17 ms·

U.S. Teen Girls Experiencing Increased Sadness and Violence

55 points by hochmartinez 3y ago

zmgsabst 3y ago
[flagged]
- echelon 3y ago
  I grew up being told I could do anything I put my mind to. That I was responsible, to a very large degree, for my own path and making my dreams come true. I don't understand how those told that they're disadvantaged can persevere and succeed. Especially when they're told that it's the system's fault. It takes seeking out adversity, embracing and enjoying it to push ahead. If you're uncomfortable at your basal level, grinding even harder must be unbearable. To make it ahead in any fitness landscape, you have to undergo hardship to lower the activation energy of your path forward. If it was easy, everyone would do it. You have to seek out discomfort where others will not. That seems especially challenging if you don't have the right mindset.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - prohobo 3y ago
    Leftists argue your mindset is a symptom of the toxic mantras of neoliberalism. It's basically a Protestant work ethic: Highly individualistic, and little sense of commonality or cooperation. Thats the reasonable argument against your ethics, in that a community or team can do things that are impossible for any individual. It's absolutely true, and can't be refuted. But that's also the trap that modern society is falling into. We do not operate in nuance. We *could* combine ethics such as yours with community efforts and empower everyone, but instead we're trying to squash individuality, and enforce toxic mantras of community! The modern left eschews nuance and reacts with self-destructive vengeance, and that's the core problem with their politics. They equate liberals with neoliberals, neoliberals with conservatives, conservatives with Nazis, and Nazis with the boogeyman. To them the individual is absolute evil. So, I think the best thing to do is attempt to assuage their fears: show them that individuals can work together to improve society for everyone, without destroying individual values.
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      I view their politics as a meme prion: perhaps there’s some reasonable interpretation — as you’ve outlined here — but that’s not what they’re arguing. For example, despite saying that they’re staunchly against bigotry, they’re defining commonality by race and sex — rather than common circumstance. That’s inherently toxic because it foments the very bigotry they (pretend to) decry: look at their proud anti-Asian racism at Harvard, using 1950s style arguments there’s “too many Asians”. They absolutely detest the people who when viewing things through the lens of individualism, conclude that they should form partnerships with people that have aligned values, principles, and goals. After all, they’d have to admit their beliefs were a return to racial and sexual essentialism to have that realization — and they’re Good People (TM) who would never do such a thing. One of the most important choices an individual makes is who to have “on your team” — and their entire world view is built on assigning those roles based on protected class. I don’t think your attempt to “assuage their fears” will be met with anything but rabid anger — because we already did that and it already produced superior results. They’ve intentionally destroyed that system, as anathema.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    What if you were born with an IQ of 85?
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      That sucks. But the problems of that are not due to skin pigmentation or genital structure — it’s the fact intelligence is necessary for many tasks. And you’re still best served by focusing on how to improve your individual circumstance, especially compared to blaming those unrelated factors.
      - hotpotamus 3y ago
        Do you think such a person can do anything they put their mind to? Also I don't know where skin pigmentation came into this though I'll admit I didn't read the article - does it say something about differential racial effects?
        zmgsabst 3y ago
        That’s within the context of my comment. Also, extremely unlikely. But they’ll be better served by the mentality that they can than worrying about a victim narrative about how they’ll never be able to succeed. Eg, this. https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/10/12/after-becoming-first-ironman-with-down-syndrome-chris-nikic-conquers-boston-marathon/ https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/10/12/after-bec...
        hotpotamus 3y ago
        Do you think repeatedly failing to achieve a goal that you may never have been able to in the first place is good for mental health? Getting people to believe some lie about how they can achieve anything might make you feel better, but it seems fundamentally dishonest; despite what we may wish, not all the children can be above average. I'm glad the person in your example has the support required to spend his time doing non-productive sports that he enjoys, that's very nice and I wish more people had that opportunity, but do you think he'll ever be able to live independently?
fafqg 3y ago
It's normal for humans to compare themselves to their peers. That's how we have achieved the level of greatness that we currently enjoy: by competing. Males do it positively and females do it negatively. My theory is that this has gotten out of hand with the boom of Instagram and it shows.
- majikaja 3y ago
  If Meta partnered with hospitals and biotech firms and entered the plastic surgery business I think they could make a lot of money. They've already come this far in exploiting people, why stop?
  - fafqg 3y ago
    I don't agree that this is Meta's fault. They gave females a window to the world and that made them depressed. Does this mean Meta should just close shop? Are they responsible for the mental health of their users?
    - bitL 3y ago
      It's similar to swengs - before remote work one could be a king of their own place for a lot of money, now swengs need to compete for much cheaper with people from all around the world who might cheat in unimaginable ways to land a job. Like all those plastic-perfect pseudocelebrity influencers on Instagram sucking all ad money, making droves of people super depresses when they look in a mirror. It's also much easier to get in touch with them directly, damaging opportunities of worse-looking real people to socialize.
    - scotty79 3y ago
      Maybe they should? What is the benefit of having them continue and does it outweigh the cost?
    - majikaja 3y ago
      I guess one has to be somewhat ill to use such platforms in the first place.
jdthedisciple 3y ago
How about spend less time on Instagram and TikTok and more in nature?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- prohobo 3y ago
  Teens don't know about this and it's unfair to expect them to. For them Insta and TikTok are part of social life, and basically necessary. Parents are obviously to blame; most are ambivalent or enmeshed in social media themselves. Their communities are to blame as well. I wonder, do schools ever address these issues? Or do they just tell kids to put down their phones in class?
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    I am 100% with you. Parents should have the right and responsibility to monitor and regulate their children's consumption of aforementioned tools.
    - dotandgtfo 3y ago
      Yes, personal responsibility™ is the root cause here. Not corporations that have been making hyper addictive applications and maximising engagement for profit. While I don't blame anyone solely, there's lots of blame to go around - solely blaming the parents doesn't hold up. Kids are ostracized if they don't have a smartphone, don't have TikTok, and don't have YouTube. It's easy to blame the parents, but it's unreasonable to expect them to know how to deal with new technology and how to enforce it with kids. Probably an unpopular take here, but I think within a decade or so social media and technology will have it's "smoking moment" and be regulated harder. Probably some sort of age limits, protections for minors and enforced parental controls (like whitelisted channels, screentime, and such). As today it's pretty much impossible for a parent to see what kids are doing on these applications, and pretty much impossible for them to enforce it if they aren't in the same room.
egeozcan 3y ago
> More than 1 in 10 (14%) had ever been forced to have sex 14% of all the teenage girls are raped? How is this possible? I'm really not the one to grab the pitchfork first for sure but this... I don't know... How are we okay with this?
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  I'd like to see the survey question(s) they used to derive this. I recall when the oft touted claim that "1 in 4 college females experience sexual assault" included anyone who answered that they'd had sex under the influence of alcohol.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Good news for you! The very first link in article body goes to a very ctrl-Fable PDF. If you are actually interested, in less than a minute worth of effort you'd find those pieces of info on pages 53 and 82.
- everdrive 3y ago
  In previous cases, the questions regarding rape have been phrased to be incredibly broad, to the point of straining credulity. I can't say where these particular statistics have come from, but prior statistical nonsense here has poisoned the well for me.
  - treis 3y ago
    Question was: >Have you ever been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when you did not want to?
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    > the questions regarding rape have been phrased to be incredibly broad If forced sexual intercourse does not fit your definition of rape, perhaps that's what's being too narrow?
    - 3y ago
chris123 3y ago
[flagged]
lakeshastina 3y ago
Those years during high school are a very challenging time in one’s life, when we develop into adults. The fundamental question of “Who am I? Where do I fit into society?” are subconsciously trying to get answered. On the other side, in the west, we have a very body-centered idea of self-worth, exaggerated by TV, music and social media. Fundamentally, I do not see this situation getting any better because of how society is wired right now. There are more dramatical changes needed than what we are perhaps capable of. 3 main changes that might help come to mind - 1. We are in an obesity epidemic. Acknowledge this, make changes in the eating and exercise habits, feed children less sugar, especially what’s provided at school during lunch. 2. Due to most kids being overweight, find ways to acknowledge their other talents. Encourage high school kids to find paid work. Help them derive self-worth from other avenues. 3. Help them learn to work their minds. It does not need to be esoteric eastern meditation techniques but learning to sit still for 20 mins a day and watch the breath, and one more time for 5 mins or so before sleep, will have tremendous transference to the rest of one’s life.
- scotty79 3y ago
  > Fundamentally, I do not see this situation getting any better because of how society is wired right now. It think tight regulation of advertisement industry could help. They really have all the incentive to make people feel worse. It directly translates to their income. There should be pre-publishing check on every advert. Like a focus group paid for by advertiser, but organized by government body. If it makes people feel worse after watching it it shouldn't be allowed to publish. Advertisement is not a free speech.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - krapp 3y ago
    >Advertisement is not a free speech. Yes it obviously is. Even advertisements that make people feel bad are free speech.
    - 3y ago
newsclues 3y ago
[flagged]
- scotty79 3y ago
  Any trans people are very rare. It's highly unlikely they influence any general statistics.
fuzzybiscuit 3y ago
[flagged]
cubefox 3y ago
There is an interesting hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt on this topic. "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence." https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...
curious-im 3y ago
Report about girls experiencing sadness and violence and comment section here putting the blame on girls themself, facebook, results being affected by wokeness and so on. Kinda ironic There is much more external reasons for young american females to feel sad right now. Culture wars, politicians becoming extremists, legislations and many other factors. I think people in general feel much less save right now, not only teen girls
- guyomes 3y ago
  > There is much more external reasons for young american females to feel sad right now. Fully agree. A sci-fi novel from Robert Heinlein [0] was describing end of life as a discontinuity. In this sense, with the very rapid changes of society that we are currently experiencing, we could say that the society is dying to let place to a new society. As examples of rapid changes, we have social network, climat change, artificial intelligence to cite a few. From a child point of view it could be harder to project themself in a society changing rapidly. How do you gain recognition for you and your creations using new medias? How do you reach confort and enjoy leisures without causing pollution? Which skills should you learn that won't become obsolete with AI? It is inevitable that societies change: our current society is very different from the society during middle-age for instance. Yet it is easier to adapt when the changes are slow and continuous than when they are sudden and discontinuous. In the first case, you can learn from your parents and other adults. In the second case, you are on your own. In the history of most countries, recovering from a revolution could take decades. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-Line
IceHegel 3y ago
Weak parents who rather than create order in their house, let things take their course - which mostly means tiktok and instagram.
l5870uoo9y 3y ago
This article is covering US teen girls but the negative pattern is the same in Denmark and likely other European countries. Jonanthan Haidt wrote an article on the subject: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill....
kmarc 3y ago
Look around you and observe your friends, family, colleagues, or a significant other, but really: any adults. This is not only affecting "teen girls", and certainly not only US people. We need more research on this without "teen girls" in the clickbait titles. This affects everyone. It affected the person of my romantic interest and I had to break up at the end. This affects 30+ year old men too. Don't dismiss it. Besides research we need solutions. We need advice on how to approach this topic. We need to find a way to be able to help those who want it.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  > This affects 30+ year old men too. Don't dismiss it. Society does not care about male problems. Let's just label them incels or terrorists and be done with it. Also at the same time let's wonder why Andrew Tate and similar are easily getting such a huge following.
  - 226_ebro_treaty 3y ago
    Most problems people have after 25 or so are directly related to income, which would upset rich people's pockets, so no, they literally do not matter.
  - dotandgtfo 3y ago
    Hot take, I know, and sorry in advance. But I'll go so far as to say that what you're saying here is in part caused by technology, the internet and social media. Most reasonable people, and reasonable feminists (which most feminists I've met are) do sympathise with men and their issues as well. I think social media amplifies the extreme minorities voices that state that they don't care about male problems, that men are incels and far-right terrorists and other unsavory takes. I don't think most people label males as such. But I do think social media is extremely good at bringing up these takes - because they create a lot of engagement (particularly from the opposing side). I think social media affects 30 year old males in the exact same way as teenage girls get body image problems from looking at "perfect" lives on Instagram. Men get served toxic and outrage based content that shows the extreme outliers - multiple times a week, for multiple years in a row. I think most people are reasonable. I think most people care about male problems. I think a minority label men as incels or terrorists. I think the internet exaggerates this position greatly, and it's at least partly overblown.
majikaja 3y ago
It will be interesting to see what happens when Elon turns Twitter into a payment platform. It's already basically a platform here in Japan for women to advertise their services and arrange encounters with older men... just need to use one's imagination. All that's left is to monetize the depressed crazies that make up the remainder of the userbase.
rrgok 3y ago
We have rules and regulation on what we can physically eat (eg. most psychedelics drugs are illegal, maybe rightly so, I'm not contesting the validity of that, but just stating they exists) so why don't we have rules for mental food? It baffles me that I cannot eat some spices from Asia just because for most local people is kinda indigestible or not good, basically destroying the market for that kind of spice. Yet, we can allow big corps to produce shitty social media apps without any rules. There should be an FDA for mental things.
- dqft 3y ago
  Mental spice ministry you say..
- krapp 3y ago
  >Yet, we can allow big corps to produce shitty social media apps without any rules. They do have rules. They publish the rules. You have to agree to the rules to get an account. On top of that, they're bound by numerous laws and regulations.
mikae1 3y ago
“Sad by design” as Geert Lovink puts it. https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745339344/sad-by-design/ https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745339344/sad-by-design/ https://thinkbelt.org/shows/interstitial/sad-by-design-geert-lovink https://thinkbelt.org/shows/interstitial/sad-by-design-geert... https://youtu.be/7LDb21An-Ag https://youtu.be/7LDb21An-Ag
tomohawk 3y ago
The newest member of the US Supreme Court was asked to define what a woman was. She refused. We have a culture where people either don't know what a woman is or are too intimidated to talk about it. Is this what girls have to look forward to? I'd be depressed, too.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  It's the same definition as what a Celt is: someone who honestly identifies as one. In the past, we thought both were more exact (mostly because gender was a synonym for "sex" aka "allosome configuration" aka "XX haver").
ForestCritter 3y ago
[dead]

55 points by hochmartinez 3y ago

zmgsabst 3y ago

[flagged]

echelon 3y ago
I grew up being told I could do anything I put my mind to. That I was responsible, to a very large degree, for my own path and making my dreams come true. I don't understand how those told that they're disadvantaged can persevere and succeed. Especially when they're told that it's the system's fault. It takes seeking out adversity, embracing and enjoying it to push ahead. If you're uncomfortable at your basal level, grinding even harder must be unbearable. To make it ahead in any fitness landscape, you have to undergo hardship to lower the activation energy of your path forward. If it was easy, everyone would do it. You have to seek out discomfort where others will not. That seems especially challenging if you don't have the right mindset.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- prohobo 3y ago
  Leftists argue your mindset is a symptom of the toxic mantras of neoliberalism. It's basically a Protestant work ethic: Highly individualistic, and little sense of commonality or cooperation. Thats the reasonable argument against your ethics, in that a community or team can do things that are impossible for any individual. It's absolutely true, and can't be refuted. But that's also the trap that modern society is falling into. We do not operate in nuance. We *could* combine ethics such as yours with community efforts and empower everyone, but instead we're trying to squash individuality, and enforce toxic mantras of community! The modern left eschews nuance and reacts with self-destructive vengeance, and that's the core problem with their politics. They equate liberals with neoliberals, neoliberals with conservatives, conservatives with Nazis, and Nazis with the boogeyman. To them the individual is absolute evil. So, I think the best thing to do is attempt to assuage their fears: show them that individuals can work together to improve society for everyone, without destroying individual values.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    I view their politics as a meme prion: perhaps there’s some reasonable interpretation — as you’ve outlined here — but that’s not what they’re arguing. For example, despite saying that they’re staunchly against bigotry, they’re defining commonality by race and sex — rather than common circumstance. That’s inherently toxic because it foments the very bigotry they (pretend to) decry: look at their proud anti-Asian racism at Harvard, using 1950s style arguments there’s “too many Asians”. They absolutely detest the people who when viewing things through the lens of individualism, conclude that they should form partnerships with people that have aligned values, principles, and goals. After all, they’d have to admit their beliefs were a return to racial and sexual essentialism to have that realization — and they’re Good People (TM) who would never do such a thing. One of the most important choices an individual makes is who to have “on your team” — and their entire world view is built on assigning those roles based on protected class. I don’t think your attempt to “assuage their fears” will be met with anything but rabid anger — because we already did that and it already produced superior results. They’ve intentionally destroyed that system, as anathema.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  What if you were born with an IQ of 85?
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    That sucks. But the problems of that are not due to skin pigmentation or genital structure — it’s the fact intelligence is necessary for many tasks. And you’re still best served by focusing on how to improve your individual circumstance, especially compared to blaming those unrelated factors.
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      Do you think such a person can do anything they put their mind to? Also I don't know where skin pigmentation came into this though I'll admit I didn't read the article - does it say something about differential racial effects?
      - zmgsabst 3y ago
        That’s within the context of my comment. Also, extremely unlikely. But they’ll be better served by the mentality that they can than worrying about a victim narrative about how they’ll never be able to succeed. Eg, this. https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/10/12/after-becoming-first-ironman-with-down-syndrome-chris-nikic-conquers-boston-marathon/ https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/10/12/after-bec...
        hotpotamus 3y ago
        Do you think repeatedly failing to achieve a goal that you may never have been able to in the first place is good for mental health? Getting people to believe some lie about how they can achieve anything might make you feel better, but it seems fundamentally dishonest; despite what we may wish, not all the children can be above average. I'm glad the person in your example has the support required to spend his time doing non-productive sports that he enjoys, that's very nice and I wish more people had that opportunity, but do you think he'll ever be able to live independently?

fafqg 3y ago

It's normal for humans to compare themselves to their peers. That's how we have achieved the level of greatness that we currently enjoy: by competing. Males do it positively and females do it negatively. My theory is that this has gotten out of hand with the boom of Instagram and it shows.

majikaja 3y ago
If Meta partnered with hospitals and biotech firms and entered the plastic surgery business I think they could make a lot of money. They've already come this far in exploiting people, why stop?
- fafqg 3y ago
  I don't agree that this is Meta's fault. They gave females a window to the world and that made them depressed. Does this mean Meta should just close shop? Are they responsible for the mental health of their users?
  - bitL 3y ago
    It's similar to swengs - before remote work one could be a king of their own place for a lot of money, now swengs need to compete for much cheaper with people from all around the world who might cheat in unimaginable ways to land a job. Like all those plastic-perfect pseudocelebrity influencers on Instagram sucking all ad money, making droves of people super depresses when they look in a mirror. It's also much easier to get in touch with them directly, damaging opportunities of worse-looking real people to socialize.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    Maybe they should? What is the benefit of having them continue and does it outweigh the cost?
  - majikaja 3y ago
    I guess one has to be somewhat ill to use such platforms in the first place.

jdthedisciple 3y ago

How about spend less time on Instagram and TikTok and more in nature?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
prohobo 3y ago
Teens don't know about this and it's unfair to expect them to. For them Insta and TikTok are part of social life, and basically necessary. Parents are obviously to blame; most are ambivalent or enmeshed in social media themselves. Their communities are to blame as well. I wonder, do schools ever address these issues? Or do they just tell kids to put down their phones in class?
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  I am 100% with you. Parents should have the right and responsibility to monitor and regulate their children's consumption of aforementioned tools.
  - dotandgtfo 3y ago
    Yes, personal responsibility™ is the root cause here. Not corporations that have been making hyper addictive applications and maximising engagement for profit. While I don't blame anyone solely, there's lots of blame to go around - solely blaming the parents doesn't hold up. Kids are ostracized if they don't have a smartphone, don't have TikTok, and don't have YouTube. It's easy to blame the parents, but it's unreasonable to expect them to know how to deal with new technology and how to enforce it with kids. Probably an unpopular take here, but I think within a decade or so social media and technology will have it's "smoking moment" and be regulated harder. Probably some sort of age limits, protections for minors and enforced parental controls (like whitelisted channels, screentime, and such). As today it's pretty much impossible for a parent to see what kids are doing on these applications, and pretty much impossible for them to enforce it if they aren't in the same room.

egeozcan 3y ago

> More than 1 in 10 (14%) had ever been forced to have sex 14% of all the teenage girls are raped? How is this possible? I'm really not the one to grab the pitchfork first for sure but this... I don't know... How are we okay with this?

lr4444lr 3y ago
I'd like to see the survey question(s) they used to derive this. I recall when the oft touted claim that "1 in 4 college females experience sexual assault" included anyone who answered that they'd had sex under the influence of alcohol.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Good news for you! The very first link in article body goes to a very ctrl-Fable PDF. If you are actually interested, in less than a minute worth of effort you'd find those pieces of info on pages 53 and 82.
everdrive 3y ago
In previous cases, the questions regarding rape have been phrased to be incredibly broad, to the point of straining credulity. I can't say where these particular statistics have come from, but prior statistical nonsense here has poisoned the well for me.
- treis 3y ago
  Question was: >Have you ever been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when you did not want to?
- throwaway290 3y ago
  > the questions regarding rape have been phrased to be incredibly broad If forced sexual intercourse does not fit your definition of rape, perhaps that's what's being too narrow?
  - 3y ago

chris123 3y ago

[flagged]

lakeshastina 3y ago

Those years during high school are a very challenging time in one’s life, when we develop into adults. The fundamental question of “Who am I? Where do I fit into society?” are subconsciously trying to get answered. On the other side, in the west, we have a very body-centered idea of self-worth, exaggerated by TV, music and social media. Fundamentally, I do not see this situation getting any better because of how society is wired right now. There are more dramatical changes needed than what we are perhaps capable of. 3 main changes that might help come to mind - 1. We are in an obesity epidemic. Acknowledge this, make changes in the eating and exercise habits, feed children less sugar, especially what’s provided at school during lunch. 2. Due to most kids being overweight, find ways to acknowledge their other talents. Encourage high school kids to find paid work. Help them derive self-worth from other avenues. 3. Help them learn to work their minds. It does not need to be esoteric eastern meditation techniques but learning to sit still for 20 mins a day and watch the breath, and one more time for 5 mins or so before sleep, will have tremendous transference to the rest of one’s life.

scotty79 3y ago
> Fundamentally, I do not see this situation getting any better because of how society is wired right now. It think tight regulation of advertisement industry could help. They really have all the incentive to make people feel worse. It directly translates to their income. There should be pre-publishing check on every advert. Like a focus group paid for by advertiser, but organized by government body. If it makes people feel worse after watching it it shouldn't be allowed to publish. Advertisement is not a free speech.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- krapp 3y ago
  >Advertisement is not a free speech. Yes it obviously is. Even advertisements that make people feel bad are free speech.
  - 3y ago

newsclues 3y ago

[flagged]

scotty79 3y ago
Any trans people are very rare. It's highly unlikely they influence any general statistics.

fuzzybiscuit 3y ago

[flagged]

cubefox 3y ago

There is an interesting hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt on this topic. "Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here’s the Evidence." https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill...

curious-im 3y ago

Report about girls experiencing sadness and violence and comment section here putting the blame on girls themself, facebook, results being affected by wokeness and so on. Kinda ironic There is much more external reasons for young american females to feel sad right now. Culture wars, politicians becoming extremists, legislations and many other factors. I think people in general feel much less save right now, not only teen girls

guyomes 3y ago
> There is much more external reasons for young american females to feel sad right now. Fully agree. A sci-fi novel from Robert Heinlein [0] was describing end of life as a discontinuity. In this sense, with the very rapid changes of society that we are currently experiencing, we could say that the society is dying to let place to a new society. As examples of rapid changes, we have social network, climat change, artificial intelligence to cite a few. From a child point of view it could be harder to project themself in a society changing rapidly. How do you gain recognition for you and your creations using new medias? How do you reach confort and enjoy leisures without causing pollution? Which skills should you learn that won't become obsolete with AI? It is inevitable that societies change: our current society is very different from the society during middle-age for instance. Yet it is easier to adapt when the changes are slow and continuous than when they are sudden and discontinuous. In the first case, you can learn from your parents and other adults. In the second case, you are on your own. In the history of most countries, recovering from a revolution could take decades. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-Line

IceHegel 3y ago

Weak parents who rather than create order in their house, let things take their course - which mostly means tiktok and instagram.

l5870uoo9y 3y ago

This article is covering US teen girls but the negative pattern is the same in Denmark and likely other European countries. Jonanthan Haidt wrote an article on the subject: https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-ill....

kmarc 3y ago

Look around you and observe your friends, family, colleagues, or a significant other, but really: any adults. This is not only affecting "teen girls", and certainly not only US people. We need more research on this without "teen girls" in the clickbait titles. This affects everyone. It affected the person of my romantic interest and I had to break up at the end. This affects 30+ year old men too. Don't dismiss it. Besides research we need solutions. We need advice on how to approach this topic. We need to find a way to be able to help those who want it.

TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
> This affects 30+ year old men too. Don't dismiss it. Society does not care about male problems. Let's just label them incels or terrorists and be done with it. Also at the same time let's wonder why Andrew Tate and similar are easily getting such a huge following.
- 226_ebro_treaty 3y ago
  Most problems people have after 25 or so are directly related to income, which would upset rich people's pockets, so no, they literally do not matter.
- dotandgtfo 3y ago
  Hot take, I know, and sorry in advance. But I'll go so far as to say that what you're saying here is in part caused by technology, the internet and social media. Most reasonable people, and reasonable feminists (which most feminists I've met are) do sympathise with men and their issues as well. I think social media amplifies the extreme minorities voices that state that they don't care about male problems, that men are incels and far-right terrorists and other unsavory takes. I don't think most people label males as such. But I do think social media is extremely good at bringing up these takes - because they create a lot of engagement (particularly from the opposing side). I think social media affects 30 year old males in the exact same way as teenage girls get body image problems from looking at "perfect" lives on Instagram. Men get served toxic and outrage based content that shows the extreme outliers - multiple times a week, for multiple years in a row. I think most people are reasonable. I think most people care about male problems. I think a minority label men as incels or terrorists. I think the internet exaggerates this position greatly, and it's at least partly overblown.

majikaja 3y ago

It will be interesting to see what happens when Elon turns Twitter into a payment platform. It's already basically a platform here in Japan for women to advertise their services and arrange encounters with older men... just need to use one's imagination. All that's left is to monetize the depressed crazies that make up the remainder of the userbase.

rrgok 3y ago

We have rules and regulation on what we can physically eat (eg. most psychedelics drugs are illegal, maybe rightly so, I'm not contesting the validity of that, but just stating they exists) so why don't we have rules for mental food? It baffles me that I cannot eat some spices from Asia just because for most local people is kinda indigestible or not good, basically destroying the market for that kind of spice. Yet, we can allow big corps to produce shitty social media apps without any rules. There should be an FDA for mental things.

dqft 3y ago
Mental spice ministry you say..
krapp 3y ago
>Yet, we can allow big corps to produce shitty social media apps without any rules. They do have rules. They publish the rules. You have to agree to the rules to get an account. On top of that, they're bound by numerous laws and regulations.

mikae1 3y ago

“Sad by design” as Geert Lovink puts it. https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745339344/sad-by-design/ https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745339344/sad-by-design/ https://thinkbelt.org/shows/interstitial/sad-by-design-geert-lovink https://thinkbelt.org/shows/interstitial/sad-by-design-geert... https://youtu.be/7LDb21An-Ag https://youtu.be/7LDb21An-Ag

tomohawk 3y ago

The newest member of the US Supreme Court was asked to define what a woman was. She refused. We have a culture where people either don't know what a woman is or are too intimidated to talk about it. Is this what girls have to look forward to? I'd be depressed, too.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
It's the same definition as what a Celt is: someone who honestly identifies as one. In the past, we thought both were more exact (mostly because gender was a synonym for "sex" aka "allosome configuration" aka "XX haver").

ForestCritter 3y ago

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