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It seems like this is a symptom of a larger problem, rates of anxiety and depression have been going up in recent years in pretty much every facet. I always hea

It seems like this is a symptom of a larger problem, rates of anxiety and depression have been going up in recent years in pretty much every facet. I always hear that social media is to blame, but I wonder if that is really the case? I feel like something else is going on, maybe it's just a totality of smaller issues rather than one big problem.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
Social media does sound like a decent theory though. To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. What did change is relative access to information, which exacerbated and maybe even hastened some trends. The small factors were always there, but were not as commonly seen for a variety of reasons ( social stigma, exposure to media, 'toughen up' message from society being but a few examples off the top of my ehad ). And even now, we only are aware of it as a potential trend due to social media exposure ( in this case, HN ). Would we be as aware of it even 10 years ago?
- cornercasechase 3y ago
  > To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. Wealth inequality has an increased a lot in the last four decades. I’d start there when looking for a source for mental health issues. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/screen-shot-2020-01-08-at-5-06-47-pm/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    Money does buy certain level of comfort ( and help if needed ) so I am more than willing to consider it as a factor, but I am not sure it is THE answer to the source of mental health issues. Lack thereof may make things worse, but I am not sure it is the core issue. FWIW, I may well be wrong, but I don't think it is fair to assume it is X, when you see same health issues pop up in otherwise wealthy environments. Most interesting example of that being 'affluenza'.
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  > To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. Inside the US, this sounds wrong both anecdotally and from the data. I'd argue the cost of "living" has gone up quite substantially. Since 1980 rent has risen 140% and incomes 20%[0]. Anecdotally, in the 1970s it was entirely possible to live in an acceptable city or suburb on part-time work, and you could have your own apartment on minimum wage. You might not have nice things but I know many people who spent their 20s very comfortably like this not worrying about how to afford living. (having a family on this budget was not feasible, but that's another thing) Conversely today I don't know anyone making less than less than 40k/yr who is not constantly stressing about food costs and how they'll make rent. [0] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/ https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/
abhayhegde 3y ago
I definitely think social media has a large share in driving down the mental health of the majority of users. No two lives are comparable, yet it induces people to compare their lives to someone else's often resulting in an unreasonable amount of envy, jealousy, and a general dissatisfaction of their lives. People pick their best moments while sharing, but it's never the true picture. It sets unrealistic expectations.
- salawat 3y ago
  So what are you blaming exactly? The fact that social media has us all connected and capable of measuring relative to others? Or the fact it's weaponized by an entire industry of "influencers" subsidized by actors just trying to maximize the consumption factor of economic activity? Or the fact that the system is fundamentally governed by network effect induced power laws, leading to massive inequality, that can end up being a stressor on average? Just trying to tease out the right thread here, is all. Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently bad. It's the end that it is applied to that is.
  - nrb 3y ago
    > Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently bad. I’m not so sure this is the case. Seems like we are testing the limits of our social programming when exposed to networks _vastly_ beyond our capabilities historically, and we’re seeing the various ways that our social behaviors break down naturally. That there is a profit motive in encouraging and accelerating this breakdown might be orthogonal to the idea that it isn’t meant to exist at this scale in the first place.
nvahalik 3y ago
[flagged]
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Starting with the boomers, children have been raised to think they are the most important people in the household. No wonder, 3 generations later, grown children are a bit self-focused.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
I’ve worked with groups of juniors and college students every year for a while now. I agree that something is going on, but I don’t think there is a single explanation. Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities. The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace. In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter) I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.
- cornercasechase 3y ago
  I think being angry is a natural and healthy response to the current economic reality. The juniors you’re working with have it right. If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. Hopefully we’ve reached a timeline where we no longer acquiesce to rampant inequality.
  - refurb 3y ago
    If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. You realized CEO's make that much money after a long career where they were busting their asses as juniors. You basically made the same argument the grandparent is criticizing.
huijzer 3y ago
According to Tim Urban’s latest book "What’s our problem?", modern Western society also has other problems such as an increase in groupthink, which is for example visible in the aggressiveness of current US politics. Overall, it’s difficult to have much hope for the future. We’re in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between the West and, I guess, East. That’s wildly different than 2008 when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and taking some more democratic stances. What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware and software. Let’s hope those things will continue improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.
jrochkind1 3y ago
In a recent Ezra Klein show interview [1] with social scientist Jean Twenge on the documented rise in teenage depression, Twenge found it correlated with a rise in social media use, but also found that increasing social media use was correlated with fewer hours of in-person social interaction among teens than previous. While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite likely lead to lower in-person socialization (I do think it's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about this a bit). To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other parts of the social/political/economic system. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jean-twenge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  It's everything. Work from home. Self-check-out at the grocery store. Delivery of everything. Telemedicine. Cars instead of walkable neighborhoods or mass transit (or even bicycles). The decline of church attendance. I can't think of one social trend pushing us toward more face-to-face interactions. If it's spanning this many different trends, I think there ought to be some larger thing driving it, but I can't put my finger on what it is.
  - jrochkind1 3y ago
    Agreed with all of your examples. I mean, to me, the larger thing is probably "capitalism", in which increasing amounts of social life are turned into things that can produce profit for a business. Our particular capitalism built on racism doesn't help either, with it's legacy of "we don't want public amenities because we don't want to fund them for THOSE people" and "we're scared to go outside because a lot of people have a lot of reason to wish us harm." (that we built for cars instead of walkable cities or public transit actually has a LOT to do with racism) But people don't love talking about this here. Or rather, they do and they don't. :) In the general socciety, decline of social interaction has probably been a topic of discussion since Robert Putman's 2000 book "Bowling Alone". http://bowlingalone.com/ http://bowlingalone.com/
bendango 3y ago
It’s not social media, it’s social awareness of the exploitation of youth to prop up elders who contribute nothing but marching orders that, conveniently, prop up elder investments. It’s being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst ecological mess any dying generation has left behind. It’s being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare… etc It’s teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a bunch of leches. And, the worst part, it’s the apathetic public following orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all the white collar workers who can’t provide anything real for themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that? This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.
mordae 3y ago
Perhaps capitalism? The days of providing new products to the eager market are gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy (communications, housing, transportation, food).
DrThunder 3y ago
It's being coddled in a sense. You have an entire generation that had very little required of them. Many of them never heard the word no and were just given what they wanted. Additionally, k12 schools told them that any slight or disagreement put towards them was bullying and unacceptable. No one should have to hear opinions they don't agree with. Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock. As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and depressing.
- doubled112 3y ago
  Related, but not completely this topic, and a sample size of two warning! I have a couple of boys, 5 and 8. They have tablets and computers, and they love them. Some days we don't use them, some days they spend far too much time on them. Life goes on, we do what we can. I played an entire metric crap ton of video games at those ages, and I turned out okay, I think. I keep hearing "screen time." That is the enemy. I'm not so sure it's just the screens. Of course it's not playing outside in a field, but you can't let them wander too far, somebody will call the cops. A lot of the modern stuff (TV shows, movies, games) seems to overstimulate them way quicker compared to something like playing a day's worth of Super Mario World. Like it was designed to lure them in and enrage them or something. I'm imagining social media is the same, but we're not there yet. I don't do a lot of social media myself, so hopefully they will see the example.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

Social media does sound like a decent theory though. To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. What did change is relative access to information, which exacerbated and maybe even hastened some trends. The small factors were always there, but were not as commonly seen for a variety of reasons ( social stigma, exposure to media, 'toughen up' message from society being but a few examples off the top of my ehad ). And even now, we only are aware of it as a potential trend due to social media exposure ( in this case, HN ). Would we be as aware of it even 10 years ago?

cornercasechase 3y ago
> To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. Wealth inequality has an increased a lot in the last four decades. I’d start there when looking for a source for mental health issues. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/screen-shot-2020-01-08-at-5-06-47-pm/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  Money does buy certain level of comfort ( and help if needed ) so I am more than willing to consider it as a factor, but I am not sure it is THE answer to the source of mental health issues. Lack thereof may make things worse, but I am not sure it is the core issue. FWIW, I may well be wrong, but I don't think it is fair to assume it is X, when you see same health issues pop up in otherwise wealthy environments. Most interesting example of that being 'affluenza'.
Hermitian909 3y ago
> To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. Inside the US, this sounds wrong both anecdotally and from the data. I'd argue the cost of "living" has gone up quite substantially. Since 1980 rent has risen 140% and incomes 20%[0]. Anecdotally, in the 1970s it was entirely possible to live in an acceptable city or suburb on part-time work, and you could have your own apartment on minimum wage. You might not have nice things but I know many people who spent their 20s very comfortably like this not worrying about how to afford living. (having a family on this budget was not feasible, but that's another thing) Conversely today I don't know anyone making less than less than 40k/yr who is not constantly stressing about food costs and how they'll make rent. [0] https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/ https://www.realestatewitch.com/rent-to-income-ratio-2022/

abhayhegde 3y ago

I definitely think social media has a large share in driving down the mental health of the majority of users. No two lives are comparable, yet it induces people to compare their lives to someone else's often resulting in an unreasonable amount of envy, jealousy, and a general dissatisfaction of their lives. People pick their best moments while sharing, but it's never the true picture. It sets unrealistic expectations.

salawat 3y ago
So what are you blaming exactly? The fact that social media has us all connected and capable of measuring relative to others? Or the fact it's weaponized by an entire industry of "influencers" subsidized by actors just trying to maximize the consumption factor of economic activity? Or the fact that the system is fundamentally governed by network effect induced power laws, leading to massive inequality, that can end up being a stressor on average? Just trying to tease out the right thread here, is all. Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently bad. It's the end that it is applied to that is.
- nrb 3y ago
  > Something that lets us all communicate isn't inherently bad. I’m not so sure this is the case. Seems like we are testing the limits of our social programming when exposed to networks _vastly_ beyond our capabilities historically, and we’re seeing the various ways that our social behaviors break down naturally. That there is a profit motive in encouraging and accelerating this breakdown might be orthogonal to the idea that it isn’t meant to exist at this scale in the first place.

nvahalik 3y ago

[flagged]

readthenotes1 3y ago
Starting with the boomers, children have been raised to think they are the most important people in the household. No wonder, 3 generations later, grown children are a bit self-focused.

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

I’ve worked with groups of juniors and college students every year for a while now. I agree that something is going on, but I don’t think there is a single explanation. Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities. The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace. In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter) I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.

cornercasechase 3y ago
I think being angry is a natural and healthy response to the current economic reality. The juniors you’re working with have it right. If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. Hopefully we’ve reached a timeline where we no longer acquiesce to rampant inequality.
- refurb 3y ago
  If the CEO is going to make 100X as much as me, I’m going to do my best to work 100X less than they do. You realized CEO's make that much money after a long career where they were busting their asses as juniors. You basically made the same argument the grandparent is criticizing.

huijzer 3y ago

According to Tim Urban’s latest book "What’s our problem?", modern Western society also has other problems such as an increase in groupthink, which is for example visible in the aggressiveness of current US politics. Overall, it’s difficult to have much hope for the future. We’re in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between the West and, I guess, East. That’s wildly different than 2008 when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and taking some more democratic stances. What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware and software. Let’s hope those things will continue improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.

jrochkind1 3y ago

In a recent Ezra Klein show interview [1] with social scientist Jean Twenge on the documented rise in teenage depression, Twenge found it correlated with a rise in social media use, but also found that increasing social media use was correlated with fewer hours of in-person social interaction among teens than previous. While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite likely lead to lower in-person socialization (I do think it's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about this a bit). To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other parts of the social/political/economic system. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jean-twenge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
It's everything. Work from home. Self-check-out at the grocery store. Delivery of everything. Telemedicine. Cars instead of walkable neighborhoods or mass transit (or even bicycles). The decline of church attendance. I can't think of one social trend pushing us toward more face-to-face interactions. If it's spanning this many different trends, I think there ought to be some larger thing driving it, but I can't put my finger on what it is.
- jrochkind1 3y ago
  Agreed with all of your examples. I mean, to me, the larger thing is probably "capitalism", in which increasing amounts of social life are turned into things that can produce profit for a business. Our particular capitalism built on racism doesn't help either, with it's legacy of "we don't want public amenities because we don't want to fund them for THOSE people" and "we're scared to go outside because a lot of people have a lot of reason to wish us harm." (that we built for cars instead of walkable cities or public transit actually has a LOT to do with racism) But people don't love talking about this here. Or rather, they do and they don't. :) In the general socciety, decline of social interaction has probably been a topic of discussion since Robert Putman's 2000 book "Bowling Alone". http://bowlingalone.com/ http://bowlingalone.com/

bendango 3y ago

It’s not social media, it’s social awareness of the exploitation of youth to prop up elders who contribute nothing but marching orders that, conveniently, prop up elder investments. It’s being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst ecological mess any dying generation has left behind. It’s being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare… etc It’s teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a bunch of leches. And, the worst part, it’s the apathetic public following orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all the white collar workers who can’t provide anything real for themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that? This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.

mordae 3y ago

Perhaps capitalism? The days of providing new products to the eager market are gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy (communications, housing, transportation, food).

DrThunder 3y ago

It's being coddled in a sense. You have an entire generation that had very little required of them. Many of them never heard the word no and were just given what they wanted. Additionally, k12 schools told them that any slight or disagreement put towards them was bullying and unacceptable. No one should have to hear opinions they don't agree with. Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock. As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and depressing.

doubled112 3y ago
Related, but not completely this topic, and a sample size of two warning! I have a couple of boys, 5 and 8. They have tablets and computers, and they love them. Some days we don't use them, some days they spend far too much time on them. Life goes on, we do what we can. I played an entire metric crap ton of video games at those ages, and I turned out okay, I think. I keep hearing "screen time." That is the enemy. I'm not so sure it's just the screens. Of course it's not playing outside in a field, but you can't let them wander too far, somebody will call the cops. A lot of the modern stuff (TV shows, movies, games) seems to overstimulate them way quicker compared to something like playing a day's worth of Super Mario World. Like it was designed to lure them in and enrage them or something. I'm imagining social media is the same, but we're not there yet. I don't do a lot of social media myself, so hopefully they will see the example.