People should really read Jonathan Haidt's full series of posts. This one is post # 8 out of N, and they are meant to be read in series. The author's arguments build on each other, and all of the criticisms people are making in the comments are addressed in prior posts.
I find the complete argument really compelling. It convincingly argues that teen use of social media has drastically reduced the time spent in person with friends, and drastically increased social comparisons. These two effects are awful for the mental health of a human who's brain is still developing. The specific issue is the combination of smartphones with cameras and social media based on images and video, which only became prevalent in ~2012. Social media is causing a public health the scale of COVID, Opiods, or smoking - a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering, and 2-3x the rate of teen self harm and suicide.
Here's the longer version of the argument, with citations:
Teen mental health has unambiguously dropped off a cliff. Both self reports of depression, and objective measures like hospital admissions and suicides, have increased drastically since ~2012 [1].
The decrease in health does not correlate with the economy [2], or with academic pressure [3]. It does not correlate with 9/11, school shootings, or any particular American issue, because the decline started at the same time in all Anglophile countries [4].
There is no evidence of the "doomer" hypothesis: that teens are right to be more depressed because the world actually does suck, and they're just the first to notice [5]. And that thought pattern is itself specifically characteristic of depression: Depressed people view the world as worse than it actually is [6].
The decline in mental health does unambiguously correlate with social media use. And every class of study that examines causation has shown that social media causes declines in mental heatlh. The issue seems to be specifically the combination of smartphones with cameras and social media based on images and videos. These two technologies both became common ~2012, at the same time mental health started dropping [7].
Some combination of social media has radically altered the social life of teens, in ways that we know to be terrible for mental health. Time spent by teens in person with friends has decreased ~70% [8]. And I don't have a specific source for this one, but it sure seems like social media has vastly increased social comparison. Nothing else can explain the decline in time spent with friends. We know depression and anxiety are tightly linked to social support - how could time spent with friends fall by so much and not cause a crisis.
I think tech-savvy people are so used to baseless moral panics that there is a set of defense instincts kick in whenever something seems like a moral panic. But all of the evidence is that this time is different. If you don't think social media is a major contributor, at least understand the evidence that it is, or use evidence for your alternative hypothesis.
The same point is made better and I think less ideologically by Matt Yglesias in the link before. Half of the piece is behind a paywall, but the first half is the most important.
Thank you, will quote this article as another great illustration why I don't want to have kids, or to be precise, don't want to expose them to the homo "civilization".
It's another example that "sapiens" are so lame, so even having AbUNdAnCe TeCHnOlGy and PrOgResS they manage to terribly screw their environment.
A handful of ancient greeks living in "undeveloped" conditions with infant mortality, slavery and no mcdonalds managed to produce philosophies, which are heavily quoted today. Take stoicism, it manages my mental health like charm, and I'm only shallowly practicing it. "Developed" countries have thousands of universities full of "educated" people who have access to orders of magnitude knowledge than the guy who taught at Stoa. They should've cured not the teenage depression, but the mental health issues at the scale of humanity. If they are _really_ developed and educated, of course ;-)
My bet is that there is a bidirectional relationship between medication and mental health. Meaning, teenagers are over medicated which is messing with their heads. Some of them need the medicine, others are unknowingly suffering under some amphetamine, antidepressant, anti-anxiety etc.
Would love to see mental health numbers of teenagers that:
Having been through several months of weekly group therapy sessions with my daughter and having seen dozens of kids suffering from anxiety and depression, I can tell you you're wrong on both counts:
1. They're not medicated. Boys are most likely to be medicated, but out of all these dozens of kids there was only one boy. Boys are so rare that one girl thought it was a girls-only therapy group and wondered where do guys go to get help?
2. Most of them were highly physically active - more so than most of the people I knew when I was growing up.
