9 ms·

No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

44 points by docdot 4y ago

kelseyfrog 4y ago
Notice how the problems share a common thread? It's simply better messaging from anti-capitalists. Everyone's lives has problems, but find a way to thread them together that frames them under a unified message, and you've done a lot more to advance a message. What's not going to work is telling people their lives are actually ok, and the alternative messages, "The problem is actually you," or "That other group is making your life worse," either turn the problem inward which doesn't do anything to help suicide rates, or foments identity tensions which teens find unpalatable. If you want teen suicide rate to fall, out-message the most powerful message. Or I mean, actually abolish capitalism and prove them wrong, or right.
notch898a 4y ago
I'm interested in the explanation for this: https://sprc.org/sites/default/files/Slide21-n.PNG https://sprc.org/sites/default/files/Slide21-n.PNG
burlesona 4y ago
Matthew Yglesias wrote about this today as well, and his take was interesting. Paywall though :/ https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depre...
- nhchris 4y ago
  > If there were more Republicans working as professors, we’d probably balance out this line of inquiry with papers asking whether rising levels of shootings and homicides also contribute to racial disparities in mental health. But there aren't. So even when all the research being done is good, we primarily see research looking at the questions that progressives think are interesting. A study was conducted examining exactly this question. It turns out the bias is even worse: Not only are the 'wrong' questions unlikely to be asked, studies get rejected if they get the wrong results: The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
- jamincan 4y ago
  FWIW, it appears it's a free read for those of us who have never visited before. It's a very thought-provoking article and one that deserves more time than just might lunch break to ponder. In particular, this quote at the end of the article articulates an increasing discomfort I've been feeling around conversations about harm: > I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    It is different from saying, "If we teach people to recognize ways they've been harmed, then they feel bad, so we shouldn't teach them how to recognize harm"? Framed another way, it looks like the language of harm is winning in the marketplace of ideas and the language of "those aren't actually that bad," is losing.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      The important language is the language of "actions you can take by yourself and with others to meaningfully address your problems in a variety of ways".
rayiner 4y ago
> [Lorenz] went on to suggest that the young people of the 1950s enjoyed objectively superior material prospects than young people do today This is why I think culture is more important than policy. Lorenz’s point is obviously non-sensical. She mentions the “safety net.” But Medicaid didn’t exist in the 1950s. There were no federal student loans. There were no food stamps. Almost nobody went to college. Etc. But it’s a mistake to say Lorenz is wrong on the facts and leave it at that. She sincerely believes that young people today are worse off than young people in the 1950s. It’s a common refrain expressed by young people. So what has changed since the 1950s? Culture. We have made massive changes to how society is structured. We have changed what we tell young people about the meaning and purpose of life. We have eliminated social roles and duties and obligations that used to apply to young people. In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems. And maybe those changes aren’t all conducive to the well being of young people.
- scotty79 4y ago
  > So what has changed since the 1950s? Trajectory of how well off average American will be in x years?
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    To add numbers to this: A teenager in 1950s would be 40-50 when the productivity-wage breakdown happened [1]. Their generation not only benefited, they caused that for juiced returns on their stocks. A teenager today was born an entire generation after that decoupling — and has only known a world where their parents were exploited by 1950s teenagers. I don’t think it’s surprising that a generation where hard work was rewarded was more optimistic than one born to parents for whom that didn’t apply. [1] - https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
    - scotty79 4y ago
      I think that chart should be expressed in gold not in dollars to fully appreciate what's happening.
green_man_lives 4y ago
Article spends entire time "debunking" a political pundit who posts "hot takes" on Twitter, doesn't interview a single teen. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is multi-faceted. Maybe we should take the things kids say at face value if we want to pretend that we are being intellectually honest. Sure, humans are notoriously bad at describing their own qualia and reasons for why they feel the things they do, but listening should surely be our starting point, right? Furthermore, why is it that capitalism can't both increase our material quality of life, while also alienating us from things that our ancestors enjoyed in abundance? Relationships, the family, simple and fulfilling labor that had an immediate impact on your surroundings, connection with nature, more leisure time, etc. There's no conversion ratio of semiconductor chips to time spent with loved ones. Guess which of the two humans can't live without? Maybe instead of having a knee-jerk reaction to anti-capitalism, we should objectively look at neoliberal capitalism and see what the negative externalities are of a system that assumes the driving force between human interactions to be economic (one of which is the commodification of everything including relationships). This article should be titled "picking a fight with Taylor Lorenz" and nothing else.
- anonuser123456 4y ago
  As a neoliberal/capitalist, I would suggest that capitalism is an incomplete theory and that we are still flushing things out. The huge rise in material standard of living from the 1850s to 1970s in the US made a dramatic improvement in people’s real quality of life. But since the 70s the improvements are very marginal. I speculate that’s because most of the consumer improvements are in the domain of status consumption goods, which by definition is zero sum. Material abundance beyond a certain point is in and of itself corrosive because it’s just status seeking / competitive signaling.
  - green_man_lives 4y ago
    I would tend to agree with this with the addition of the fact that labor rights have degenerated too. The relationship between working people and let's say "capital" used to be more tenuous. This had ramifications for political stability in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but by the middle of the century we had a decent balance of power between laborers and companies, mediated by the government. Union membership + secret societies were a huge building block of everyday life. If you haven't ever walked through a graveyard, I encourage you to do so. Look at the headstones of people who died before the 1980s. A huge number belong to a secret society or trade union group (for the sake of simplicity let's ignore the uncomfortable racial aspects many of these organizations may have had, they were still pillars of community even if they were racist pillars of community) Contrasted with up until very recently where the norm was about bragging how hard you work (for someone else). Rugged individualism, not collectivism, is what some would consider to be the highest virtue today. Not to say this is a root cause, but just an example of change that can be analyzed in some weighted equation.
korroziya 4y ago
"Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate among Americans ages 10 to 24 increased by nearly 60 percent." Right around the time social media garbage bloomed. Weird coincidence.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  Or post the 2008 crash where everything governments did for young people was slashed...
  - gretch 4y ago
    +1 to this How many teens had to watch their parent come home and announce that they got laid off from their job and that this year there wasn't going to be a yearly family trip?
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      There were so many recessions before 2008.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Yearly vacations are a fairly modern thing. My older relatives have stories about not being able to afford food, either due to the depression, or rationing during the war. Car ownership in the US broke 50% mid-century. The majority of my silent-generation relatives never, in their entire lives, traveled more than 100 miles from their birthplace. Poverty and unemployment continue to exist in other places around the globe, often in places with very low suicide rates.
      - jrussino 4y ago
        I wonder if it's the change in the trend rather than the change in the state. My great grandparents came to the US as immigrants with zero wealth in the early 1900's. My grandparents were children during the depression, lived their formative years during WWII and raised "baby boomer" children, and had a modest but comfortable retirement. My dad was the first person in his family to go to college and had a relatively prosperous professional career and a nice big house in the suburbs and we got to experience ~yearly vacations. I realize that there are many life stories here and this may not be reflective of everybody's expectations, but when I was young (pre-9/11) it felt like part of the zeitgeist that "every generation has it a little better than the last" (at least, in the material sense). Now there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that for the first time in living memory people's conditions in the aggregate are trending downward rather than upwards.
braingenious 4y ago
From the article: >Lorenz isn’t wrong to suggest that economic conditions can influence the prevalence of mental distress. Unemployment and poverty are both major risk factors for depression. Recessions are associated with elevated rates of suicide. And there is some evidence that robust social-welfare states improve mental health by reducing material insecurity. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that America’s relatively stingy social safety net and elevated level of child poverty are implicated in its youth mental-health crisis. lmao he agrees with her main point and then goes on to just shrug his shoulders in the next paragraph.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yeah I cackled. Quite literally the skinner "am I out of touch" / "no it's the children who are wrong" meme.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  The whole point of the article is that, although in general economic conditions can negatively impact mental health, in this case the increase in mental health problems does not coincide with a deterioration in overall economic conditions.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    The point of the article seems more like NY Mag getting clicks by having one of their writers throw together a rebuttal to some recently popular tweets. I think the lack of seriousness is highlighted by the paragraph I quoted along with other bits from the author like this one: >Thus it is possible that the social pathologies cited by Lorenz are preconditions for today’s mental-health crisis. and >It’s possible that Lorenz’s general intuitions may someday be validated. and >What we can say with confidence is that we do not know and that we owe it to those suffering in our mental-health crisis to be honest about that fact. It’s clickbait meant to congratulate people that disagreed with Lorenz before they clicked on the article. Its substance is considerably less strong or confident than the headline assigned by the editor.
    - 4y ago
inphovore 4y ago
Are you sure? Just last week an article that rising number of teens (girls and boys) are being sextorted, or sexually coerced. More and more girls are getting raped before adulthood, let alone the rising likelihood that an attractive single woman will get raped in a major metropolitan. America has several converging cultural epidemics. It’s all in the meme stream.
woolion 4y ago
The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? What is it an indicator of, Mr Levitz? Are they unable to tolerate so much happiness? Are these people dumb? Defective? Arguing that life is objectively better because you are going to make a better salary than in the fifties is plain gaslighting, but I don't believe there are a lot of people who will still fall for this trick.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  It could be an indicator that people are less able to cope, and there is some really good causal evidence that social media causes anxiety in young girls.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Fortitude and coping skills are learned through adversity (sometimes with the help of parents or a therapist, most often with a lot of hopefully lower cost failure), but suffering you cannot grow from is unnecessary and not of value. With that said, social media is an unnecessary toxin children and teens are exposed to. You wouldn’t let them bathe in PFAS, and social media is similar: ubiquitous but also toxic with extended exposure.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    > it could be an indicator that people are less able to cope That would mean life is worse. And we can measure how much worse in suicide rate deltas.
    - tomjen3 4y ago
      No, it would mean that one specific part of life is worse.
- green_man_lives 4y ago
  If I was being cynical I'd say that this is just an article designed to get clicks by confirming people's biases. To anyone who disagrees with me, ask yourself. What is the most important thing in your life? I can with certainty say that it doesn't have a "price" associated with it. If you can comprehend that then you can accept the premise that life can get worse as material conditions improve, especially when the marginal utility of those increasing material conditions is already low. Are touchscreens really a 10x improvement in quality of life when penicillin has been invented?
hot_gril 4y ago
Yes it is. But anyone publicly commenting on this is wading into the biggest political cesspool ever, so you aren't going to get a clear answer.
sakopov 4y ago
I personally think that mental health in teens is deteriorating because western society throws teenagers into adulthood and forces adult decision-making choices upon them with nearly constant propaganda. Look at all the shit that's happening at school where kids are advised not tell their parents about certain, sometimes even life-altering, decisions they're struggling with. The social media aspect of it adds fuel to the fire by further isolating every teen and allowing them to wallow in their fears and sadness by putting them into bubbles of same-thinkers. A few years back when political derangement was seemingly at its peak, my 14-year-old cousins were feverously arguing politics and social issues with adults at family functions. It was astounding to me, not because I was shocked that they had an opinion on any of it, but because they wasted their precious youth on stupid adult issues when they have their entire adulthood ahead of them to worry about it. This is an incredible weight to bare for adults, let alone children.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  > kids are advised not tell their parents about certain, sometimes even life-altering, decisions they're struggling with As a parent of a teen a huge part of this comes from the experienced shared by their friends. When a kiddo shares that they're struggling with a life-altering decision with a parent they're taking a risk they will be disowned, kicked out, or that the decision isn't theirs to make and that their parent is the sole-authority on their decision making. When they share it with a teacher in confidence, the risk of the above occurring are less. Kiddos aren't dumb; they're minimaxing[1] - reducing the possibility of worse case outcomes. When they share it with their friends, they absolutely pass around stories of the kiddo that went to their parents and now has to live with an aunt or grandparent now because that other kid made the decision to confide in their parents. Let's be frank, there are certain lines folks have, which if their kiddo came to them for support in those cases, they would tell them wasn't metaphysically possible. We would all like to believe that parents have infinite grace with their kids, but there are real life case that get shared amongst kids, that serve as living counter-examples. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax
vaillant 4y ago
Surprised nobody is mentioning climate change. Young people are supposed to be contributing and centering their lives around a kind of societal structure which is increasingly seen as doomed. The constant acceleration of capital is bumping up against the material finitude of an increasingly depleted Earth. Conservatives have a vision of the doomed future, built around walls and hoarding resources against impending scarcity. But liberals don't really have a good answer outside of "bring the super-rich to heel and use their resources to invest in mitigations," a view which is anathema to politicians who depend on the super-rich to continue holding power. People are depressed because there doesn't seem to be a future.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yeah I think this is a big part of the core thing. The author is trying to explain it away because a bunch of quantitative metrics are better or improving. But regardless, it feels more hopeless now. It feels like the world is going to end and we're powerless to affect it, it feels like our lives are grist for engine of wealth accumulation. Surprise, people's feelings are based on how things feel and regardless of what numbers say the world feels worse than it used to. We've optimized the hopefulness out of our changes.
haswell 4y ago
> The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? This is not the claim. The word “objective” does a lot of important heavy lifting here, and there are strong arguments to be made that subjective experience has gotten significantly worse, while most “objective” factors have continued to improve as the world modernizes. The trouble is that evolutionary psychology is such that the major changes to how humans live and communicate leave us in an environment that looks less and less like the environment we evolved in. This is why there is so much interest in the impact of social media. There is evidence that even among those who are in an objectively “good” circumstance when defining “good” based on safety, financial security and other commons measures, individuals are just as susceptible to the negativity and distorted reality that dominates modern social life.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  If it can be measured it is objective. And I find it odd that the objective criteria the author chooses ("it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security.") are mostly not applicable to teens, but to adults. And to the extent they are applicable to teens, well teen employment has dropped quite a bit since the Great Recession, and is just now returning to what is was in 2007: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/21/after-dropping-in-2020-teen-summer-employment-may-be-poised-to-continue-its-slow-comeback/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/21/after-dropp... The percent of children living in "poverty" also increased by a few percentage points (about 1/4 to 1/3 in relative percent) after the Great Recession, and didn't fall back to trend until around 2017. This would have affected today's teens during formative times in their childhood: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/43-children-in-poverty?loc=1&loct=1#1/any/false/2048,1729,871,573,36,867,38,18,16,14/asc/any/322 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/43-children-in-po...
karmakaze 4y ago
I wouldn't read this unless I thought that measuring the value of my life by politics or economics was valid and complete. 'objectively' here is a qualifier used like a weasel word limiting scope in a manner that also limits the meaningfulness of the conclusion.
quantified 4y ago
Adolescence is where the kid-friendly world created by parents, educators and others begins to really give way to the reality of the adult world, and how f'd up it can be and is. Adults have put the transition behind them for the most part and assimilated. Life may not have gotten much worse. The expectations of what the world is like may have been dumbed down during prior childhood.
spaced-out 4y ago
So the author spent the article responding to Twitter takes from journalists and looking at stats from economists who are pretty much all old and financially secure... I didn't see anywhere where the author looked at what teenagers themselves say is bothering them, either with interviews or studies. Maybe we should get their opinion before concluding that they're being irrational?
uoaei 4y ago
This style of article -- the attempt to will truths into existence through the imposition of a specific perspective -- is always so patronizing... Any time the word "objectively" is bandied around, you should be extremely skeptical. Very often, it is used to impose a values system pre-emptively on the conversation, and then make its argument from illusorily high ground. A true discussion on the subject would of course start with "what are the values we are trying to encourage in a healthy society, and how does that view differ between teens and other people?" which NY Mag doesn't seem interested in examining. I suspect this is because the imposition of an external values system itself is what's killing teens. You will have to take me at my word that I have personal experience with this question among people who are in this demographic. To me, teen suicide is making my life worse. It's making your life worse, too. If we want to play this game of counterfactuals, let's take it to its logical ends: how much will we miss these potential future inventors, stewards of good will, and powerhouses of industry when they are gone? Also, objective measures are pointless when suicide is and only ever will be a subjective experience motivated by subjective viewpoints. If the point is "look how great everything is out here, outside of your little poisoned head!" then we can expect a spike, not a reduction, in suicides. I didn't even have high hopes for this article but wow, this is an astonishingly out-of-touch take. Shame on the author, truly, for this. Especially this part: > It seems possible that the story of the teen-suicide crisis will come to resemble that of the opioid epidemic. Perhaps in a few years, we will find the U.S. economy’s structural inequities had less to do with American adolescents’ declining mental health than did the sudden introduction of a highly addictive (digital) technology. Come on! There has been vigorous debate over exactly these things, and where they fit into our society (incentive structures for doctors and pharma companies to push their products on vulnerable populations, incentive structures for social media companies to promote or demote certain kinds of potentially harmful content) precisely because this is a question of societal values! The question "Do we subject unwitting populations to things we know will harm them?" can be answered in different ways. In our current society, we've decided that permitting companies to act in these ways is in our best interest in order to legitimize this method of organizing capital markets (the profit motive) and refusing to apply different rules for different companies or industries on the basis of appeals to "free market" principles. I will note that, without access to the internal research of e.g. Meta or e.g. Purdue Pharma, the "consumers" of such "technologies" are literally, legally incapable of consenting to the set of possible outcomes that may result from their use. Furthermore, especially in the case of opioids, the people making the decision to accept such products are by definition under duress, as opioids are typically prescribed for constant and unbearable pain.
anuraaga 4y ago
[dead]

44 points by docdot 4y ago

Notice how the problems share a common thread? It's simply better messaging from anti-capitalists. Everyone's lives has problems, but find a way to thread them together that frames them under a unified message, and you've done a lot more to advance a message. What's not going to work is telling people their lives are actually ok, and the alternative messages, "The problem is actually you," or "That other group is making your life worse," either turn the problem inward which doesn't do anything to help suicide rates, or foments identity tensions which teens find unpalatable. If you want teen suicide rate to fall, out-message the most powerful message. Or I mean, actually abolish capitalism and prove them wrong, or right.

notch898a 4y ago

I'm interested in the explanation for this: https://sprc.org/sites/default/files/Slide21-n.PNG https://sprc.org/sites/default/files/Slide21-n.PNG

burlesona 4y ago

Matthew Yglesias wrote about this today as well, and his take was interesting. Paywall though :/ https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depressed https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-are-young-liberals-so-depre...

nhchris 4y ago
> If there were more Republicans working as professors, we’d probably balance out this line of inquiry with papers asking whether rising levels of shootings and homicides also contribute to racial disparities in mental health. But there aren't. So even when all the research being done is good, we primarily see research looking at the questions that progressives think are interesting. A study was conducted examining exactly this question. It turns out the bias is even worse: Not only are the 'wrong' questions unlikely to be asked, studies get rejected if they get the wrong results: The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
jamincan 4y ago
FWIW, it appears it's a free read for those of us who have never visited before. It's a very thought-provoking article and one that deserves more time than just might lunch break to ponder. In particular, this quote at the end of the article articulates an increasing discomfort I've been feeling around conversations about harm: > I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  It is different from saying, "If we teach people to recognize ways they've been harmed, then they feel bad, so we shouldn't teach them how to recognize harm"? Framed another way, it looks like the language of harm is winning in the marketplace of ideas and the language of "those aren't actually that bad," is losing.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    The important language is the language of "actions you can take by yourself and with others to meaningfully address your problems in a variety of ways".

rayiner 4y ago

> [Lorenz] went on to suggest that the young people of the 1950s enjoyed objectively superior material prospects than young people do today This is why I think culture is more important than policy. Lorenz’s point is obviously non-sensical. She mentions the “safety net.” But Medicaid didn’t exist in the 1950s. There were no federal student loans. There were no food stamps. Almost nobody went to college. Etc. But it’s a mistake to say Lorenz is wrong on the facts and leave it at that. She sincerely believes that young people today are worse off than young people in the 1950s. It’s a common refrain expressed by young people. So what has changed since the 1950s? Culture. We have made massive changes to how society is structured. We have changed what we tell young people about the meaning and purpose of life. We have eliminated social roles and duties and obligations that used to apply to young people. In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems. And maybe those changes aren’t all conducive to the well being of young people.

scotty79 4y ago
> So what has changed since the 1950s? Trajectory of how well off average American will be in x years?
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  To add numbers to this: A teenager in 1950s would be 40-50 when the productivity-wage breakdown happened [1]. Their generation not only benefited, they caused that for juiced returns on their stocks. A teenager today was born an entire generation after that decoupling — and has only known a world where their parents were exploited by 1950s teenagers. I don’t think it’s surprising that a generation where hard work was rewarded was more optimistic than one born to parents for whom that didn’t apply. [1] - https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
  - scotty79 4y ago
    I think that chart should be expressed in gold not in dollars to fully appreciate what's happening.

green_man_lives 4y ago

Article spends entire time "debunking" a political pundit who posts "hot takes" on Twitter, doesn't interview a single teen. Maybe, just maybe, the answer is multi-faceted. Maybe we should take the things kids say at face value if we want to pretend that we are being intellectually honest. Sure, humans are notoriously bad at describing their own qualia and reasons for why they feel the things they do, but listening should surely be our starting point, right? Furthermore, why is it that capitalism can't both increase our material quality of life, while also alienating us from things that our ancestors enjoyed in abundance? Relationships, the family, simple and fulfilling labor that had an immediate impact on your surroundings, connection with nature, more leisure time, etc. There's no conversion ratio of semiconductor chips to time spent with loved ones. Guess which of the two humans can't live without? Maybe instead of having a knee-jerk reaction to anti-capitalism, we should objectively look at neoliberal capitalism and see what the negative externalities are of a system that assumes the driving force between human interactions to be economic (one of which is the commodification of everything including relationships). This article should be titled "picking a fight with Taylor Lorenz" and nothing else.

anonuser123456 4y ago
As a neoliberal/capitalist, I would suggest that capitalism is an incomplete theory and that we are still flushing things out. The huge rise in material standard of living from the 1850s to 1970s in the US made a dramatic improvement in people’s real quality of life. But since the 70s the improvements are very marginal. I speculate that’s because most of the consumer improvements are in the domain of status consumption goods, which by definition is zero sum. Material abundance beyond a certain point is in and of itself corrosive because it’s just status seeking / competitive signaling.
- green_man_lives 4y ago
  I would tend to agree with this with the addition of the fact that labor rights have degenerated too. The relationship between working people and let's say "capital" used to be more tenuous. This had ramifications for political stability in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but by the middle of the century we had a decent balance of power between laborers and companies, mediated by the government. Union membership + secret societies were a huge building block of everyday life. If you haven't ever walked through a graveyard, I encourage you to do so. Look at the headstones of people who died before the 1980s. A huge number belong to a secret society or trade union group (for the sake of simplicity let's ignore the uncomfortable racial aspects many of these organizations may have had, they were still pillars of community even if they were racist pillars of community) Contrasted with up until very recently where the norm was about bragging how hard you work (for someone else). Rugged individualism, not collectivism, is what some would consider to be the highest virtue today. Not to say this is a root cause, but just an example of change that can be analyzed in some weighted equation.

korroziya 4y ago

"Between 2007 and 2018, the suicide rate among Americans ages 10 to 24 increased by nearly 60 percent." Right around the time social media garbage bloomed. Weird coincidence.

LatteLazy 4y ago
Or post the 2008 crash where everything governments did for young people was slashed...
- gretch 4y ago
  +1 to this How many teens had to watch their parent come home and announce that they got laid off from their job and that this year there wasn't going to be a yearly family trip?
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    There were so many recessions before 2008.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Yearly vacations are a fairly modern thing. My older relatives have stories about not being able to afford food, either due to the depression, or rationing during the war. Car ownership in the US broke 50% mid-century. The majority of my silent-generation relatives never, in their entire lives, traveled more than 100 miles from their birthplace. Poverty and unemployment continue to exist in other places around the globe, often in places with very low suicide rates.
    - jrussino 4y ago
      I wonder if it's the change in the trend rather than the change in the state. My great grandparents came to the US as immigrants with zero wealth in the early 1900's. My grandparents were children during the depression, lived their formative years during WWII and raised "baby boomer" children, and had a modest but comfortable retirement. My dad was the first person in his family to go to college and had a relatively prosperous professional career and a nice big house in the suburbs and we got to experience ~yearly vacations. I realize that there are many life stories here and this may not be reflective of everybody's expectations, but when I was young (pre-9/11) it felt like part of the zeitgeist that "every generation has it a little better than the last" (at least, in the material sense). Now there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that for the first time in living memory people's conditions in the aggregate are trending downward rather than upwards.

braingenious 4y ago

From the article: >Lorenz isn’t wrong to suggest that economic conditions can influence the prevalence of mental distress. Unemployment and poverty are both major risk factors for depression. Recessions are associated with elevated rates of suicide. And there is some evidence that robust social-welfare states improve mental health by reducing material insecurity. It is therefore reasonable to suspect that America’s relatively stingy social safety net and elevated level of child poverty are implicated in its youth mental-health crisis. lmao he agrees with her main point and then goes on to just shrug his shoulders in the next paragraph.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yeah I cackled. Quite literally the skinner "am I out of touch" / "no it's the children who are wrong" meme.
jimbokun 4y ago
The whole point of the article is that, although in general economic conditions can negatively impact mental health, in this case the increase in mental health problems does not coincide with a deterioration in overall economic conditions.
- braingenious 4y ago
  The point of the article seems more like NY Mag getting clicks by having one of their writers throw together a rebuttal to some recently popular tweets. I think the lack of seriousness is highlighted by the paragraph I quoted along with other bits from the author like this one: >Thus it is possible that the social pathologies cited by Lorenz are preconditions for today’s mental-health crisis. and >It’s possible that Lorenz’s general intuitions may someday be validated. and >What we can say with confidence is that we do not know and that we owe it to those suffering in our mental-health crisis to be honest about that fact. It’s clickbait meant to congratulate people that disagreed with Lorenz before they clicked on the article. Its substance is considerably less strong or confident than the headline assigned by the editor.
  - 4y ago

inphovore 4y ago

Are you sure? Just last week an article that rising number of teens (girls and boys) are being sextorted, or sexually coerced. More and more girls are getting raped before adulthood, let alone the rising likelihood that an attractive single woman will get raped in a major metropolitan. America has several converging cultural epidemics. It’s all in the meme stream.

woolion 4y ago

The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? What is it an indicator of, Mr Levitz? Are they unable to tolerate so much happiness? Are these people dumb? Defective? Arguing that life is objectively better because you are going to make a better salary than in the fifties is plain gaslighting, but I don't believe there are a lot of people who will still fall for this trick.

tomjen3 4y ago
It could be an indicator that people are less able to cope, and there is some really good causal evidence that social media causes anxiety in young girls.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Fortitude and coping skills are learned through adversity (sometimes with the help of parents or a therapist, most often with a lot of hopefully lower cost failure), but suffering you cannot grow from is unnecessary and not of value. With that said, social media is an unnecessary toxin children and teens are exposed to. You wouldn’t let them bathe in PFAS, and social media is similar: ubiquitous but also toxic with extended exposure.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > it could be an indicator that people are less able to cope That would mean life is worse. And we can measure how much worse in suicide rate deltas.
  - tomjen3 4y ago
    No, it would mean that one specific part of life is worse.
green_man_lives 4y ago
If I was being cynical I'd say that this is just an article designed to get clicks by confirming people's biases. To anyone who disagrees with me, ask yourself. What is the most important thing in your life? I can with certainty say that it doesn't have a "price" associated with it. If you can comprehend that then you can accept the premise that life can get worse as material conditions improve, especially when the marginal utility of those increasing material conditions is already low. Are touchscreens really a 10x improvement in quality of life when penicillin has been invented?

hot_gril 4y ago

Yes it is. But anyone publicly commenting on this is wading into the biggest political cesspool ever, so you aren't going to get a clear answer.

sakopov 4y ago

I personally think that mental health in teens is deteriorating because western society throws teenagers into adulthood and forces adult decision-making choices upon them with nearly constant propaganda. Look at all the shit that's happening at school where kids are advised not tell their parents about certain, sometimes even life-altering, decisions they're struggling with. The social media aspect of it adds fuel to the fire by further isolating every teen and allowing them to wallow in their fears and sadness by putting them into bubbles of same-thinkers. A few years back when political derangement was seemingly at its peak, my 14-year-old cousins were feverously arguing politics and social issues with adults at family functions. It was astounding to me, not because I was shocked that they had an opinion on any of it, but because they wasted their precious youth on stupid adult issues when they have their entire adulthood ahead of them to worry about it. This is an incredible weight to bare for adults, let alone children.

kelseyfrog 4y ago
> kids are advised not tell their parents about certain, sometimes even life-altering, decisions they're struggling with As a parent of a teen a huge part of this comes from the experienced shared by their friends. When a kiddo shares that they're struggling with a life-altering decision with a parent they're taking a risk they will be disowned, kicked out, or that the decision isn't theirs to make and that their parent is the sole-authority on their decision making. When they share it with a teacher in confidence, the risk of the above occurring are less. Kiddos aren't dumb; they're minimaxing[1] - reducing the possibility of worse case outcomes. When they share it with their friends, they absolutely pass around stories of the kiddo that went to their parents and now has to live with an aunt or grandparent now because that other kid made the decision to confide in their parents. Let's be frank, there are certain lines folks have, which if their kiddo came to them for support in those cases, they would tell them wasn't metaphysically possible. We would all like to believe that parents have infinite grace with their kids, but there are real life case that get shared amongst kids, that serve as living counter-examples. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax

vaillant 4y ago

Surprised nobody is mentioning climate change. Young people are supposed to be contributing and centering their lives around a kind of societal structure which is increasingly seen as doomed. The constant acceleration of capital is bumping up against the material finitude of an increasingly depleted Earth. Conservatives have a vision of the doomed future, built around walls and hoarding resources against impending scarcity. But liberals don't really have a good answer outside of "bring the super-rich to heel and use their resources to invest in mitigations," a view which is anathema to politicians who depend on the super-rich to continue holding power. People are depressed because there doesn't seem to be a future.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yeah I think this is a big part of the core thing. The author is trying to explain it away because a bunch of quantitative metrics are better or improving. But regardless, it feels more hopeless now. It feels like the world is going to end and we're powerless to affect it, it feels like our lives are grist for engine of wealth accumulation. Surprise, people's feelings are based on how things feel and regardless of what numbers say the world feels worse than it used to. We've optimized the hopefulness out of our changes.

haswell 4y ago

> The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? This is not the claim. The word “objective” does a lot of important heavy lifting here, and there are strong arguments to be made that subjective experience has gotten significantly worse, while most “objective” factors have continued to improve as the world modernizes. The trouble is that evolutionary psychology is such that the major changes to how humans live and communicate leave us in an environment that looks less and less like the environment we evolved in. This is why there is so much interest in the impact of social media. There is evidence that even among those who are in an objectively “good” circumstance when defining “good” based on safety, financial security and other commons measures, individuals are just as susceptible to the negativity and distorted reality that dominates modern social life.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
If it can be measured it is objective. And I find it odd that the objective criteria the author chooses ("it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security.") are mostly not applicable to teens, but to adults. And to the extent they are applicable to teens, well teen employment has dropped quite a bit since the Great Recession, and is just now returning to what is was in 2007: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/21/after-dropping-in-2020-teen-summer-employment-may-be-poised-to-continue-its-slow-comeback/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/21/after-dropp... The percent of children living in "poverty" also increased by a few percentage points (about 1/4 to 1/3 in relative percent) after the Great Recession, and didn't fall back to trend until around 2017. This would have affected today's teens during formative times in their childhood: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/43-children-in-poverty?loc=1&loct=1#1/any/false/2048,1729,871,573,36,867,38,18,16,14/asc/any/322 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/43-children-in-po...

karmakaze 4y ago

I wouldn't read this unless I thought that measuring the value of my life by politics or economics was valid and complete. 'objectively' here is a qualifier used like a weasel word limiting scope in a manner that also limits the meaningfulness of the conclusion.

quantified 4y ago

Adolescence is where the kid-friendly world created by parents, educators and others begins to really give way to the reality of the adult world, and how f'd up it can be and is. Adults have put the transition behind them for the most part and assimilated. Life may not have gotten much worse. The expectations of what the world is like may have been dumbed down during prior childhood.

spaced-out 4y ago

So the author spent the article responding to Twitter takes from journalists and looking at stats from economists who are pretty much all old and financially secure... I didn't see anywhere where the author looked at what teenagers themselves say is bothering them, either with interviews or studies. Maybe we should get their opinion before concluding that they're being irrational?

uoaei 4y ago

This style of article -- the attempt to will truths into existence through the imposition of a specific perspective -- is always so patronizing... Any time the word "objectively" is bandied around, you should be extremely skeptical. Very often, it is used to impose a values system pre-emptively on the conversation, and then make its argument from illusorily high ground. A true discussion on the subject would of course start with "what are the values we are trying to encourage in a healthy society, and how does that view differ between teens and other people?" which NY Mag doesn't seem interested in examining. I suspect this is because the imposition of an external values system itself is what's killing teens. You will have to take me at my word that I have personal experience with this question among people who are in this demographic. To me, teen suicide is making my life worse. It's making your life worse, too. If we want to play this game of counterfactuals, let's take it to its logical ends: how much will we miss these potential future inventors, stewards of good will, and powerhouses of industry when they are gone? Also, objective measures are pointless when suicide is and only ever will be a subjective experience motivated by subjective viewpoints. If the point is "look how great everything is out here, outside of your little poisoned head!" then we can expect a spike, not a reduction, in suicides. I didn't even have high hopes for this article but wow, this is an astonishingly out-of-touch take. Shame on the author, truly, for this. Especially this part: > It seems possible that the story of the teen-suicide crisis will come to resemble that of the opioid epidemic. Perhaps in a few years, we will find the U.S. economy’s structural inequities had less to do with American adolescents’ declining mental health than did the sudden introduction of a highly addictive (digital) technology. Come on! There has been vigorous debate over exactly these things, and where they fit into our society (incentive structures for doctors and pharma companies to push their products on vulnerable populations, incentive structures for social media companies to promote or demote certain kinds of potentially harmful content) precisely because this is a question of societal values! The question "Do we subject unwitting populations to things we know will harm them?" can be answered in different ways. In our current society, we've decided that permitting companies to act in these ways is in our best interest in order to legitimize this method of organizing capital markets (the profit motive) and refusing to apply different rules for different companies or industries on the basis of appeals to "free market" principles. I will note that, without access to the internal research of e.g. Meta or e.g. Purdue Pharma, the "consumers" of such "technologies" are literally, legally incapable of consenting to the set of possible outcomes that may result from their use. Furthermore, especially in the case of opioids, the people making the decision to accept such products are by definition under duress, as opioids are typically prescribed for constant and unbearable pain.

anuraaga 4y ago

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