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Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Look back at videos from the 1950s an

Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Look back at videos from the 1950s and people didn't talk to each other on the train back then either, their noses were in books, magazines and newspapers. By the 80s, the nerdy kids had headphones and cassette players. By the 90s, people had discmans. The trouble with articles like this is they don't explore the other factors. Maybe the simply access to information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning except what we give to ourselves (through religion or belief of whatever). Maybe kids are just realizing this, and it has nothing to do with technology? Maybe they're realizing that because of technology. Maybe they see a wold that's yelling at them, calling them entitled, where they know they'll be in more debt and less paid than any other generation before them. Maybe it's just the pure knowledge of our place as cogs in the gears. There are tons of factors for where we are today. The income gap is getting wider, parents are struggling to give their kids a good standard of living. Many parents can't pay for their kids educations like the previous generation could because it's getting too expensive. The article says "every region in the country." Are they just looking at the US? If you didn't find similar numbers in Europe, where they have the same access to cellphones and technology, they you have to address the other issues such as health care, better pubic welfare, freedom of transportation and high standards of living.

luckydude 9y ago
I like the point of looking at Europe, that's a good idea. Anyone have any stats for Europe?
jp555 9y ago
“And nihilism isn't a bad thing.“ Becoming unwilling to manifest any faith in anything at all is absolutely a bad thing.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  That... is not what Nihilism is though? I mean someone who is a nihilist might think that but it’s not a logical consequence of, or foundational feature of, nihilism.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    It sort of is, though. Nietzsche in particular didn't actually portray nihilism as a good thing, but just an inevitable stage in human development, which could be either very good or very bad depending on what kind of values system (if any) arose from that nihilism. There are in my opinion some similarities between the direction we're heading and what he called "The Last Man", which was basically the worst possible outcome of nihilism.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      There is more - a lot more - to nihilism than Nietzsche.
      - jrs95 9y ago
        Of course there is. I was just trying to point out that the views on it, even from the perspective of nihilists, isn’t necessarily that nihilism is a “good thing”.
  - jp555 9y ago
    Humans focus on what they look at, compounding into a perspective, belief, and actions. You can’t work to think nothing is of any consequence and simultaneously work to build anything of value (family, friendships, business, intellect, etc). Nihilism is the abolishment of value systems. Nothing matters. Building things of value requires a system to evaluate value.
    - mykull 9y ago
      No, nihilism is the denial of any intrinsic value, we are still all free to make up and agree on our own values if we want, but it would be because we decided to, as untethered things in a meaningless expanse.
      - jp555 9y ago
        Ah I see so deciding, as in to act as though something is intrinsically true. Is it just me that these things so often seem like arguing about semantics? Or are we talking more about weight (extrinsic) vs. mass (intrinsic)?
- hortonew 9y ago
  Your reference to "faith in anything" is most likely referring to a central being controlling everything (see: god), as faith in something/anyone doesn't give that something meaning. Nihilism doesn't necessary refer to faith, it's typically referring to existential nihilism, or that nothing has an intrinsic meaning. Nothing comes with meaning. This isn't something to despair, you have full ability to give things meaning. What I'm getting at is more in the realm of optimistic nihilism, or that ability to give your own meaning to things, as they didn't have any intrinsic meaning to begin with. That game you're playing? Some might think of it as a waste but you gave it the meaning of happiness. That flower you're smelling didn't come with meaning by default, but you gave it the meaning of beauty. I would argue faith can be a burden more than nihilism as blind faith can lead to complacency. Again, complacency might not be the worst thing until you give that meaning.
- mykull 9y ago
  Of course "people of faith" are going to chime in and say nihilism is evil... Also, you have to give yourselves up to Jesus to do good or be happy.
tboyd47 9y ago
It's not just the nerdy kids, though. It's all kids. Smartphones are teen culture now. It all takes place online. It's kinda hard to imagine a society where all meaningful interaction takes place online that's not massively depressing.
- mykull 9y ago
  I don't think that's hard to imagine. I'm imagining it right now. I don't think we're going to get there without some strange forces acting on us, and idk if that's a society I want, but we are more malleable than we give ourselves credit for. People seem to think that life as we know it is life in all it's possibilities rather than one permutation of an infinite mess of dissimilar outcomes. I think the things we struggle over which will determine our future are battles of coincidence and not fated. I don't think communism and capitalism needed to compete through their representative nations in the cold war, that was just the way we dressed up a power struggle, where power struggles are the actual predictable thing.
  - tboyd47 9y ago
    I'd be interested to know what that society looks like, if you want to share. My own personal observation is people who are totally absorbed in social media are socially anxious and awkward, don't engage in conversation except about things that are in their very narrow areas of interest, and tend to suddenly get heated or "triggered" very quickly when exploring those subjects. There really is no such thing as "casual conversation" with them. You're either engaging in total mind-meld or you're completely ignored. I don't understand that mindset, so I'm keeping an open mind, but I don't see how that can't trap a person into a rigid and boring life, where you're confined to your home most of the time and only engage with people who share 99% of your opinions about things that only affect you in a marginal way.
    - mykull 9y ago
      I think we agree. For living that way to not be massively depressing, as you say, it would have to be a different world. Social media would need to be different. Sociological lessons would have to be learned that prevent the internet and social media from being what they are in reality. Thankfully at least my imagination can step out of this reality. I can see a scenario where people are spread thin and just use remote conversation instead of in-person. I can see a world where politics and profiteering don't end up in the way of quality communications tools.
c8d3f7b49897918 9y ago
> And nihilism isn't a bad thing. You aren't taking nihilism seriously enough.
- thinkloop 9y ago
  Nihilism can be liberating and a source of joy. Why does there have to be "meaning", whatever that is? Perhaps the issue is that we don't prepare young people properly for it and have an over-reliance on "god". Realizing that you can live your life as you wish is amazing.
  - c8d3f7b49897918 9y ago
    > Realizing that you can live your life as you wish is amazing. You aren't taking nihilism seriously enough.
    - dzjkb 9y ago
      Care to elaborate instead of repeating yourself?
      - c8d3f7b49897918 9y ago
        nihilism is not liberating or joyful, that is squishy lastman talk it drove nietzsche insane, and he was much smarter and greater than any of us nihilism is terrible and heroic and demonic, and possibly true but i don't think so
orasis 9y ago
Nihilism is the scourge of our age. It takes courage to create meaning and love life.
- marnett 9y ago
  I agree. Out of curiousity, how have you found the meaning in your life?
  - abledon 9y ago
    I just keep my head down and try and write the best webpack config file I can.
  - DowsingSpoon 9y ago
    You ask how? I accept that any search for meaning in life is founded on a categorical error. Life is not the sort of thing that can have meaning. Then, I just get on with the business of trying to find some modicum of happiness while I still breathe.
  - orasis 9y ago
    Service to others. Gratitude. Exploration of the edges of discomfort. Surrender to this experience.
- mLuby 9y ago
  That second part sounds pretty nihilist to me. Life has no meaning, so it's up to you to create it (if you want).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - orasis 9y ago
    I’m a construct-aware thinker. So it means something different to me now than it would to my previous nihilistic stage. Here is a nice model of human cognitive development beyond the meaninglessness of nihilism: http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_increasing_embrace_update_1_07.pdf http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_in... Also see David Chapman’s writings on Robert Keegan’s models - https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/ https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-...
bitcurious 9y ago
>In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent. Perhaps to a nihilist maybe that's not a bad thing, but to most that's neither good nor nihilism. This is a serious problem.
- ianai 9y ago
  The US culture needs some changes. We’re still having children bringing guns to school to shoot their bullies. It happened before MySpace and Facebook. There are structural problems in a society where expressions of love are rarer than violence. Last I knew, kids were still largely growing up in schools where being smart is dumb and prosecuted through bullying. That’s sufficient for mass depression to climb when the rest of life becomes more stressful. I.e. people really are having a hard time finding actually good work that provides health care and a steady paycheck and decent work environment. The opioid crisis has fallouts, in addition. Most of what I just said was said by the hippies in the 60s.
  - King-Aaron 9y ago
    > We’re still having children bringing guns to school to shoot their bullies. Americans seem to bring guns to church to shoot church goers. They bring guns to cinemas to shoot patrons. They leave guns in their car's back seat so their infant can accidentally shoot them through the back of their own head. I think the example of gun violence has a solution found outside the topic of teen depression. Gun ownership and the romanticism around the 'right to bear arms' in the US is a whole deluded issue in itself.
    - ianai 9y ago
      I addressed depression in the later paragraph. Kids are facing a pinch. If they do the socially expected thing and be “dumb” they face dismal employment opportunities. If they buck the trend they face harassment and still bad employment opportunities. Faced with no way out people feel depressed. And I’m just singling out a couple stress points there.
ntsplnkv2 9y ago
> The universe is absurd, This is in no way a proven fact. Only one of many possible philosophical views on life. > Maybe they see a wold that's yelling at them, calling them entitled, where they know they'll be in more debt and less paid than any other generation before them. Maybe it's just the pure knowledge of our place as cogs in the gears. Yes and they have a 24/7 view of the world now. You didn't have that even 20 years ago. > Are they just looking at the US? If you didn't find similar numbers in Europe, where they have the same access to cellphones and technology, they you have to address the other issues such as health care, better pubic welfare, freedom of transportation and high standards of living. Those factors already exist in the US-some have higher standards of living here than others, some have better healthcare, some have freedom of exploration and the numbers are still there.
enraged_camel 9y ago
>>Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Books are categorically different from smartphones. For one, they don't constantly interrupt regular conversations by beeping and buzzing and demanding the owner's attention. For another, they tend to be about a single subject, and tend to explore that subject in depth.
- foxylad 9y ago
  Yes, and books don't tell you everyone hates you and show that awful photo where you look fat and stupid every second minute and how much better everyone else is at everything and how a person even stupider and more obnoxious than you ends up as president and that really cute guy/girl has millions of friends and you're not one of them...
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>The trouble with articles like this is they don't explore the other factors. Maybe the simply access to information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning except what we give to ourselves (through religion or belief of whatever). Maybe kids are just realizing this, and it has nothing to do with technology? Maybe they're realizing that because of technology. I don't want to just write you off with a snotty, "Rubbish!", but IMHO, yes, this is rubbish. Nihilism is just plain wrong-headed. It's answering, "No" where you should answer, "Mu"[1]. [1] -- http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html
- sago 9y ago
  I think it is no coincidence that in your final paragraph you don't specify the question. Can you formulate a specific question in such a way that an nihilist might answer "No", but you feel that the correct answer is "Mu"? "What is the meaning of life?" - a nihilist would answer 'mu'. "Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout. Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    >"Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout. Yes, it does seem to me that "mu" would be a copout. A binary question about a well-specified (you could say, meaningful, ahaha) concept should not be answered with "mu". >Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless? No, more that the kind of people who ask "is there a meaning to life?" are underspecifying the word. I think it would be useful to have a companion here to "mu", meaning, "Your question is so vague as to be meaningless." An easy way to see the issue is to ask: what would it be like (whether that's what we really experience or not) for there to definitively be meaning in life? If you can't answer that, can't ground such a basically humanistic question in even potential human experience, then I charge that the question has become meaningless, and should thus be either refined or discarded.
rev0lutions 9y ago
the school shootings are a really big problem here.. and its a strange, almost uniquely american phenomena (even including 3rd world 'shitholes' like pakistan and afghanistan') https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235 https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-b...
shams93 9y ago
Rasing tuition from $50 a year for baby boomers in the 70s to 25k a year any generation facing a life of indentured servitude when their parents got to be human beings is going to be nihilistic.
- thinkloop 9y ago
  Income and money are weakly correlated to happiness.
  - afpx 9y ago
    http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full Kahneman would disagree. Correlation is only weak for those above the median income. Furthermore, a lower than median income appears to amplify other negative factors (illness, stress, etc.) Note that the study data is 10 years old. It would be interesting to know what today’s kids today believe is the median.
- indubitable 9y ago
  The vast majority of kids don't realize what money means. I mean they do in the abstract sense, but they tend to be naively unrealistic about the future. What's $70k of debt per year (paired with compound interest) matter when they'll be a millionaire in a decade or two anyhow? --Edit-- Interesting, people didn't seem to realize this was true. Here [1] is a study from Gallup on peoples' views on wealth. There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of people that expect to become "rich" and age. For ages 18-29 it's 51%. That decreases down to 8% by the time people are 65, which is still unrealistic. That study is from 2003, yet its results have been replicated with minimal change in other more recent studies as well (though not from Gallup). It's part of the reason that education loans are simultaneously so overtly predatory, but also phenomenally successful (from the point of view of lenders). Young people are completely unrealistic about their chances for success and so the implications of taking on mountains of debt with often poor interest rates, when you're young, is something they cannot accurately assess. [1] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-Strike-Rich.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-St...
justonepost 9y ago
Agreed, if you look at things like global warming and nuclear war, Artificial Intelligence - being inundated with these types of things can be pretty depressing. There's not a lot of sources of Hope for children these days. Blaming it directly on phones seems a bit like tunnel vision. That being said, it might be wise to control access to this type of information until your children grow up and get better context / moral code to deal with such things.
trisimix 9y ago
Gotta say I think theres a big difference between cassetes and the level of intensity some kids use facebook and the like.
debt 9y ago
“...information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning...” Lotta leaps in such a short span of text.
- Retra 9y ago
  You're looking at a list of assumptions and wondering why it doesn't suffice as a chain of related conclusions?
panarky 9y ago
Is it the phone or is it Facebook? If you have 500 friends, your feed is dominated by the 5 friends with spectacular stories about their stupendous lives. Continuously comparing your ordinary life against your feed naturally makes you feel bad about yourself. And being on public display 24x7, with the pressure to perform for your audience, in a never-ending struggle to keep up, must do incredible damage to the psyche.
- inDigiNeous 9y ago
  Teenagers don't use facebook. Instagram and snapchat more. Which is kinda more effective in creating a false image of somebody else having the great look, great time, when you just take pictures of the "best" moments of your life, and leave out everything else.
inDigiNeous 9y ago
That's a good point. Maybe it's the combination of both. The access to information that was not before reachable to teenagers. What I've noticed for myself once online access becomes more and more universal, more information is also available, and this means that also information about what is _really_ happening in the world becomes available, not just curated "everything is ok" information. Information about wars being waged, global poverty, the US raging wars, nuclear holocaust fears, and the feedback loops that the effect of anybody becoming a journalist these days creates. Also the combination of internet trolls, systematic brainwashing and censorship, makes it even harder to understand what is real and what is not. But it might be the phones, I see more and more kids, like aged 10 - 15, walking in the playgrounds, streets, sitting down with phones in their hands, staring at some game or video that is providing them with constant small feedback. It used to be that if you were outside, you at least were walking and concentrating on just that, or you were sitting down with your friends at the playground, now everybody seems to have a phone or they are looking at somebody elses phone. It's a complex issue for sure. But I wouldn't blame the kids either, as they learn these habits from their parents, who to be honest most are just getting used to the internet phenomena and global information access, it's not that much of an old thing, although us working in the technical field who have had access since maybe childhood to BBSs etc might think so.

luckydude 9y ago

I like the point of looking at Europe, that's a good idea. Anyone have any stats for Europe?

jp555 9y ago

“And nihilism isn't a bad thing.“ Becoming unwilling to manifest any faith in anything at all is absolutely a bad thing.

abritinthebay 9y ago
That... is not what Nihilism is though? I mean someone who is a nihilist might think that but it’s not a logical consequence of, or foundational feature of, nihilism.
- jrs95 9y ago
  It sort of is, though. Nietzsche in particular didn't actually portray nihilism as a good thing, but just an inevitable stage in human development, which could be either very good or very bad depending on what kind of values system (if any) arose from that nihilism. There are in my opinion some similarities between the direction we're heading and what he called "The Last Man", which was basically the worst possible outcome of nihilism.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    There is more - a lot more - to nihilism than Nietzsche.
    - jrs95 9y ago
      Of course there is. I was just trying to point out that the views on it, even from the perspective of nihilists, isn’t necessarily that nihilism is a “good thing”.
- jp555 9y ago
  Humans focus on what they look at, compounding into a perspective, belief, and actions. You can’t work to think nothing is of any consequence and simultaneously work to build anything of value (family, friendships, business, intellect, etc). Nihilism is the abolishment of value systems. Nothing matters. Building things of value requires a system to evaluate value.
  - mykull 9y ago
    No, nihilism is the denial of any intrinsic value, we are still all free to make up and agree on our own values if we want, but it would be because we decided to, as untethered things in a meaningless expanse.
    - jp555 9y ago
      Ah I see so deciding, as in to act as though something is intrinsically true. Is it just me that these things so often seem like arguing about semantics? Or are we talking more about weight (extrinsic) vs. mass (intrinsic)?
hortonew 9y ago
Your reference to "faith in anything" is most likely referring to a central being controlling everything (see: god), as faith in something/anyone doesn't give that something meaning. Nihilism doesn't necessary refer to faith, it's typically referring to existential nihilism, or that nothing has an intrinsic meaning. Nothing comes with meaning. This isn't something to despair, you have full ability to give things meaning. What I'm getting at is more in the realm of optimistic nihilism, or that ability to give your own meaning to things, as they didn't have any intrinsic meaning to begin with. That game you're playing? Some might think of it as a waste but you gave it the meaning of happiness. That flower you're smelling didn't come with meaning by default, but you gave it the meaning of beauty. I would argue faith can be a burden more than nihilism as blind faith can lead to complacency. Again, complacency might not be the worst thing until you give that meaning.
mykull 9y ago
Of course "people of faith" are going to chime in and say nihilism is evil... Also, you have to give yourselves up to Jesus to do good or be happy.

tboyd47 9y ago

It's not just the nerdy kids, though. It's all kids. Smartphones are teen culture now. It all takes place online. It's kinda hard to imagine a society where all meaningful interaction takes place online that's not massively depressing.

mykull 9y ago
I don't think that's hard to imagine. I'm imagining it right now. I don't think we're going to get there without some strange forces acting on us, and idk if that's a society I want, but we are more malleable than we give ourselves credit for. People seem to think that life as we know it is life in all it's possibilities rather than one permutation of an infinite mess of dissimilar outcomes. I think the things we struggle over which will determine our future are battles of coincidence and not fated. I don't think communism and capitalism needed to compete through their representative nations in the cold war, that was just the way we dressed up a power struggle, where power struggles are the actual predictable thing.
- tboyd47 9y ago
  I'd be interested to know what that society looks like, if you want to share. My own personal observation is people who are totally absorbed in social media are socially anxious and awkward, don't engage in conversation except about things that are in their very narrow areas of interest, and tend to suddenly get heated or "triggered" very quickly when exploring those subjects. There really is no such thing as "casual conversation" with them. You're either engaging in total mind-meld or you're completely ignored. I don't understand that mindset, so I'm keeping an open mind, but I don't see how that can't trap a person into a rigid and boring life, where you're confined to your home most of the time and only engage with people who share 99% of your opinions about things that only affect you in a marginal way.
  - mykull 9y ago
    I think we agree. For living that way to not be massively depressing, as you say, it would have to be a different world. Social media would need to be different. Sociological lessons would have to be learned that prevent the internet and social media from being what they are in reality. Thankfully at least my imagination can step out of this reality. I can see a scenario where people are spread thin and just use remote conversation instead of in-person. I can see a world where politics and profiteering don't end up in the way of quality communications tools.

c8d3f7b49897918 9y ago

> And nihilism isn't a bad thing. You aren't taking nihilism seriously enough.

thinkloop 9y ago
Nihilism can be liberating and a source of joy. Why does there have to be "meaning", whatever that is? Perhaps the issue is that we don't prepare young people properly for it and have an over-reliance on "god". Realizing that you can live your life as you wish is amazing.
- c8d3f7b49897918 9y ago
  > Realizing that you can live your life as you wish is amazing. You aren't taking nihilism seriously enough.
  - dzjkb 9y ago
    Care to elaborate instead of repeating yourself?
    - c8d3f7b49897918 9y ago
      nihilism is not liberating or joyful, that is squishy lastman talk it drove nietzsche insane, and he was much smarter and greater than any of us nihilism is terrible and heroic and demonic, and possibly true but i don't think so

orasis 9y ago

Nihilism is the scourge of our age. It takes courage to create meaning and love life.

marnett 9y ago
I agree. Out of curiousity, how have you found the meaning in your life?
- abledon 9y ago
  I just keep my head down and try and write the best webpack config file I can.
- DowsingSpoon 9y ago
  You ask how? I accept that any search for meaning in life is founded on a categorical error. Life is not the sort of thing that can have meaning. Then, I just get on with the business of trying to find some modicum of happiness while I still breathe.
- orasis 9y ago
  Service to others. Gratitude. Exploration of the edges of discomfort. Surrender to this experience.
mLuby 9y ago
That second part sounds pretty nihilist to me. Life has no meaning, so it's up to you to create it (if you want).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- orasis 9y ago
  I’m a construct-aware thinker. So it means something different to me now than it would to my previous nihilistic stage. Here is a nice model of human cognitive development beyond the meaninglessness of nihilism: http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_increasing_embrace_update_1_07.pdf http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_in... Also see David Chapman’s writings on Robert Keegan’s models - https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/ https://vividness.live/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-...

bitcurious 9y ago

>In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent. Perhaps to a nihilist maybe that's not a bad thing, but to most that's neither good nor nihilism. This is a serious problem.

ianai 9y ago
The US culture needs some changes. We’re still having children bringing guns to school to shoot their bullies. It happened before MySpace and Facebook. There are structural problems in a society where expressions of love are rarer than violence. Last I knew, kids were still largely growing up in schools where being smart is dumb and prosecuted through bullying. That’s sufficient for mass depression to climb when the rest of life becomes more stressful. I.e. people really are having a hard time finding actually good work that provides health care and a steady paycheck and decent work environment. The opioid crisis has fallouts, in addition. Most of what I just said was said by the hippies in the 60s.
- King-Aaron 9y ago
  > We’re still having children bringing guns to school to shoot their bullies. Americans seem to bring guns to church to shoot church goers. They bring guns to cinemas to shoot patrons. They leave guns in their car's back seat so their infant can accidentally shoot them through the back of their own head. I think the example of gun violence has a solution found outside the topic of teen depression. Gun ownership and the romanticism around the 'right to bear arms' in the US is a whole deluded issue in itself.
  - ianai 9y ago
    I addressed depression in the later paragraph. Kids are facing a pinch. If they do the socially expected thing and be “dumb” they face dismal employment opportunities. If they buck the trend they face harassment and still bad employment opportunities. Faced with no way out people feel depressed. And I’m just singling out a couple stress points there.

ntsplnkv2 9y ago

> The universe is absurd, This is in no way a proven fact. Only one of many possible philosophical views on life. > Maybe they see a wold that's yelling at them, calling them entitled, where they know they'll be in more debt and less paid than any other generation before them. Maybe it's just the pure knowledge of our place as cogs in the gears. Yes and they have a 24/7 view of the world now. You didn't have that even 20 years ago. > Are they just looking at the US? If you didn't find similar numbers in Europe, where they have the same access to cellphones and technology, they you have to address the other issues such as health care, better pubic welfare, freedom of transportation and high standards of living. Those factors already exist in the US-some have higher standards of living here than others, some have better healthcare, some have freedom of exploration and the numbers are still there.

enraged_camel 9y ago

>>Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Books are categorically different from smartphones. For one, they don't constantly interrupt regular conversations by beeping and buzzing and demanding the owner's attention. For another, they tend to be about a single subject, and tend to explore that subject in depth.

foxylad 9y ago
Yes, and books don't tell you everyone hates you and show that awful photo where you look fat and stupid every second minute and how much better everyone else is at everything and how a person even stupider and more obnoxious than you ends up as president and that really cute guy/girl has millions of friends and you're not one of them...

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

>The trouble with articles like this is they don't explore the other factors. Maybe the simply access to information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning except what we give to ourselves (through religion or belief of whatever). Maybe kids are just realizing this, and it has nothing to do with technology? Maybe they're realizing that because of technology. I don't want to just write you off with a snotty, "Rubbish!", but IMHO, yes, this is rubbish. Nihilism is just plain wrong-headed. It's answering, "No" where you should answer, "Mu"[1]. [1] -- http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mu.html

sago 9y ago
I think it is no coincidence that in your final paragraph you don't specify the question. Can you formulate a specific question in such a way that an nihilist might answer "No", but you feel that the correct answer is "Mu"? "What is the meaning of life?" - a nihilist would answer 'mu'. "Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout. Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless?
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >"Is there any intrinsic meaning to life?" - a nihilist would answer 'no', and it seems to me that 'mu' would be an obvious copout. Yes, it does seem to me that "mu" would be a copout. A binary question about a well-specified (you could say, meaningful, ahaha) concept should not be answered with "mu". >Is your point that the word 'meaning' itself is meaningless? No, more that the kind of people who ask "is there a meaning to life?" are underspecifying the word. I think it would be useful to have a companion here to "mu", meaning, "Your question is so vague as to be meaningless." An easy way to see the issue is to ask: what would it be like (whether that's what we really experience or not) for there to definitively be meaning in life? If you can't answer that, can't ground such a basically humanistic question in even potential human experience, then I charge that the question has become meaningless, and should thus be either refined or discarded.

rev0lutions 9y ago

the school shootings are a really big problem here.. and its a strange, almost uniquely american phenomena (even including 3rd world 'shitholes' like pakistan and afghanistan') https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235 https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-b...

shams93 9y ago

Rasing tuition from $50 a year for baby boomers in the 70s to 25k a year any generation facing a life of indentured servitude when their parents got to be human beings is going to be nihilistic.

thinkloop 9y ago
Income and money are weakly correlated to happiness.
- afpx 9y ago
  http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full Kahneman would disagree. Correlation is only weak for those above the median income. Furthermore, a lower than median income appears to amplify other negative factors (illness, stress, etc.) Note that the study data is 10 years old. It would be interesting to know what today’s kids today believe is the median.
indubitable 9y ago
The vast majority of kids don't realize what money means. I mean they do in the abstract sense, but they tend to be naively unrealistic about the future. What's $70k of debt per year (paired with compound interest) matter when they'll be a millionaire in a decade or two anyhow? --Edit-- Interesting, people didn't seem to realize this was true. Here [1] is a study from Gallup on peoples' views on wealth. There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of people that expect to become "rich" and age. For ages 18-29 it's 51%. That decreases down to 8% by the time people are 65, which is still unrealistic. That study is from 2003, yet its results have been replicated with minimal change in other more recent studies as well (though not from Gallup). It's part of the reason that education loans are simultaneously so overtly predatory, but also phenomenally successful (from the point of view of lenders). Young people are completely unrealistic about their chances for success and so the implications of taking on mountains of debt with often poor interest rates, when you're young, is something they cannot accurately assess. [1] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-Strike-Rich.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-St...

justonepost 9y ago

Agreed, if you look at things like global warming and nuclear war, Artificial Intelligence - being inundated with these types of things can be pretty depressing. There's not a lot of sources of Hope for children these days. Blaming it directly on phones seems a bit like tunnel vision. That being said, it might be wise to control access to this type of information until your children grow up and get better context / moral code to deal with such things.

trisimix 9y ago

Gotta say I think theres a big difference between cassetes and the level of intensity some kids use facebook and the like.

debt 9y ago

“...information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning...” Lotta leaps in such a short span of text.

Retra 9y ago
You're looking at a list of assumptions and wondering why it doesn't suffice as a chain of related conclusions?

panarky 9y ago

Is it the phone or is it Facebook? If you have 500 friends, your feed is dominated by the 5 friends with spectacular stories about their stupendous lives. Continuously comparing your ordinary life against your feed naturally makes you feel bad about yourself. And being on public display 24x7, with the pressure to perform for your audience, in a never-ending struggle to keep up, must do incredible damage to the psyche.

inDigiNeous 9y ago
Teenagers don't use facebook. Instagram and snapchat more. Which is kinda more effective in creating a false image of somebody else having the great look, great time, when you just take pictures of the "best" moments of your life, and leave out everything else.

inDigiNeous 9y ago

That's a good point. Maybe it's the combination of both. The access to information that was not before reachable to teenagers. What I've noticed for myself once online access becomes more and more universal, more information is also available, and this means that also information about what is _really_ happening in the world becomes available, not just curated "everything is ok" information. Information about wars being waged, global poverty, the US raging wars, nuclear holocaust fears, and the feedback loops that the effect of anybody becoming a journalist these days creates. Also the combination of internet trolls, systematic brainwashing and censorship, makes it even harder to understand what is real and what is not. But it might be the phones, I see more and more kids, like aged 10 - 15, walking in the playgrounds, streets, sitting down with phones in their hands, staring at some game or video that is providing them with constant small feedback. It used to be that if you were outside, you at least were walking and concentrating on just that, or you were sitting down with your friends at the playground, now everybody seems to have a phone or they are looking at somebody elses phone. It's a complex issue for sure. But I wouldn't blame the kids either, as they learn these habits from their parents, who to be honest most are just getting used to the internet phenomena and global information access, it's not that much of an old thing, although us working in the technical field who have had access since maybe childhood to BBSs etc might think so.