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A Zoomer explains her generation's malaise to older generations

• foxyv 3y ago
  I can narrow it down to three critical problems with our society. 1. Car dependent cities. 2. Housing crisis 3. Wage suppression Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. They don't make enough money to survive, much less thrive. I know a lot of GenZ people living in rotting camper trailers, sheds, tents, and cars. Many of my millennial friends are going through the same thing. They have no savings, no house, and they could never afford to start a family. A child is a ruinous event instead of joyous. There is no safety net and the tight rope is made of silly string. But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other.
  • stcredzero 3y ago
    But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other. On top of the physical impoverishment, young people are being starved of meaning and face to face social interaction. Online "communities" are not real communities. Hell, many face to face ones aren't either, at this point. Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject.
    • foxyv 3y ago
      > Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject. Agreed, but what community do they have as an alternative? Especially after they leave school.
  • toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Conversely, here is an example of the concerns of older generations that just happened to strangely present itself in my Google News feed today. https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-in-the-villages/ https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://www.thevillages.com/ https://www.thevillages.com/
    • switchbak 3y ago
      But be fair, he couldn't secure tee time until 4pm! The injustice!
      • mnky9800n 3y ago
        I cried tears for him.
    • mikestew 3y ago
      The concerns of older generations that live in The Villages. That's bordering on finding someone that complained about the quality of the wine served at the country club, and then using that as your basis of what "older generations" are concerned about.
      • HDThoreaun 3y ago
        The villages is actually pretty affordable. If you have a nice house, even in a low to medium cost of lviign area you can sell it and buy a place in the villages with the proceeds. It's not like south florida where everything is a million plus. The villages was specifically put inland and designed to be affordable for blue collar workers that have been working for 45 years. Excluding children allows the government to save a bunch of money on schooling and the like.
    • jedberg 3y ago
      That post is satire, right? It has to be.
  • KittenInABox 3y ago
    > there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. I think it's way more than car dependent infrastructure. It's also the pressures of monetizing everything including social spaces. The only place I know in my town where you will be unharassed for hanging out in the open free of charge for hours out of the weather is the library. The mall will encourage you and your group to leave with security. The coffee shops and lounges require purchases of drink. Even my local makerspace requires at least one purchase to hang out in their scheduled "free" hangout meetups.
    • gen220 3y ago
      I think if we fixed the housing crisis and wage suppression, requiring nominal purchases wouldn't be such a significant barrier. Nominal fees are like congestion pricing. If you don't have them, the space loses its ability to fulfill its original purpose.
      • KittenInABox 3y ago
        I strongly disagree with this for children & community buildings. Children shouldn't be subject to congestion pricing. Teenagers should be free to rove a mall and be harmlessly loud and messy without being pressured to buy something-- chances are they will buy something eventually but it shouldn't be a requirement just to participate in community. I also wish my local makerspace didn't require a purchase. They should be funded by a government grant or wealthy donor such that impoverished people can learn skills and find community as equally as those with the spending money to chuck 5$ on a doodaad they'll never use.
  • xwdv 3y ago
    It gets worse: in a society where children are a luxury requiring careful investment and sacrifice to conceive, child abuse will be far more rampant, as there will be growing pressure from parents to make their children some sort of positive ROI, otherwise why even bother having them?
  • mixdup 3y ago
    Did you actually read the article? The three things you cite were literally never mentioned. We've been heavily car dependent since the 50s. Most of the places teens have been hanging out for the past 40 years are built around cars--malls, theaters, etc--you drive to all of them Teens are not sitting around sulking because they can't ride the train somewhere. They're all glued to their phones doomscrolling until they can't take it anymore
    • mintplant 3y ago
      foxyv's comment is much closer to how my friends feel about the world than the convenient list of conservative talking points presented in the article.
      • dingnuts 3y ago
        Jon Haidt is a conservative now?? good lord, if that is what you think you must be so far left that anybody to the right of Stalin is a Republican. Jon Haidt is about as even-tempered and desiring of reconciliation as anybody out there. We could all stand to be a little more like him. Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence. I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things: https://civilpolitics.org https://civilpolitics.org If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
        • vore 3y ago
          Are these not literally a laundry list of conservative talking points? And, by the way, you can be conservative without being MAGA. Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.” Community — “I have enough friends online.” Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.” Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.” Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.” Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”
  • smt88 3y ago
    Your list is three angles of the same problem, which is financial insecurity. I'd say it's actually just two things: financial insecurity and climate change. Both feel hopeless and both make them feel like there is no future no matter what they do.
    • hotpotamus 3y ago
      As a millennial, I'm pretty sure I've only seen those problems get worse; I wonder if it feels like there is no hope because there is in fact no hope.
      • foxyv 3y ago
        I think it's important that we all identify these issues so that, when we have the power to enact change, that we do so. Eventually Millennials will be in the driver seat. Same as the Baby Boomers and eventually Generation Z after us. Just because there is no hope now, doesn't mean an opportunity won't eventually fall into our laps. There is already a lot of change underway in our cities to address these issues because they MUST address them to survive. It will happen, hopefully in time for our children to experience a better society than we did.
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      >financial insecurity I think financial expectations are warped, too. Look at the viral TikTok video from a few weeks ago, where a recent marketing graduate was wondering why she wasn't making $100k right out of school. Or I recently saw a Twitter discussion where someone said, "Sure you can raise a family on a $100k, but you'll have to do it in 1000sqft. Who wants to do that?". We, I am, and I'm as happy as I've ever been. Financial inequality has completely skewed what is seen as "normal". We need to fix both that perception, and the actual inequality.
      • smt88 3y ago
        It's perfectly realistic to want more than 1,000 sqft to raise a family because we live in a country where all previous living generations were able to do that for far less than $100k. It's not the absolute quality of life that's infuriating. It's seeing how previous generations plundered the country and then pulled up the drawbridge behind them.
  • Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
    And the three problems are all each exacerbated by the other two. For fuck's sake, there's a complex near me [0] that has STUDIO apartments that start at $1,690. This is a suburb. It's not even close to anything. Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away. Granted, our minimum wage is somewhat high at $15.45/hr. But even at that rate, it would take 110 hours of pretax wages to pay for it. Post-tax, it'd be at least 75% of your monthly pay. [0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/EYCy2kvXsRYCjz4J7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/EYCy2kvXsRYCjz4J7
    • hondo77 3y ago
      > Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away. The horror.
      • jonwest 3y ago
        You ever walked a mile carrying two armfuls of groceries? That’s brutal without a car, and without public transit nearby, that makes it incredibly inconvenient and difficult to have food in the fridge. Get outta here with your feigned sarcasm, it’s a legitimate problem.
        • hondo77 3y ago
          Yes, I have. That's why I switched over to a foldable shopping cart. Cutting-edge 20th century technology for today's modern problems.
        • SirMaster 3y ago
          Grocery stores? I thought all the young people are doing things like DoorDash, Hello Fresh or Amazon Fresh etc. Not saying they should be doing that so much, but seems like they aren’t interested in shopping at a Grocery store.
          • tyg13 3y ago
            The smart and motivated ones will try to get to the grocery store. Unfortunately, for most, those services do so much more harm than good. What makes sense for a wealthy professional to pay for the convenience of food or grocery delivery ends up being a small fortune for a lot of young people who can't afford a car to go to the grocery store. It's a clear short- vs long-term thinking issue, but the reality is most young people are living with so little hope for the future that denying immediate pleasures in search of a future payoff seems naive and pointless.
  • madengr 3y ago
    [dead]
  • thepasswordis 3y ago
    >1. Car dependent cities. Do you think that cities used to be less "car dependent"? What point in American history are you imagining where people weren't taking cars around? You could look back to maybe the early 20th century, but what that meant is that you had to live right next to the factory where you worked, which was obviously terrible. Cars meant that you could have separate areas for living and working, and this was considered a good thing. edit: people keep making the same point, so I'll reply to all of you at once: do you think you could find a single person on any public transportation anywhere in America who wouldn't take a free, brand new Tesla model X with free charging and a free place to park it over riding the bus? Or if they had that brand new Tesla: would any of them trade it straight across for a free lifetime bus pass? Of course not. Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way. The reason people take public transportation is because they can't afford a car, and yes owning a house with a garage is part of affording the car.
    • lainga 3y ago
      The 1920s?
      • thepasswordis 3y ago
        The cities of the 1920s where absolutely horrific places to live. They were filthy and polluted. People fled them to the suburbs for a reason: because they were terrible.
        • malcolmgreaves 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • thepasswordis 3y ago
            This is…factually incorrect, and honestly insulting. No I mean actual measurable particulate counts in the air around factories, and the industrial vehicles moving goods in and out of those factories. When people talk about “environmental racism”, that is: making poor people live in the worst parts of town, they’re talking about the environmental aspects of those parts of town.
  • emmet 3y ago
    100% correct here. Young people have been robbed of public space, and her solution to them finding even a facsimile of one to replace it is to... rob them of that too.
    • thepasswordis 3y ago
      >Young people have been robbed of public space What do you mean "robbed of public space"? What public space was taken away? The only public space which seems inaccessible to me that used to be is: parks and sidewalks, both of which have become open air drug markets/tent cities. The city where I live has no parks I am comfortable taking my children to, and we actively avoid walking on the sidewalks because it's dangerous.
      • fzzzy 3y ago
        Didn't you answer your own question？
        • thepasswordis 3y ago
          No? What does turning my public parks into drug dens have to do with car ownership?
          • emmet 3y ago
            my guy you literally brought up the parks problem unprompted so you clearly understand the issue being presented here
            • thepasswordis 3y ago
              No I absolutely do not see a link between turning parks into fentanyl use zones and cars. I live in a super walkable city with two grocery stores and a million restaurants and coffee shops within walking distance. Many many people don’t own cars here. The parks are unusable and the sidewalks are campgrounds for drug addicts. What is the link to cars here?
  • morkalork 3y ago
    Beyond wage suppression, it feels like there isn't competition any more. Instead of one company undercutting another to offer a better deal, both or all just raise prices for maximum revenue extraction. For example telecom companies and cell phone plans in Canada. They know its an essential service and charge exhorbently for access, because what are you going to do, not have a cellphone? If every "mandatory for living" service (housing, medical, food, utilities, telecom,...) does that, what's left?
    • emmanuel_1234 3y ago
      I feel Canadians get particularly shafted: lower wage, higher cost of life on essentials, stupid high rent in first tier city (where the jobs are!). On the wages only, I wonder what justifies that Canadians make so little in comparison to their American peers living just an hour away across the border. Taxes alone don't seem enough to justify that gap. My take is that Canadians just... accepted it.
    • foxyv 3y ago
      Monopolies and Cartels are definitely a huge contributor to wage suppression and increased cost of living.
  • lettergram 3y ago
    > 1. Car dependent cities. > 2. Housing crisis Ugh… you can improve the situation by spreading out. Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. Using cars enables cheaper housing. If you want cheaper cars and transportation in general, it’s cheaper energy & cheaper vehicles. Both require less regulation. You can’t save in a city, where your paying a landlord and the wages are perfectly at market equilibrium. You can only get ahead by moving out, living cheaper and making decent pay. It’s exactly what the older generations realized.
    • Arelius 3y ago
      We've already spread out a lot. Should young people be living acres away from the next house and an hours drive from their friends? I'm not sure that'll solve loneliness and disconnection. Not to mention that these days, even doing that won't save you much, or in some cases, post pandemic you'll be paying a premium.
    • throwawayqqq11 3y ago
      Total BS. Cars and their supporting infra take up space. Less regulations will never get rid of increased cost of individual transportation. Public transportion is the only way to push energy demand significantly. Advising your boomer strategy "to just save" in the current era is so ignorant. This ignorance combined with the ever prospect of passive growth is imo the reason why rent extracts much more out of a life since the golden 50s.
    • sanderjd 3y ago
      > Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. This could not possibly be more the opposite of the case.
    • foxyv 3y ago
      You may want to consider why cities are so unaffordable right now. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-reason-freeway-building-hollowed-out-americas-cities https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-rea...
  • itsoktocry 3y ago
    >Car dependent cities. This doesn't make sense to me. Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. The current generations are choosing to not go anywhere because they believe they can get the experience by phone. I think the assumption that "if they could get there, they would" is incorrect; they don't want to.
    • marssaxman 3y ago
      > Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. Only a couple of them! You are aware that the mass adoption of cars was a mid-20th-century phenomenon, yes? US cities were radically reshaped around interstate highways during the '50s and '60s. This car-dependence is quite a recent thing in the human experience.
    • foxyv 3y ago
      > Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. How much more prosperous would our nation be if we had not invested such a significant amount of our time and wealth into cars? We could have built colonies on the Moon with the amount we spent on building more lanes for people to be stuck in traffic.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • next_xibalba 3y ago
    When, to your estimation, did cities become “car dependent”? Most cities have been car centric since long before Gen Z. Real wage growth has been stalled out since the 1970s, several generations before Gen Z.
    • sanderjd 3y ago
      By my estimation, the problems highlighted by the comment you replied to indeed started around the 70s. I think what happened recently is that the internet and social media came along as the perfect, but also terrible, solution to those problems. I think the couple generations in between experienced the problems more as boredom and ennui. Indeed, "gen x" is pretty famous for this, and I think "millenials" are just a mish-mash of the late stage of "gen x" and the early stage of the "zoomer" generations.
    • foxyv 3y ago
      I would estimate that it started with Brown v. Board of Education in the mid 1950s. As racial integration started we saw "White Flight" from city centers. Naturally, those people exiting the cities wanted a way to enter the cities for jobs, education, entertainment, etc... So then we saw the construction of Urban Freeways in the 60s and 70s. Before then, cars were unaffordable for almost everyone. It was kind of like owning an airplane nowadays. It was doable, but most didn't bother unless they really needed one since there were more affordable alternatives and you could walk everywhere you needed to go anyways. Since then, things have only gotten worse as we slowly make cars the only viable method of transportation through land use requirements and neglected infrastructure.
  • lupyro 3y ago
    I'm a millenial myself, and not a parent so parents please correct me. 4. Modern parenting is torture for children. Up until the teenage years kids need to feel useful. They need to be able to help fix things, etc. They need to get into a little bit of trouble and get dinged up a bit. Teenagers need a lot more freedom. Every ounce of their body is pushing them to distance themselves from their family, have sex and take risks. Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad. As the parent points out, living in a car dependent city with nowhere to go and no way to get there leaves you no choice but to stay home. Staying home means tv, internet and video games. Parents are out on a holy war against that as well. Are you suffocating yet? Now remember that in addition to everything above your texts, location, browsing history, grades, etc. are all being tracked and reported for your parents to further control you. Could you imagine if you were treated like this as an adult. You'd have a civil war. Let them fuck. Let them work. Let them do drugs. Let them make mistakes for christ sake. All of these things have consequences and are worth keeping in mind. But coddling them until 18 and expecting them to be functional is like raising an elephant from birth isolated until adulthood then releasing them to the african savannah. They'll be dead before sunset.
    • chlodwig 3y ago
      Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad. My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.
  • ctoth 3y ago
    Remarkably, these issues you've articulated perfectly-capture the progressive bugbear zeitgeist and yet do not seem to have much (if any) support in the original article. Is it possible it actually might be the phones somehow as she argues?
    • sanderjd 3y ago
      The comment you replied to agrees that it's the phones (well, the social media accessed by the phones)... But then it asks, why? It's not orthogonal, it's additive. And I might suggest that the author of the essay very likely hasn't considered this next level deeper, because "this is water".
    • foxyv 3y ago
      If you think car dependency is an imaginary problem (bugbear), I would invite you to walk or ride a bicycle more. You may find that the bugbear is just a bear. As for housing affordability and wage suppression, these are just established facts. One visit to Zillow to look at a place you used to live is enough. My old apartment that cost $800/month is currently going for $2400/month 8 years later. Minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009 and is currently $7.24/hour.
  • nunez 3y ago
    > Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. This is a big one IMO. We moved to a Northern NJ suburb in the late-90s. However, NYC Metro suburbs are very different from the "suburbs" that are a dime a dozen here in Texas. The town was small --- about a mile in square area. You could walk pretty much everywhere within it, even though some points were far. Almost every street had a sidewalk that was maintained by the city. Since the city followed a grid system, routes from one persons house to another could be done on foot. I spent a lot of time walking in my teens because of this, though not being allowed to have a car played a big part in that. (Walking a lot comes naturally to me because of this; in fact, a big reason why I hated living in these suburbs was because of how difficult it was to walk somewhere interesting instead of "mandatory walking" around a fake pond.) By comparison, suburbs in Texas (or at least here in Houston, and definitely in Dallas) are gigantic. You could walk for miles before you hit literally anything. The nearest business in the suburb we lived in when we moved here was 1.5 miles away on foot. The first 0.5 mile within the neighborhood was fine since the neighborhood had nicely curated sidewalks. Once you left the neighborhood though, you were walking on the 45mph-rated streets that people definitely drive 15+ over on (usually on their phones, since we're on the subject). None of these neighborhoods have a grid system, so going from one house to another within the neighborhood could take a shocking amount of time despite being a short distance away. This design is done on purpose to "increase safety," which is at best farcical considering how unbelievably spread out these communities are and how distant they are from anything. I hope the next generation of parents opt for smaller, more walkable towns with smaller houses and proper city centers instead of gigantic, cavernous and mostly empty sets of endless houses. I think this can be done while also remaining affordable, but we, collectively, have to want it. Otherwise, yeah, the screens will "win" because the Internet is cheap, immediate and has basically anything you can think of.
  • lamontcg 3y ago
    Seems like the problems are more: 1. Phones and social media 2. Anomie
• pauldenton 3y ago
  It's more like certain sectors have seen growth, others are so regulated that not many people aspire to work in them. How many Smart kids enroll to be Nuclear Engineers instead of Computer Science, Finance or Business? How many rocket Engineer jobs are out there besides at NASA or Space X? Things that capture imagination and could be dream jobs just aren't hiring, aren't building or aren't paying
  • mostlysimilar 3y ago
    > others are so regulated that not many people aspire to work in them Can you talk more about this and cite some sources?
    • adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      I know a few people who got out of aero/defense related jobs because they were sick of spending most of a career in meetings petitioning to use Vishay Resistor B instead the Murata Resistor A that was in the certified design. I imagine medical and nuclear are similar but I don't know anyone who did that. To be clear I'm glad some things are regulated, but being in hundreds upon thousands of those meetings doesn't appeal to me, and it eventually didn't speak to them.
  • downrightmike 3y ago
    That cycles back into companies no longer train anyone. All the training has to be done by the kid schools with ridiculously inflated tuition. And if they don't pick something that will pretty much guarantee a job, like anything other than CS, they get put down by society for not picking a high paying major. The situation is not any of the kid's fault. This perverse system was put in place to wring kids for money, put them in debt, so a few of the oligarchy could feel safe and secure.
  • bigbillheck 3y ago
    The usual kinds of analyses applied to nuclear engineering salaries suggest that there's already more than enough smart people working in that area.
  • 3y ago
• treis 3y ago
  I guess this is just my getting old moment. I watched planes fly into buildings, friends go off to war and die, and had memory of three economic crises by the time I was 24. Which was way better than my parents generation which was (arguably) better than my grandparents generation. This generation is complaining about... having phones? Bah, get off my lawn so I can yell at a cloud.
  • mixdup 3y ago
    I don't know, the 90s were kind of the peak. We've been pretty downhill since And, I will admit a lot of indicators and below the surface trends were in the wrong direction since the 80s at least--the 00s are just went everything finally collapsed
    • mvdtnz 3y ago
      > I don't know, the 90s were kind of the peak. We've been pretty downhill since Are you sure this isn't just nostalgia? There was a lot going wrong in the 90's.
      • mixdup 3y ago
        like the other comment in reply to my parent, the 90s were relatively benign compared to the 60s/70s and the shit that 2001 ushered in Were the 90s perfect? No, of course not. We had a very long economic boom, technology advancing in a very optimistic way (vs. today where technology is actively making things worse) Now, what fed a lot of that caused a lot of our problems today--the 24 hour news cycle spun up, there were troubling economic trends like the fact that wages basically never went up after Reagan so I'm not saying that time has nothing to answer for
        • NoGravitas 3y ago
          The 90s were pretty benign if you didn't live in the wrong place (like Eastern Europe, where life expectancy cratered after the fall of the Soviet Union). I mean, my memories of the 90s were pretty great, but I was a young adult in the US.
• chasebank 3y ago
  Her conclusion was basically: phone is bad. Which has been the same conclusion that older generations have come to as well.
  • glitchc 3y ago
    Agreed. So why do they remain glued to them. Why don't they just turn the phone off and put it down?
    • iris2004 3y ago
      I'll assume for a moment it's not a rhetorical question and state the obvious - phones (i.e. apps) have been designed to be addictive. It's not a failure of willpower but rather it's you losing (predictively) to decades of market research and teams of PhDs employed to exploit your brain. It's asymmetrical warfare. It's like cigarettes of the past except instead of chemists optimising addictive additives it's programmers optimising attention stealing notifications and dark patterns.
      • glitchc 3y ago
        If phones are so addictive, how come I can put mine away? I'm human too, not special. Many things are designed to be addictive: TV, alcohol, sugar and salt are also addictive. Shall we ban them all? We bring the big bad banhammer down whenever someone cannot deal with their addiction. Every ban erodes our freedoms, bit by bit. Why not just go live in China? There the authorities are happy to tell you what you can and cannot do with every aspect of your life.
        • I_Am_Nous 3y ago
          >If phones are so addictive, how come I can put mine away? You are not everybody. There are people more susceptible to addiction than you, and likely people less susceptible to addiction than you as well. Should the Sacklers have been allowed to keep lying about the addictive qualities of Oxycontin despite there being people who "cannot deal with their addiction?"
• recursivedoubts 3y ago
  We are all usurers now. We live in a utopia of usurers, we've forced our children into unforgivable debt to "get a good job" before they have a chance to earn a cent, we've pushed education, housing and now automobiles beyond all reason via debt finance. When they complain we say "Well, you signed the contract" because we've lost all sense of morality in financial and economic matters. We even deny the language necessary to understand their situation to our children: when is the last time the church, let alone an economist, even mentioned the term usury? We need a debt jubilee, as Steve Keen has been saying for a decade now. But we won't, for the same reason he's been ridiculed for a decade now. We small time usurers will find, very late in the game, that our money doesn't mean much when the social contract has been shattered.
  • glitchc 3y ago
    This is flawed. We live in an era of cheap, everflowing credit. When you speak of usury, keep in mind that lenders in earlier times could charge many times the original loan amount, that there was a stigma associated to being in debt, that becoming insolvent would mean a criminal record and jail time. You're comparing that to 2.5%, 5%, 10%, and calling it usurious?? Read some history, would ya? What we have nowadays is mainly a case of mismatched expectations. All children are told that they are special, and that when they become an adult, a car, a nice job and a McMansion awaits them. These statements glossed over the reality of hard work and mapping skills to outcomes. It was never possible to guarantee this for everyone. Now kids are finding out the hard way that not all of them will get what they were promised, and in fact most won't.
    • recursivedoubts 3y ago
      We have kept rates low (for rich people and governments, poor people still pay through the nose) because we have to to avoid a debt crisis, which has driven up prices to the moon which, again, benefits the existing owners of capital to the detriment of people with little capital, such as our children. Now we are against the wall and have to pick between higher rates and inflation, and we may get both for our trouble. There is a reason the Hebrews, and most stable ancient civilizations, had a debt jubilee roughly every 50 years, and the church, after the Roman empire experience, forbid usury. I would be willing to wager that have read far more, and far different, history that you.
• goodroot 3y ago
  Gosh that's sad. Zoomers are in this very forum - hi Zoomers. Hang in there. Whatever precipitating causes led to such suffering, know that we're _here_, _now_, together. You aren't as alone as it might seem. And hey, try to relax a little. We'll figure it out.
  • LesZedCB 3y ago
    i think part of the problem is these kind of messages are alienating exactly because they appear on screen. the meat-space sentiments rarely match the "thoughts and prayers" type online speech-acts, or at least, they are basically never extended as readily.
  • gedy 3y ago
    > Whatever precipitating causes led to such suffering, know that we're _here_, _now_, together. The article comments on this though: "All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.” This is absolutely true and no wonder young folks are feeling down. I think the counter-culture types starting 50+ years ago wanted to tear down the old, but forgot to put something constructive in its place. (Well the leftist/Marxist types tried, but then the USSR imploded)
    • goodroot 3y ago
      It's the Internet: All the "debunkings" have also been "debunked". From the article... Monogamy is the corollary for the debunking of love. That's very silly. Love is much more than marriage. "Church" foibles is the corollary for the debunking of Faith. That's also very silly. Faith is much more than church or religion. In other times and other cultures, spiritual insight removed the roots of suffering.
  • alx_the_new_guy 3y ago
    Nothing personal (I mean, seriously, nothing personal) Little (probably hard) advice for if/when you're going to say something like that to a zoomer irl (based on personal experience from the receiving end): The "you aren't as alone as it might seem" gets the "what you're saying is just factually incorrect and what you're trying to do is to bullshit me and maybe possibly yourself" thing going. I have never heard something like that from a person "in the weeds". Same for "We'll figure it out". How much time have you personally spent "figuring it out" and how much time have you spent playing hot potato with the problem? How important is it compared to your own problems? I guess, not very, so there is no "us" figuring it out. Basically, don't be a disingenuous dense motherfucker and don't bullshit other people and yourself. Not saying you personally are doing it, but there are definitely more people that do, than that don't.
• tippytippytango 3y ago
  It's more than a loss of hope. Somehow we've succumb to a rampant performative cynicism that has made it low status to like anything that makes life meaningful.
• johnea 3y ago
  As expected on HN, just a bunch of apologism. The whole self-destructive behaviour is clearly addiction. And no one, except the addict, is ever going to cure it. Real life sucks. People have sought escapism for ever. Do you really think there's something called a "dream job"? Seriously? A job is something people endure so they can live inside, with electricity. This myth that there used to be engaging stimulating employment that made people feel fulfilled is just part of the escape mentality. Having to face physical reality is what's missing for gen z. It's not fun, or fulfilling, but in the aftermath there is a sense of self preservation that will never come from the opium of twerk tic "influencers". I was a teenager of the '70s, we pursued PLENTY of escapes from reality. But the big difference is that after 6 or 8 hours, the LSD wore off! The phone is 24/7, and this is the root of the problem. Sorry to break it to you, but this idea that the world is what's the problem is just plain wrong. The world has ALWAYS been an exploitive murderous place, but previously people had to come to grips with that, whereas with the cyber-escape, people can live forever in a goggle fueled delerium. Put down the phone, go outside, talk to people IRL. That's your only hope...
  • bjablonski 3y ago
    It reads like "life is suffering" and tbf unless you were born in first world high class that's hard to argue against. Still, that'd mean that there's failure in parenting, as gen z seems to be ill-equipped to handle what's there - assuming that's all there is to it.
  • haltist 3y ago
    Talking to people is exactly what they're doing but the talking happens through intermediaries who spy on every interaction because they want to increase advertising revenue. The truth is that the advertising model is corrosive because it treats people like products to be bought and sold for profit. The cognitive framework imposed by social media companies is one of the main drivers of social decay and the general lack of hope about the future. I've talked to veterans at bars and the stories they tell about how they worked and lived is entirely alien to anyone who grew up with the internet and smartphones. These people worked the same jobs for 30+ years and are now retired with pensions or disability benefits. The kind of stability that was afforded to the older generations is no longer available to anyone. No one will ever work at a single job for 30+ years and then retire with full benefits. Whatever economic and social circumstances made that possible are long gone.
• transcriptase 3y ago
  I reached the point where a Zoomer allegedly said their peers use the term "quiet-quitting" and realized this was fiction.
  • wtfwhateven 3y ago
    I scrolled through her twitter a bit and can't see a single instance of her posting a picture with a "fellow gen z-er", just her with middle-aged conservative pundits. I know multiple non-monogamous people and not a single one has ever said monogamy is outdated or ever tried to coerce someone away from monogamy. Nothing about her story sounds honest to me. The conclusion of the article is "phones bad, take them away and everything good" which is the same talking point politicians from the era of leaded fuel want you to believe. She appears to solely blame phones for zoomer depression and completely ignores everything else. It's gross. I don't know why any reasonable person would ignore everything else other than them wanting to push an agenda or they're completely oblivious to the situation. It's probably both, she's a wealthy individual (sites state her net worth is $1.5 million, how many zoomers do you know that have such a net worth or can ever achieve such a net worth?) and constantly tweets conservative culture war stuff on Twitter. Another thing I'm reminded of is the articles that sometimes make the rounds with headlines like "This teen just purchased their own house!" and other "rags to riches stories" and every single time it turns out their parents are extremely wealthy and inherited the wealth from their own parents. It's grossly dishonest.
• Eiriksmal 3y ago
  >The Millennials were largely spared from the carnage because all but the last few years of them were beyond puberty when the phone-based childhood swept in. Every generation thinks its suffering is unique and worse than those before it. Read Douglas Coupland's early 90s novels (Generation X and Microserfs) to see how Gen X fared in contrast to their parents. Watch Eden of the East to see how middle-Millenials struggled with the rising concept of the NEET (in Japan, the US, and western Europe alike) as our Gen X and Baby Boomer parents couldn't understand the difference in economic and life circumstances between being 23 in 1980 and being 23 in 2008. Smartphones and social media are accelerating the decline, but there's evidence collected over the past ~60 years that points to a trend of diminishing quality of life. A great non-fiction economics-oriented book on the US version of this is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...)
  • BytesAndGears 3y ago
    I think your last paragraph ties this together. Every recent generation has felt like they have it harder than their parents, and it is usually brushed off as just hindsight bias. But I feel like we don’t look at it enough that maybe things have actually gotten worse overall (for those of us in relatively rich countries). I think a lot of things have gotten better in the last ~60 years, especially medicine, in terms of improving the lives of people. But some things, especially community related, have definitely gotten worse. And maybe those things are more important to our health than we’ve given credit to.
• jncfhnb 3y ago
  This author is also behind articles and books such as > We’re conservative moms. This is how we raise our kids in a woke city And > the canceling of the American mind And > Climate protesters will never get people to change if they keep acting like this Provocative right wing trash
• lsy 3y ago
  The summary is that traditional sources of meaning — marriage, friends, patriotism, career, childbearing, and faith — are now devalued, and cell phones offer in their place corporate solutions that are harmful. As can be expected, Haidt and the poster argue that solutions are found at the level of the cell phone and limiting access to it, rather than improvements at the social level where the boomer, gen x, and increasingly millennial generations continue to fail to deliver meaning through the aforementioned institutions. If Gen Z could look to society and especially older generations for - interpersonal relationships based on cooperation rather than competition - work that was meaningfully compensated rather than exploitative - governments that were responsive to their constituents rather than self-serving - social support systems that reward rather than punish parenting, or - religious institutions that delivered compassion and moral goodness rather than prejudice and contempt, then I think it could be argued that folks could find meaning in these institutions instead of behind a phone screen. Until then the complaints about social decay are almost insulting.
  • vlunkr 3y ago
    I'm reminded of the "useful myths" concept in the book Sapiens. Being very patriotic, very confident in your religion and politics was useful for most of human history. Even if you're wrong, the confidence gives you purpose, and peace. Gen-Z seems more nuanced about all of these things. I think I blame the Internet. Speaking very very broadly, millennials grew up with this type of confidence, but abandoned it in adulthood, when they became educated and emotionally ready to do so. Gen-Z has not had the same time to prepare. As teens or young adults, they are having all this thrust on them, and getting hit with nihilism really early.
  • glitchc 3y ago
    Boomers are dying. Gen Z are welcome to take charge of these institutions and transform them as they see fit. I know some who are doing exactly that, and are much happier than the subject matter of the article. Ultimately people are looking for meaning and purpose to their existence. There are productive ways to get there, and then there are destructive ways. Everyone needs to pick their own path.
• vore 3y ago
  As expected from Jonathan Haidt, it's clearly because nobody is trad anymore and not because of any material factors like housing unaffordability.
  • itsoktocry 3y ago
    >not because of any material factors like housing unaffordability. I agree this is a major problem, especially here in Canada. But what makes you think these people will suddenly be satisified when they own a home or live on their own? It's more cost and more responsibility, and isn't automatically fulfilling in any special way, is it?
    • vore 3y ago
      They probably won't be, just like how every generation has its anxieties. But it's certainly the elephant in the room that he makes no mention of.
• jrajav 3y ago
  I'm sure the general hopelessness of younger generations has nothing at all to do with the facts that: - They get paid less (in terms of actual purchasing power) than any prior generation in memory. - They are saddled with mountains of education debt their elders told them to take on if they want a good job (which they usually never got). - They cannot get the security and long-term investment that is owning a house, which was much easier for older generations. - Food and college and other basics of survival and upward mobility are costing more and more every year, outpacing inflation, which itself is outpacing wages. I really think this is a much simpler explanation for a generation-wide malaise than the popular (with older generations), but infantilizing, explanation of a social media addiction. Not getting paid a fair amount for your hard work, and it being so obvious that you are indeed not getting paid a fair amount, will be demoralizing to anyone of any background.
  • gurchik 3y ago
    The article is mostly centered around the short-term benefits but long-term harms of electronic devices and social media. This is a symptom, not the source of the problem. The Gen Z adults I know are struggling to survive, and they're left wondering, "_These_ are supposed to be my golden years? Going to the food bank and ignoring my student loan bills?" And the older people they look up to are more often than not completely out of touch. They had time to grow savings when it was easier to do so. Everyone I know has a story about some family member who can't understand how they're struggling because they purchased a house with a part time job with no college degree. But not all older people are like that. My parents never had time to save and buy a house, and today they find themselves hopelessly incapable of doing so. They would never make remarks you hear all the time about "people don't want to work these days." They have the exact same problem as the Gen Z adults except they have a quickly-approaching deadline where they can't work anymore. I do think social media can be a problem. Besides this site, I am not active anywhere else. A lot of people in my generation already have deleted their accounts, or they _want_ to but can't because it's free and they feel somewhat dependent on it. But you'd be surprised how many fewer people would be feeling depressed if they didn't need to fight to put food on the table. Disclaimer: Not technically Gen Z, but I don't think I'm far off. The author states they received their first iPhone at 10. I was already spending hours every day on the internet by that age, and bought my first smartphone at 14.
• glitchc 3y ago
  What nonsense. If the phone's your problem, just put it down. Stay away from it. Give it back to your parents. I'm sure they'd love to pare down that data plan. It costs money after all. As a millenial, things weren't that different for us. We had AoL, ICQ, MSN messenger. Folks played Quake, Starcraft, Everquest. WoW came out just as many of us entered university. Some of us flunked out because we gamed too much. To Gen Z: Look, there are no substitutes for hard work and self control. If it's important, work at it. If it's bad for you, put it down. Delay isn't going to change anything. An 18 year old smoker is just as addicted as a 10 year old smoker. We can make progress once people start taking responsibility for themselves.
• solardev 3y ago
  This blog post is an incredibly Conservative (capital C) take on social issues, to the point where it reads like it was written by the very same kind of person that and Gen Z and millennials are often griping about to begin with. It starts out, off the bat, by reframing structural social issues as individual failures: it's mental illness, suicide, anxiety, cancel culture, coddling. Then it tries to make the point that phones enable this sort of collective doom-scrolling escapism. Then it tries to present an actual anecdote from a Gen Z person to reinforce the viewpoint that liberal ideology (non-monogamy, shame about American issues, quiet-quitting, climate change, anti-religion) are the cause of this discontent... but then instead of addressing any of them, it tries again to reframe those issues as a personal addiction to smartphones. As if Gen Z would be happier simply by turning off their phones (which is probably true, granted, but doesn't really address any of the underlying social issues). It's a weird strawman: Nevermind that the world is broken. You're just on your phone too much. Then what happens after they turn it off? Still a shit economy, no good jobs unless you want to work in tech or finance (and even then...), climate change getting worse, nobody can afford housing, education is increasingly worthless, culture wars are getting more polarized... I'd argue the opposite cause/effect: People are on their phones so much because that's all that's left to do in a dying world, because previous generations hoarded so much for themselves there's nothing left for the future.
  • itsoktocry 3y ago
    >It's a weird strawman: Nevermind that the world is broken. You're just on your phone too much. You've missed and/or are proving the point. Would it shock you to learn that there are large segments of the population who aren't in a doom loop of "the world is broken"?
    • solardev 3y ago
      Would it shock you to learn that there are in fact significant structural issues that continue to exist even if you turn off your phone?
      • I_Am_Nous 3y ago
• solatic 3y ago
  I'm not hearing anything particularly modern in this take. The author lacks a sense of personal foundation upon which to build a life for themselves. Their list of "debunked" foundations - family, country, church, work - were never universally applicable to everyone. Not for the last fifty years, hundred years, all of human history were people doomed to be unhappy if they did not get married, or did not serve their country, or did not join a priesthood, or did not find professional success. Plenty of people found and find happiness in spite of not having one or more of these achievements. The author would be advised to find something creative that engages them. No, doomscrolling doesn't count, and "creative" is a pretty broad term. Even for, especially for, someone who believes that everything is doomed - activism can be creative. It requires little more than intrinsic motivation, energy, time, and the dedication to see it through. It may have been a mistake to give children social media from too early an age, but at some point, it became the author's responsibility to give up an energy sink that is not serving them anymore and find a better use for their time.
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• slowhadoken 3y ago
  I get along with zoomers. They’re the most informed and out to of touch people I talk to. Parents aren’t equipped to talk to them because parents aren’t very honest and they’re out of touch. It’s an age old story really.
• davesque 3y ago
  I think the problem is bigger than the young author would like to admit. She's correct that Zoomers probably have it worse than previous generations as the victims of a psychological capitalism that seeks to profit by hollowing out their sense of self worth. But I think those forces got started a while ago. Companies were already clawing at people's attention in various ways, and treating it rather like a science, well before those efforts were distilled into algorithms. Maybe the bigger problem is society's tolerance of mega companies that become so large that no one employee feels responsible for their abuses.
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• kotlip 3y ago
  Many of the negative effects of social media and phone use seem to point to infinite feeds of content as the root cause. I spent my teens scrolling a Facebook feed that largely consisted of updates from my friends (with a few meme pages sprinkled in between). Most of my time was spent reacting to posts and engaging in lively discussions in long comment threads instead of passively viewing content, and the feed didn't randomly reshuffle itself the way it does now so you'd naturally stop scrolling once you'd caught up with the day's updates. I actually felt closer to my friends as a result. Using BeReal feels like using Facebook in its earlier days because it has a finite feed, and it seems to be the only social media app that encourages you to engage with people instead of content.
  • goodpaul6 3y ago
    I get the sense that most ad-monetised social media apps are forced to show an algorithmic feed that maximises ad impressions; otherwise advertisers will just move to a platform that does. I suspect that even BeReal will do this at some point unless they pivot to e.g. Cohost’s [1] model of paying a monthly fee. Unfortunately achieving the network effects required for a successful social media app is at odds with the friction involved in paying for a subscription service. As such, “cool” apps like BeReal don’t stay cool for very long IMO. [1] cohost.org
• nunez 3y ago
  For anyone like me that was wondering how average screen time on phones compares to average "screen time" watching television in the late 90's: - 2000: "Almost all 6-17 year olds (99%) watch television in their leisure time, and on average spend *two and half hours almost every day* in front of the screen." - 2023: "On average, children ages 8-12 in the United States spend 4-6 hours a day watching or using screens, and *teens spend up to 9 hours.*" I think this screen time increase, and, specifically, the lack of regulation around social media consumption is a crisis. Data on the harms that social media is directly and indirectly accountable for is abundant. The increase in children getting a tablet thrown in front of them is particularly concerning to me. This might be me (a Millennial) channeling Socrates[^2] about the next generation, but I am increasingly strongly believing that insufficient life skills development and the achievement gap in general will be significantly wider in the coming years because of this, and that wage/class inequalities will increase with it. [^0]: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/21172/1/Young_people_New_media.pdf https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/21172/1/Young_people_New_media.pdf [^1]: https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Children-And-Watching-TV-054.aspx https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam... [^2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4vnuv/old_generations_complain_about_the_next_one_since/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a4vnuv/old_g.... Yes, I know it's misattributed to Socrates and is a much more recent quote than oft-believed.
• thefz 3y ago
  I don't understand how the author can blame being fed an endless doomscroll, just... put the phone away. Put that damn thing away for a minute.
• ulizzle 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s the phones, because a lot of us here were hooked on the internet (cellphones, laptops, forums, message boards, Usenet, email newsletter, rss, etc) from a very early age and we didn’t come out thinking that monogamy was debunked, community is passé, friends are obsolete, gender is like…just a vibe and communism is unicorns and rainbows and capitalism is the devil. Also religious people are trash (except for astrology) and the more promiscuous you are the more your moral virtue and all opinions are valid and equal no matter the source or the content It’s this myth that gen z if the fist generation growing up with modern tech that goes unchallenged I think it’s of more what the adults are teaching the kids that’s harming them. Ideological stuff, not tech.
• NoGravitas 3y ago
  So, Boomer finds reactionary Zoomer who's willing to parrot his views. Film at 11.
• taylodl 3y ago
  I would argue increasing wealth discrepancy is causing far more problems. All three of my kids are in Gen Z. They all have anxiety disorders, some severe. I got bad news for everyone: this started before they had smart phones. Premise blown. But now that they're okay (after 10 years) I've been talking with my kids what happened. They all said the same thing: high school. In high school, they said, they had College! College! College! pounded into their heads all day, every class period, of every day. The unspoken message they loudly received is if you don't go to college then you're doomed. You're going to drown, college is the only means to tread water or get ahead. I've been in group therapy sessions with anxiety-ridden, suicidal Gen Z kids. They all identify the same source for their problems. Pressure. Intense pressure. You want to play sports for fun? Nope. Gotta be serious about getting a scholarship. Can't go out and play a pick-up game with your friends, either. They're all consumed in playing league sports. Want to do an activity? Better consider how that looks on the college resumé. Better excel at that activity. Be a leader. Can't just join Boy Scouts because you want to hang out with your friends and go camping. Oh no! You need to be an Eagle scout! You need to be a leader! If you do martial arts then there had better be a black belt coming at the other end. All activities serve the college resumé. College! College! College! But wait, there's more! My daughter recently pointed out that the United States had been at war since the day she was born. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a constant background narrative throughout her life. It seemed surreal because life proceeded as though we weren't at war. But you always heard about it. Always saying thanks to those who'd served several tours fighting it. Finally, I, being a Gen X'er, was the first of the divorce generation. My generation was hit hard by divorce. What did Gen Z get hit with? The housing crash of 2008. Gen Z is the generation of foreclosure. They saw their families lose their home. They saw their families who struggled to afford their home kicked out of their home and then forced to rent where the rents would go even higher than what they were paying for their own home. Gen Z is the first generation in American history who's not doing as well as their parents. Don't be surprised when they call bullshit on American Exceptionalism or say Okay Boomer! And don't think for a second that the problem is with smartphones. They may not be helping, but they're not the source of all their problems.