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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 una

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?
- majormajor 4y ago
  > 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. This shows one of the wrinkles. Some people will be able to put a very specific price on that most important thing, straight from their health/insurance bills, because they would be dead without types of care that existed even in the 50s. We should be happy we've improved potential material conditions for people, but unhappy that it's distributed so poorly and that we've also introduced other technologies that rub those differences in people's faces. The headline is ludicrous because what the fuck does "objectively worse" even mean about quality of life. Humans have emotions, not just objective material sensor evaluators.
- falcolas 4y ago
  > What is the most important thing in your life? Security - food, transportation, housing. All have huge price tags associated with them. My wife being able to follow her passion - taking care of her family. Which means I have to make enough to account for her lost income for all the above.
  - green_man_lives 4y ago
    It sounds like the things you listed are prerequisites to having a family. Something people have been able to do for hundreds of thousands of years without transportation or high-paying tech jobs. That's the point I was making. Our material gains are only true quality of life improvements when they increase the access to things that are "meaningful" like relationships. GDP increase could mean you are capable of producing one extra Jurassic Park sequel each year, while people's ability to start a family stagnates.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      Those weren't the goals asked for by the parent. But to address this individually, yes, they are required for any kind of a family - single or married or with 55 children. And it's harder to do than it has been for the hundreds of thousands of years before now - it's not something you just "get" for working, for being part of a community, anymore. In other words, being hale and working all of the sunlit hours week is no longer sufficient to provide for a family. Something relatively new in human history. EDIT: $7.25 (US federal minimum wage) * 8 hours * 365 days/year puts you right at the poverty line for a 3 person household. A quality of life which may theoretically be better than that of a caveman, but hardly what I'd call "providing" for your family.
kube-system 4y ago
Mental health is just one aspect of life, but issues in just this one aspect can cause death.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
Did you even read the article? You're arguing a complete strawman. You can be materially better off while still feeling life is worse than it used to be.
jimbokun 4y ago
Do you disagree with this statement? > Whatever caused young people in the U.S. to develop higher rates of mental illness over the past two decades, it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security. What numbers or objective data can you put forward to refute it? Imagine a short story where a man gets a diagnosis of an incurable, terminal disease certain to inflict much suffering before death. He kills himself. And then the doctor discovers there was an error in the test, and the man did not have the disease after all. It's possible that for young people today, life is not objectively worse than for previous generations. But with catastrophic pronouncements on blast from social media to a greater extent than ever before, lack of in person support and friendships, a general discourse of partisanship and hate and unrelenting negativity, it's plausible more people are killing themselves due to the perception of reality, moreso than reality itself. In other words, maybe we should stop telling people life is hopeless, the world is doomed, and it's impossible for it to get better.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  I disagree with the statement. It privileges economic factors over social factors, environmental factors, sexual factors. If it's easier today to inaccurately broadcast doom, then that is an indication that life got objectively worse in one respect. There are plenty of distopian SF societies that are wonderful from an economic basis, but horrific from another basis (Brave New World is the most famous, but by far not the only example). I think the biggest issue here is the normal headline/article disagreement. Edit to add: As for "objective data": Social: The collapse of friendships and group activities. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/ https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a... Environmental: Things have improved in some respects compared to the smog and burning rivers of the 60s. But in other respects we now have historic droughts, historic wildfires, increasing frequency of cyclones, sea-level increases, decreases in green spaces, climate change, and still a variety of pollution events (which get more airplay than in previous years). Sexual: Incel communities. Breakups by text and ghosting. Finding partners online balanced out by not having the support of shared communities with sexual partners.
complianceowl 4y ago
I think this issue is extremely complex and not something we can just address by saying, "You make more money. You're better off." It's factually correct to say we live in much more materially-abundant times today. In that respect, I think that the easiness of life has caused many to become more mentally weak. I don't think the solution is to go back to scarcer times. I think we need to recognize this and voluntarily introduce challenges into our lives; dare say I, a little bit of adversity. My second thought is that we have weaker homes today than we did in times past. No, I don't think our ancestors were perfect. I could go on and on about how we've improved so much on many things. But homes were more stable in the past -- and that too is factually correct. I also think this weakens a teenagers support system and overall sense of love and security. My third thought is that even if someone comes from a good home, great parents, and well-off, today -- we have social media. Anyone can recognize the mental struggle this has catapulted humanity into. That too is factual. And for teens, they probably have it worse than anyone because the need and desire for acceptance is at the absolute strongest during these years. And being excluded or bullied is a harsh reality for many teens; not to mention being in relationships, introducing social media, and combining that with a lack of real education, experience, and emotional maturity. I don't have the answer, but if teens are offing themselves, something is wrong. And those of us who have already passed through that age should reach out and help.
marcosdumay 4y ago
The article is very bad. But this specific point is because it tries to say that it's not because life got materially worse. It implies the problems is with culture, socialization or something like that. Of course, all the evidence it has is that suicide trends are not correlated with short term noise on general measurements of the economy. Or, in other words, it's bullshit. But the hypothesis itself is valid and worth looking at.
Aunche 4y ago
Life was objectively better than it was during the 2019 than during the great recession. If anything is gaslighting, it's denying that reality. That period of time is also when teen suicides started dramatically increasing. Many people notice that it also coincides with the rise of social media, so that's an obvious culprit, and scientists have conducted studies that suggest that this may be the case. However, that's not good enough for far leftists, so they weaponize issues like teen suicides and global warming to raise awareness to class consciousness, despite having no objective data supporting the notion that abolishing capitalism will somehow fix these issues. Let's say a service is written Go, but it's inefficient. Some engineers are diagnosing the problem. It's not helpful to deny their work by proclaiming that Go is shit, and any solution that doesn't involve rewriting the service in Rust is counterproductive, especially when you know that very few people would agree with you.
jl6 4y ago
> The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? It could be an indicator that there is a perception that life is worse, which may drive action regardless of whether it is objectively true - and social media may be the primary vector for spreading that perception. Let’s face it, “life is better/worse” is an absurdly one-dimensional judgement given how complex everyone’s lives are. Even if there was a way of measuring an accurate quality of life trend, I expect it is far more likely that people’s perceptions are shaped by their media inputs than by reviewing actual data.
david38 4y ago
Suicide is not necessarily a sign life is worse. It can also be a sign suicide is perceived as “normal”. Look at the occurrences of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. When newspapers talked about it, it spiked. They made a pact not to talk about it, it tanked.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  You're right, but that example is a method of suicide, not suicide rates. https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abuse/what-does-suicide-contagion-mean/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abus...
yucky 4y ago
It's pretty clear that social media is a leading cause of the increase in suicide, because it certainly isn't anything else measurable in the data. Every single study on social media use shows how destructive it is for the psyche but we're supposed to pretend that's not related to the increases in depression and suicide? Why?
sershe 4y ago
Note "objectively". Subjectively, their lives are worse. Why? Coddling of the American Mind is a great book that I think has part of the answer. Personally, I also think social media, general political polarization, and general grievance/doom focus of left-wing politics are too blame, in some order. Objectively speaking, their lives are better or at least not worse on most metrics, and far better than most of the world. Perhaps due to all of the above they don't have a good reference to judge against.

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?

majormajor 4y ago
> 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. This shows one of the wrinkles. Some people will be able to put a very specific price on that most important thing, straight from their health/insurance bills, because they would be dead without types of care that existed even in the 50s. We should be happy we've improved potential material conditions for people, but unhappy that it's distributed so poorly and that we've also introduced other technologies that rub those differences in people's faces. The headline is ludicrous because what the fuck does "objectively worse" even mean about quality of life. Humans have emotions, not just objective material sensor evaluators.
falcolas 4y ago
> What is the most important thing in your life? Security - food, transportation, housing. All have huge price tags associated with them. My wife being able to follow her passion - taking care of her family. Which means I have to make enough to account for her lost income for all the above.
- green_man_lives 4y ago
  It sounds like the things you listed are prerequisites to having a family. Something people have been able to do for hundreds of thousands of years without transportation or high-paying tech jobs. That's the point I was making. Our material gains are only true quality of life improvements when they increase the access to things that are "meaningful" like relationships. GDP increase could mean you are capable of producing one extra Jurassic Park sequel each year, while people's ability to start a family stagnates.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Those weren't the goals asked for by the parent. But to address this individually, yes, they are required for any kind of a family - single or married or with 55 children. And it's harder to do than it has been for the hundreds of thousands of years before now - it's not something you just "get" for working, for being part of a community, anymore. In other words, being hale and working all of the sunlit hours week is no longer sufficient to provide for a family. Something relatively new in human history. EDIT: $7.25 (US federal minimum wage) * 8 hours * 365 days/year puts you right at the poverty line for a 3 person household. A quality of life which may theoretically be better than that of a caveman, but hardly what I'd call "providing" for your family.

kube-system 4y ago

Mental health is just one aspect of life, but issues in just this one aspect can cause death.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

Did you even read the article? You're arguing a complete strawman. You can be materially better off while still feeling life is worse than it used to be.

jimbokun 4y ago

Do you disagree with this statement? > Whatever caused young people in the U.S. to develop higher rates of mental illness over the past two decades, it was not an objective collapse in living standards, employment prospects, or opportunities for material security. What numbers or objective data can you put forward to refute it? Imagine a short story where a man gets a diagnosis of an incurable, terminal disease certain to inflict much suffering before death. He kills himself. And then the doctor discovers there was an error in the test, and the man did not have the disease after all. It's possible that for young people today, life is not objectively worse than for previous generations. But with catastrophic pronouncements on blast from social media to a greater extent than ever before, lack of in person support and friendships, a general discourse of partisanship and hate and unrelenting negativity, it's plausible more people are killing themselves due to the perception of reality, moreso than reality itself. In other words, maybe we should stop telling people life is hopeless, the world is doomed, and it's impossible for it to get better.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
I disagree with the statement. It privileges economic factors over social factors, environmental factors, sexual factors. If it's easier today to inaccurately broadcast doom, then that is an indication that life got objectively worse in one respect. There are plenty of distopian SF societies that are wonderful from an economic basis, but horrific from another basis (Brave New World is the most famous, but by far not the only example). I think the biggest issue here is the normal headline/article disagreement. Edit to add: As for "objective data": Social: The collapse of friendships and group activities. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/ https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-a... Environmental: Things have improved in some respects compared to the smog and burning rivers of the 60s. But in other respects we now have historic droughts, historic wildfires, increasing frequency of cyclones, sea-level increases, decreases in green spaces, climate change, and still a variety of pollution events (which get more airplay than in previous years). Sexual: Incel communities. Breakups by text and ghosting. Finding partners online balanced out by not having the support of shared communities with sexual partners.

complianceowl 4y ago

I think this issue is extremely complex and not something we can just address by saying, "You make more money. You're better off." It's factually correct to say we live in much more materially-abundant times today. In that respect, I think that the easiness of life has caused many to become more mentally weak. I don't think the solution is to go back to scarcer times. I think we need to recognize this and voluntarily introduce challenges into our lives; dare say I, a little bit of adversity. My second thought is that we have weaker homes today than we did in times past. No, I don't think our ancestors were perfect. I could go on and on about how we've improved so much on many things. But homes were more stable in the past -- and that too is factually correct. I also think this weakens a teenagers support system and overall sense of love and security. My third thought is that even if someone comes from a good home, great parents, and well-off, today -- we have social media. Anyone can recognize the mental struggle this has catapulted humanity into. That too is factual. And for teens, they probably have it worse than anyone because the need and desire for acceptance is at the absolute strongest during these years. And being excluded or bullied is a harsh reality for many teens; not to mention being in relationships, introducing social media, and combining that with a lack of real education, experience, and emotional maturity. I don't have the answer, but if teens are offing themselves, something is wrong. And those of us who have already passed through that age should reach out and help.

marcosdumay 4y ago

The article is very bad. But this specific point is because it tries to say that it's not because life got materially worse. It implies the problems is with culture, socialization or something like that. Of course, all the evidence it has is that suicide trends are not correlated with short term noise on general measurements of the economy. Or, in other words, it's bullshit. But the hypothesis itself is valid and worth looking at.

Aunche 4y ago

Life was objectively better than it was during the 2019 than during the great recession. If anything is gaslighting, it's denying that reality. That period of time is also when teen suicides started dramatically increasing. Many people notice that it also coincides with the rise of social media, so that's an obvious culprit, and scientists have conducted studies that suggest that this may be the case. However, that's not good enough for far leftists, so they weaponize issues like teen suicides and global warming to raise awareness to class consciousness, despite having no objective data supporting the notion that abolishing capitalism will somehow fix these issues. Let's say a service is written Go, but it's inefficient. Some engineers are diagnosing the problem. It's not helpful to deny their work by proclaiming that Go is shit, and any solution that doesn't involve rewriting the service in Rust is counterproductive, especially when you know that very few people would agree with you.

jl6 4y ago

> The logic here is absolutely astounding. People _killing themselves_ is not an indicator that life is worse? It could be an indicator that there is a perception that life is worse, which may drive action regardless of whether it is objectively true - and social media may be the primary vector for spreading that perception. Let’s face it, “life is better/worse” is an absurdly one-dimensional judgement given how complex everyone’s lives are. Even if there was a way of measuring an accurate quality of life trend, I expect it is far more likely that people’s perceptions are shaped by their media inputs than by reviewing actual data.

david38 4y ago

Suicide is not necessarily a sign life is worse. It can also be a sign suicide is perceived as “normal”. Look at the occurrences of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge. When newspapers talked about it, it spiked. They made a pact not to talk about it, it tanked.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
You're right, but that example is a method of suicide, not suicide rates. https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abuse/what-does-suicide-contagion-mean/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abus...

yucky 4y ago

It's pretty clear that social media is a leading cause of the increase in suicide, because it certainly isn't anything else measurable in the data. Every single study on social media use shows how destructive it is for the psyche but we're supposed to pretend that's not related to the increases in depression and suicide? Why?

sershe 4y ago

Note "objectively". Subjectively, their lives are worse. Why? Coddling of the American Mind is a great book that I think has part of the answer. Personally, I also think social media, general political polarization, and general grievance/doom focus of left-wing politics are too blame, in some order. Objectively speaking, their lives are better or at least not worse on most metrics, and far better than most of the world. Perhaps due to all of the above they don't have a good reference to judge against.