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Seeing as how my daughter has gone through ten years of therapy due to depression I'll throw my hat in the ring and tell you what I think at least part of the p
Seeing as how my daughter has gone through ten years of therapy due to depression I'll throw my hat in the ring and tell you what I think at least part of the problem is:
Late stage, winner-takes-all & loser-gets-nothing, Capitalism.
Those of us who are well-entrenched in our careers may not understand how vicious the world is for the entry-level and those aspiring to launch careers. The secondary schools preach and harp about college nearly every single day. If you don't go to college then expect to work meaningless jobs and live in squalor. I'm paraphrasing, but only a bit.
If you don't know anyone going through today's college admissions process then whoo-boy! There have been a recent spate of articles here on HN complaining about developer interviews and how insane they've become. Multiply the insanity by 10x and then re-label it as college admissions. You'd better have made sure you played the right sport, had the right extracurricular activities, volunteered for the right organizations, and be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. That should at least guarantee you a spot at your state college, maybe even a scholarship or two.
And speaking of scholarships - you need money for college. Lots and lots of money. More money than your parents could have ever possibly saved - and that's if your parents are in the top 10% of wage earners. You're going to be taking out loans, maybe spending a significant part of your adult life paying back those loans.
Why would you do this? You don't want to have a menial job and live in squalor do you?
Meanwhile while killing themselves to get into college they're watching billionaires literally buy the government and pass the laws they want passed. They watch politicians gerrymander so that the majority doesn't actually have a say. They watch a moral minority strip them of every personal liberty they have and tell them how to live their lives.
Oh, and all these assholes are completely destroying the Earth, and their future, without a care in the world for what will come after them. In fact they don't think there's going to be a future because Jesus Christ is going to float down on a cloud and save them all and leave your sorry ass behind to suffer.
And we're wondering, actually wondering, why an entire generation is depressed and apathetic and looking at the older generations with derision.
Meanwhile the depression will continue until they rise up and burn the place down. That is if they're not so downtrodden they can't even lift their heads any longer.
But yeah, let's blame smartphones instead.
Add increasing concentration of wealth in less and less people, increasing job insecurity due to technological advances rendering many jobs completely useless (and transfers even more wealth to those that are already haves and removes it even more from have-nots), the instant access to compare yourself to millions of others around the world...
I seriously can't understand why some people scratch their heads around the youth's mental health crisis. I'd be baffled if they weren't depresesd.
These were all the things the kids were talking about in group therapy - and this was nearly 10 years ago!
BUT - I wouldn't expect people who haven't been paying attention to the environment to be paying attention to their children. Or maybe it's the other way around?
We've seen much worse wealth inequalities in history, we've seen much worse job markets, we've seen much worse wars and pandemics, history was a lot more violent.
Really the only thing different there is that "instant access to compare yourself to millions of others". Which is essentially social media.
I'm sure there are other factors and everyone can speculate what they are, but "the world is terrible today" is hard to argue because it was much worse before, yet this didn't happen.
Things may have been worse in the past but in the past everybody was in the same boat.
Famine? It affected everybody.
Plague? It affected everybody.
Drought? It affected everybody.
War? It affected everybody.
Nowadays the systemic problems that are an artifact of modern life do not affect everybody. The richer you are, the less your affectation. This a winner-takes-all and loser-gets-nothing is a byproduct of the neocon ideology that has dominated our politics since the 80's. Forty years on and its causing grave psychological trauma.
I believe you're romanticizing the past.
Famine (often with Drought)? What do you think the alleged "Let them eat cake" came from? The nobility and the bourgeoisie weren't affected, only the peasants.
Plague? The motto was cito, longe, tarde: quickly travel far away from the city, and return late. Guess who had that option to leave the plague-affected town for their country estate?
War? While not as clear as the others, it's similar: besides a few sons of nobility, it was the peasants that did the dying, not everybody.
When is the last famine that saw millions dead in the USA while the rich lived lavishly? Because that's what the past looked like, so "winner takes all" was obviously much more true back then. Society used to be much, much more unequal, capitalism was much harsher.
I might be mistaken, but judging that you're on HN and likely work in tech/STEM and had the money to pay for years of therapy for your daughter, I assume you're part of what would previously be called the bourgeoisie -- so there's really no factual reason for you or your daughter to be worried about an increasingly unequal wealth distribution, because you'll have more than your "fair share". I'm not judging, and I don't want to say that her pain isn't or wasn't real, but maybe it's not a rational response to the state of the world and her role in it.
If you look to Western Europe, we have similar issues, yet "winner takes all" couldn't be further from the truth here, we have strong welfare states, we have high taxes, yet teens are still struggling, apparently more than usual. We have very few school shootings, we're lifting any restrictions on abortions, we're constantly making it easier for trans people to transition etc etc etc, so lots of things are fundamentally different. Yet we still see something very similar, and we do have cellphones and social media.
I've been trying to post less online because it's, well, depressing. But I agree with you 1000%.
The main way to curtail late stage crony capitalism is to raise taxes on the wealthy. We're at about half the tax rate that sustains a healthy middle class, which is directly correlated with wages being half what they should be, the lack of personal savings for the bottom half of the population, etc. It's been well-understood since the Great Depression, but empires have always known that there's a limit to what workers will accept before they revolt. I believe that we passed the point of stability around the Dot Bomb and 9/11 2001. But a strong argument could be made that the writing was on the wall by 1990 when the USSR separated but world powers kept funding their own militaries to create new bogeymen like terrorism to control the population.
Everything since has been theater: from the way we reward financiers and penalize employees, to how our legal system protects status quo players like the RIAA/MPAA, and how threats to our environments are just treated as externalities and not addressed directly because that goes against "free market" capitalism.
I learned about the situation we're in today with looming global threats like nationalism and fascism in high school AP government class back in maybe 1993. Back then, guys like Robert Bork, Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh were curiosities, and Newt Gingrich was just getting started. Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that Fox News would dominate all media, thanks to bitter old men like Rupert Murdoch. They created such a dark reality that I feel awful for young people today who think that this is how it always was and always will be.
The silver lining is that every bully eventually realizes that everyone is laughing at him. I think we're in one of those moments now with stuff like the TikTok ban hearings illustrating how comically out of touch bitter old men are. Their time is ending, and I still hold out hope that when Gen X attains power in government, we'll pull the plug on the fear mongering. But I'm generally wrong about these things, so I also expect the powers that be will prevent us from ever gaining any power whatsoever. Which is why it's so important to organize outside of whatever circles the mainstream media deems appropriate. Thankfully Gen Z appears to be doing just that.
I agree with this take. The biggest difference I see between the world I grew up in in the 80s/90s and today is how everything has moved to this horrible "winner take all" mode. Not just in education, but everything. Every aspect of life has turned into this zero-sum slugfest where very few win the lottery or kill their way to the top, and the remainder are expected to live with nothing. Used to be there were careers available for A students, B students, C students, D students and so on. We're very quickly moving towards this bimodal: ultra-luxury standard of living for a tiny few elite who ended up #1 (or lucked into it through their parents), and squalor for everyone else.
My kid asks me what career she should be when she grows up and I honestly don't know what to tell her. Every job category is fighting for its life against the capital ownership class's unquenchable need for more of the pie. The truth is that it probably doesn't matter. Unless I'm a multimillionaire and pay her way to the elite club, she doesn't really have anything besides downward class mobility to look forward to.