7 ms·

I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. It's 100% bad but it's just trash filling the hole society is making. Looking top down at the problem,

I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. It's 100% bad but it's just trash filling the hole society is making. Looking top down at the problem, humans need self actualization or propose to be happy. Originally we evolved to live in medium sized social groups that worked together to ensure their survival, we took care of each other and that was what drove our purpose, or rather why that need evolved, it helped increase the odds a group survived. Fast forward and we're now trying to derive purpose out of pure competition. What percentile is your IQ, your GPA, your income, your stack rank. Society is becoming hyper competitive because that is what makes the most money. Nobody interacts with their local community, they interact with those that provide the best chance of making enough money to survive: coworkers, their "network", prospective employers. This is all great for perpetual exponential economic growth but not so great for humans. Instead of just being the best we can be for our community we're trying to make them compete, keeping people switched on in survival mode 24/7 to extract maximum profits. Instead of community we're trying to create a nice plastic wrapped substitute with social media and phones, they're not the cause, they're the symptom.

mcmcmc 3y ago
Competition and stack ranking are nothing new, Imperial China was doing it in the 6th century with civil service exams. You might as well say humanity is the cause.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  Calling this a stretch is an understatement.
flappyeagle 3y ago
You got cause and effect reversed. Can’t have global competition without global reach. No instagram, no influencers.
corethree 3y ago
I think you're right. But society has been this way from way Before the mental illness epidemic. Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing. That being said I do think you're right. It's just that there's two underlying trends here of "mental illness". The one your addressing has been longer term and more pervasive while the recent trend is, as stated, a new trend and seemingly caused by social media.
- sublinear 3y ago
  > society has been this way from way Before the mental illness epidemic. Definitely agree. > Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing. Trends can't exist without metrics. What's recent are the observations of the behaviors and new politics and moved goalposts, not the behaviors themselves.
- atoav 3y ago
  As someone who has 4 cousins and one brother that just went throught their teenage years: Social media is definitely a factor. I was still in the generation where we had social media, but phones had no or very shitty cameras and mobile internet was too expensive for us teens. Some people didn't have phones, period. But those kids have a constant comparison to ideals, especially the girls, be it their peers or celebrities. And if there is mobbing it is way, way worse than in my generation, because it is easier to have a true all against you situation (with many passive bystanders) and because it doesn't end when you are at home.
- djtango 3y ago
  when do you have in mind? In recent modern history, we saw periods of high social mobility - competition works well in positive sum environments where the pie is getting bigger for everyone. Feels less good when the pie is getting smaller...
  - corethree 3y ago
    We've seen this in America well before the advent of social media. Maybe you haven't seen life before the internet.
dottjt 3y ago
I think this will always be the case as long as there's inequality of any kind in the world. People will do extraordinary things to get themselves into a better position. I mean, just look at the things people are doing to migrate to other countries, let alone what they have to do once they're in the country. So much of it sounds dreadful, yet for some people it's still a better life than the alternative i.e. gang violence etc.
anon373839 3y ago
> I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. I think phones may well be responsible. Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime - unstructured moments with nothing to do except be in your surroundings, feel your own boredom, experience your thoughts. Now, the moment our attention isn’t occupied by something external, we reach for our phones to have something to fill the silence. I believe this has negatively affected everyone’s mental health, but it stands to reason that children would be worse off because they’ve never known anything different: they’ve never had the opportunity to develop the ability to just be.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  >I think phones may well be responsible take a smartphone, remove its internet connection and you'll quickly discover it's the internet access thst causes all problems
  - flappyeagle 3y ago
    You need both. Internet to connect to the global rat race. Phone to inject it into every waking moment of your existence.
- realpotatosalad 3y ago
  I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. I view phones as tool to 'solve' specific problems, such as communication. Apps and websites such as Outlook (email apps with notifications in general), LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, maybe also Hackernews etc. pose more of the role of ruining our downtime, as they are designed that way. At the end it would probably be about the lack of media competency, not knowing which apps and sites want to keep you as long as possible on their sites and which sources could benefit you better mentally. And for children, aren't we adults (& probably also young adults) responsible to teach them about what media is and how to detect the bad apples?
  - anon-3988 3y ago
    > I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do. I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always are on their phone or listening to something.
coryrc 3y ago
The price of housing is outrageous and it's worldwide, somehow. The knock-on effects are huge and I think this is one of them. Or maybe governments just can't last as long as they have and they steal all progress eventually. (WW2 reset most, but not the US, would help explain why it's worse here?) Or maybe it really is monkey-brain things and normies shouldn't be on the Internet.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  This one is puzzling because "shelter" (right to adequate housing) is directly a human right we once agreed upon. But when we view this as a commodity and allow housing to be an investment vehicle it really displays the lack of empathy and care for the humans around us we have.
  - Scea91 3y ago
    Most people have shelter, they just want better shelter. There is a vast inflation in expectations. Previously more people have been living together in smaller spaces, thats why we have housing shortage now.
  - prox 3y ago
    Commoditization isn’t really a problem except that governments went overboard by leaving it to market to solve problems. This creates unhealthy incentives to only build commercial buildings for upper middle class and higher. It drives prices up. Good government should be aware of it but usually they rub shoulders with the project managers of the big building corporations.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    > we once agreed upon That's the issue. All the basic human rights have been rolled back especially in the anglosphere. Housing, public health services, employment (proper jobs, non gigs)
    - bigstrat2003 3y ago
      The other issue is that we didn't actually agree on this. It may be that something like the EU declaration of rights says that housing is a human right, but humanity overall has never agreed that is the case.
LoganDark 3y ago
I've been trying to get a job and honestly, the only reason I want one is because I want enough money to buy all the things that I enjoy playing around with. Computers, electronics, machining, construction and whatever. Self actualization, in other words. I want to make stuff! Having to worry about all that other crap is just a burden. It's had me down for years. I just want to do stuff, man..
Aunche 3y ago
People have been citing Marx's theory of alienation for a century and a half. Conveniently, they are only started to manifest during the rise of social media. > Fast forward and we're now trying to derive purpose out of pure competition. What percentile is your IQ, your GPA, your income, your stack rank I hear this a lot, and this attitude does seem more pervasive on the internet, but in the real world, I find that people don't care about any of this any more than they have to, especially after college. The only people who I know who work "unhealthy hours" genuinely seem to enjoy work or are treating work as an escape. When you look at working hours in the US it's been mostly flat since 2010 and it's actually significantly lower than it was in the 1950s [1]. The real reason nobody is spending time with their community because they are too busy consuming media. The average teen spends over 7 hours a day consuming media [2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444888/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444888/
spullara 3y ago
Being the best in your community is a dead end. This is a global optimization problem, maybe galactic, maybe the universe.
granshaw 3y ago
All this talk about “community” - what “community”? It simply doesn’t exist anymore even if you wanted it - short of arranging to stay near your extended family and in laws, what else is there in the modern western world? Churches, I guess is the only other true community left…
- nickd2001 3y ago
  Music groups such as amateur orchestras, brass bands etc are still a bit of community. Admittedly quite niche, you need to know about them, find a way and have the ability to learn an instrument. There are informal ad-hoc communities e:g at my local leisure centre the regular swimmers chat to each other quite a lot. Kept a lot of people going mentally through lockdown I think. (swimming was allowed subject to restricted numbers and booking ahead)
- trealira 3y ago
  Speaking as an American: I think it happens if you have kids. Parents make friends with their kids' friends' parents. "Soccer moms" and other parents whose kids are enrolled in sports make friends with other parents of their kid's teammates. Parents also make friends with their kid's teachers. And kids still make friends at school, and after school during extracurricular activities like sports and jazz band. Besides that, I think you're right, unless you make friends with your coworkers. There are also still parts of the US where you make friends with your neighbors. My parents recently moved to different suburbs a few years ago, and they're friends with their neighbors.
- jurynulifcation 3y ago
  There are affinity groups dedicated to more than just particular novel-gazing interpretations of the divine. We should be striving to make a space for affinity groups to meet & form.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Gasp0de 3y ago
  Small communities exist everywhere, at least in Europe. Scouts, sports clubs, volunteer fire departments, political activism groups. In all of these groups we build a community around a non-competitive purpose (with the exception of some sports clubs) and in all of them we also help each other with stuff that is not related to the primary purpose of the club.
ascorbic 3y ago
That didn't change in 2010 though, did it? None of that seems particularly different from 25 years ago, and their figures show this was clearly a sudden change around 2010-2012. The smartphone does feel like the only convincing explanation to me, because it's the only thing that happened globally around then which was a persistent change in the lives of teens.
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
Honestly, I think the fact that, as the headline says, "it's international" is evidence against what you're saying. Even though the post only covers the Anglosphere, I'm from Spain and the phenomenon also happens here and is often qouted as worrying (e.g. child and teen suicide trends: https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OJt9haHrWhKMDEPsTtrj3g--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2022-04/d465a9e0-b8d5-11ec-b6fe-7cd8d82cbc1c https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OJt9haHrWhKMDEPsTtrj3g--/Y...) I don't think the Spanish society is especially competitive - no one cares about IQ, just a minority (going into academic sector) cares about GPA, stack rank is not a thing in any company I know here (maybe it exists, but if it does, it would be rare), and income... well, people do care about that, of course, but as they have always done and more out of practical reasons than sheer competitiveness - in fact, many people would rather be a public sector worker with a super stable contract than earn a lot of money with more instability. And still, our teens are completely messed up. So I think either phones, or social networks, or a combination of both are more likely culprits.
- balder1991 3y ago
  The Latin cultures certainly don’t have the same hustle and competitiveness as the US seems to have. In fact, it always sounded strange to me how in English they have this concept of a “loser” as an insult, as if losing in the rat race means you’re worthless as an individual.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago
  I'm in Germany, not in Spain but I have family there. My impression is that young people in Spain do face quite a lot of insecurity and pretty dismal outlooks. Focusing on GPAs and the like is one way of dealing with that (that may be most prevalent in GP's bubble), but there are others. Lack of purpose and agency and a hopeful narrative for one's own future is pure poison to the mind though, and I think that's at the heart of GP's comment. Social media may very well just be the sniffing glue that makes misery more bearable, and indirectly fuel that misery, but not act as the (primary) cause of said misery.
cookiengineer 3y ago
> best we can be for our community This is the actual problem, because the scope of realization is way too small for humans to comprehend. That is the reason why we're in a climate crisis, plastic waste crisis, middle east crisis, and housing crisis - all simultaneously. How did that happen you might ask? Aren't people responsible for this? Humans are very, very, very _bad_ at planning the future, and they should be absolved of that task, and absolved from the burden of making those decisions. We're in this mess because old people with old opinions lead our nations, and they were trained all their lifetime to only think for themselves and their small little community. Right-wing populist propaganda works so well because they appeal to emotions around your "nice little community and its values", always painting a dangerous picture of change that people don't want to accept in their isolated world views. Why humans still drive cars powered by oil today is the best example. Because they're not good at making decisions, and their moral values are always undermined by economic incentives.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Humans are very, very, very _bad_ at planning the future, and they should be absolved of that task, and absolved from the burden of making those decisions. What are you talking about? Who would do that?
worldsayshi 3y ago
We went rather quickly from a situation where it was quite easy to explain to kids what is expected of them - you hunt, survive or maintain a farm to survive - to a situation where the value of an action depends on a million things. And, just to add yet another layer of complexity, there are few certain things about the future regarding what you need to know or do to thrive in it. Most jobs today might be obsolete by the time kids graduate. .
- candiodari 3y ago
  THIS. But add the things you're not supposed to say: 1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot of people have kids for a hundred different reasons, not to have kids. You're supposed to, to keep a marriage together, to get attention, to feel superior to others, ... 2) hence, they neither explain to kids what is expected of them, don't help. Kids grow up in a directionless vacuum. 3) People's (average) abilities have not gone up in 20-30 years. So this is a much worse problem than simply not wanting to help. A worse problem than simply adults needing to put aside 30 minutes every day for the kids. Adults don't have the knowledge expected in high school. Nor do they have practical knowledge (it's not that most adults don't know math, or don't know how to be a plumber or open a shop, it's that they know nothing) Which means most adults CAN'T provide direction for kids. Not even if they wanted to. Not before putting in a lot of effort themselves first. 4) The traditional escapes have been closed off: factory work, marriage (as a means to escape jobs), clergy (as a means to escape normal jobs). All this has diminished or even disappeared. The marriage thing is a double whammy since marriage helps both partners on a lot of different fronts. Not just jobs, but housing, stress, cooking, housework, calling the doctor when something's wrong (or generally administrative stuff), and of course an outlet, someone to talk to and even sex. 5) most easy jobs that have replaced this, have global competition. "Influencer" for example. So, they're not at all as easy as they look. 6) and the solutions for this are "psychology". In case anyone failed to notice, this fundamentally means blaming the kid (therapists are only supposed to fix the symptoms), while making it as hard as possible to see that you're blaming the kid. Psychologists/therapists are not capable people that will teach kids that, say, a career as programmer, consultant or engineer is open to them, and then learn them math, economics or ... Again: they're totally incompetent. They won't do that, as it's not expected of them, but they also can't. 7) and like any other neural network, if you don't a human mind enough feedback, it'll start by having wild swings in output, and eventually the signal to noise ratio in the output breaks down, which for humans probably means the person "in" the human mind effectively (eventually) disappears, replaced by wild, big, excessive, even violent impulses. 8) what therapy/psychologists do is ENTIRELY the wrong thing: they "focus on the negative", the symptoms. In other words, they take a human mind, and complain about the noise. Think of it like this: If you had to guess a number between 1 and 2 million, and numbers divisible by 314 (for example) are valid answers. If I only tell you "no", and discuss how bad your decision process to arrive at an answer is ... it'll take a while. If I help you and tell you how to arrive at the right answer, you'll have it in 2 or 3 guesses. It is almost impossible to overstate the difference you'll see in "performance" between a kid that is left directionless for their first 15 years and someone who is "led up the ladder". Constantly explaining what they're supposed to do, and where their reasoning is flawed. Now you can can overdo this, but frankly, if you overdo it, the kid will become angry ... and still be extremely capable. Perhaps not ideal, but hardly a situation where the kid's life will crash and burn.
dr_dshiv 3y ago
Running clubs and associations and churches and any nonprofit oriented community organization is hard work. Throw more parties. That’s one solution. It’s not easy either, but it isn’t pure hedonism. It’s creating real social bonds. And it takes real work!! Underappreciated.
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  Throw more parties Ok. So what do poor people do? Or folks living in spaces too small for such things?
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Arrange for people meet up in a bar. There are meaningful costs to social organization, though. Important to note.
  - lobocinza 3y ago
    Virtual reality. Though it sucks.
  - photonthug 3y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place Not that building these is or was ever that easy for the impoverished, but hey, before civil society became more secular, folks still managed to throw together churches even without the Vatican. Not that I think we need more churches, but makerspaces are a very good idea, and should ideally serve a larger segment of their host community beyond just hardware and software nerds.
thefz 3y ago
In other words, capitalism is bad for the earth and for the humans. Who would have thought!
- bluescrn 3y ago
  But still better than the alternatives that have been attempted so far.
  - thefz 3y ago
    Like asking the ultra rich to pay taxes?
barelyAHerd 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mcmcmc 3y ago

Competition and stack ranking are nothing new, Imperial China was doing it in the 6th century with civil service exams. You might as well say humanity is the cause.

goodpoint 3y ago
Calling this a stretch is an understatement.

flappyeagle 3y ago

You got cause and effect reversed. Can’t have global competition without global reach. No instagram, no influencers.

corethree 3y ago

I think you're right. But society has been this way from way Before the mental illness epidemic. Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing. That being said I do think you're right. It's just that there's two underlying trends here of "mental illness". The one your addressing has been longer term and more pervasive while the recent trend is, as stated, a new trend and seemingly caused by social media.

sublinear 3y ago
> society has been this way from way Before the mental illness epidemic. Definitely agree. > Evidence points to the fact that the structure of society is not causative of a new trend we are seeing. Trends can't exist without metrics. What's recent are the observations of the behaviors and new politics and moved goalposts, not the behaviors themselves.
atoav 3y ago
As someone who has 4 cousins and one brother that just went throught their teenage years: Social media is definitely a factor. I was still in the generation where we had social media, but phones had no or very shitty cameras and mobile internet was too expensive for us teens. Some people didn't have phones, period. But those kids have a constant comparison to ideals, especially the girls, be it their peers or celebrities. And if there is mobbing it is way, way worse than in my generation, because it is easier to have a true all against you situation (with many passive bystanders) and because it doesn't end when you are at home.
djtango 3y ago
when do you have in mind? In recent modern history, we saw periods of high social mobility - competition works well in positive sum environments where the pie is getting bigger for everyone. Feels less good when the pie is getting smaller...
- corethree 3y ago
  We've seen this in America well before the advent of social media. Maybe you haven't seen life before the internet.

dottjt 3y ago

I think this will always be the case as long as there's inequality of any kind in the world. People will do extraordinary things to get themselves into a better position. I mean, just look at the things people are doing to migrate to other countries, let alone what they have to do once they're in the country. So much of it sounds dreadful, yet for some people it's still a better life than the alternative i.e. gang violence etc.

anon373839 3y ago

> I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. I think phones may well be responsible. Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime - unstructured moments with nothing to do except be in your surroundings, feel your own boredom, experience your thoughts. Now, the moment our attention isn’t occupied by something external, we reach for our phones to have something to fill the silence. I believe this has negatively affected everyone’s mental health, but it stands to reason that children would be worse off because they’ve never known anything different: they’ve never had the opportunity to develop the ability to just be.

Almondsetat 3y ago
>I think phones may well be responsible take a smartphone, remove its internet connection and you'll quickly discover it's the internet access thst causes all problems
- flappyeagle 3y ago
  You need both. Internet to connect to the global rat race. Phone to inject it into every waking moment of your existence.
realpotatosalad 3y ago
I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. I view phones as tool to 'solve' specific problems, such as communication. Apps and websites such as Outlook (email apps with notifications in general), LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, maybe also Hackernews etc. pose more of the role of ruining our downtime, as they are designed that way. At the end it would probably be about the lack of media competency, not knowing which apps and sites want to keep you as long as possible on their sites and which sources could benefit you better mentally. And for children, aren't we adults (& probably also young adults) responsible to teach them about what media is and how to detect the bad apples?
- anon-3988 3y ago
  > I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do. I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always are on their phone or listening to something.

coryrc 3y ago

The price of housing is outrageous and it's worldwide, somehow. The knock-on effects are huge and I think this is one of them. Or maybe governments just can't last as long as they have and they steal all progress eventually. (WW2 reset most, but not the US, would help explain why it's worse here?) Or maybe it really is monkey-brain things and normies shouldn't be on the Internet.

sureglymop 3y ago
This one is puzzling because "shelter" (right to adequate housing) is directly a human right we once agreed upon. But when we view this as a commodity and allow housing to be an investment vehicle it really displays the lack of empathy and care for the humans around us we have.
- Scea91 3y ago
  Most people have shelter, they just want better shelter. There is a vast inflation in expectations. Previously more people have been living together in smaller spaces, thats why we have housing shortage now.
- prox 3y ago
  Commoditization isn’t really a problem except that governments went overboard by leaving it to market to solve problems. This creates unhealthy incentives to only build commercial buildings for upper middle class and higher. It drives prices up. Good government should be aware of it but usually they rub shoulders with the project managers of the big building corporations.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  > we once agreed upon That's the issue. All the basic human rights have been rolled back especially in the anglosphere. Housing, public health services, employment (proper jobs, non gigs)
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    The other issue is that we didn't actually agree on this. It may be that something like the EU declaration of rights says that housing is a human right, but humanity overall has never agreed that is the case.

LoganDark 3y ago

I've been trying to get a job and honestly, the only reason I want one is because I want enough money to buy all the things that I enjoy playing around with. Computers, electronics, machining, construction and whatever. Self actualization, in other words. I want to make stuff! Having to worry about all that other crap is just a burden. It's had me down for years. I just want to do stuff, man..

Aunche 3y ago

People have been citing Marx's theory of alienation for a century and a half. Conveniently, they are only started to manifest during the rise of social media. > Fast forward and we're now trying to derive purpose out of pure competition. What percentile is your IQ, your GPA, your income, your stack rank I hear this a lot, and this attitude does seem more pervasive on the internet, but in the real world, I find that people don't care about any of this any more than they have to, especially after college. The only people who I know who work "unhealthy hours" genuinely seem to enjoy work or are treating work as an escape. When you look at working hours in the US it's been mostly flat since 2010 and it's actually significantly lower than it was in the 1950s [1]. The real reason nobody is spending time with their community because they are too busy consuming media. The average teen spends over 7 hours a day consuming media [2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444888/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8444888/

spullara 3y ago

Being the best in your community is a dead end. This is a global optimization problem, maybe galactic, maybe the universe.

granshaw 3y ago

All this talk about “community” - what “community”? It simply doesn’t exist anymore even if you wanted it - short of arranging to stay near your extended family and in laws, what else is there in the modern western world? Churches, I guess is the only other true community left…

nickd2001 3y ago
Music groups such as amateur orchestras, brass bands etc are still a bit of community. Admittedly quite niche, you need to know about them, find a way and have the ability to learn an instrument. There are informal ad-hoc communities e:g at my local leisure centre the regular swimmers chat to each other quite a lot. Kept a lot of people going mentally through lockdown I think. (swimming was allowed subject to restricted numbers and booking ahead)
trealira 3y ago
Speaking as an American: I think it happens if you have kids. Parents make friends with their kids' friends' parents. "Soccer moms" and other parents whose kids are enrolled in sports make friends with other parents of their kid's teammates. Parents also make friends with their kid's teachers. And kids still make friends at school, and after school during extracurricular activities like sports and jazz band. Besides that, I think you're right, unless you make friends with your coworkers. There are also still parts of the US where you make friends with your neighbors. My parents recently moved to different suburbs a few years ago, and they're friends with their neighbors.
jurynulifcation 3y ago
There are affinity groups dedicated to more than just particular novel-gazing interpretations of the divine. We should be striving to make a space for affinity groups to meet & form.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Gasp0de 3y ago
Small communities exist everywhere, at least in Europe. Scouts, sports clubs, volunteer fire departments, political activism groups. In all of these groups we build a community around a non-competitive purpose (with the exception of some sports clubs) and in all of them we also help each other with stuff that is not related to the primary purpose of the club.

ascorbic 3y ago

That didn't change in 2010 though, did it? None of that seems particularly different from 25 years ago, and their figures show this was clearly a sudden change around 2010-2012. The smartphone does feel like the only convincing explanation to me, because it's the only thing that happened globally around then which was a persistent change in the lives of teens.

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

Honestly, I think the fact that, as the headline says, "it's international" is evidence against what you're saying. Even though the post only covers the Anglosphere, I'm from Spain and the phenomenon also happens here and is often qouted as worrying (e.g. child and teen suicide trends: https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OJt9haHrWhKMDEPsTtrj3g--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://s.yimg.com/os/creatr-uploaded-images/2022-04/d465a9e0-b8d5-11ec-b6fe-7cd8d82cbc1c https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/OJt9haHrWhKMDEPsTtrj3g--/Y...) I don't think the Spanish society is especially competitive - no one cares about IQ, just a minority (going into academic sector) cares about GPA, stack rank is not a thing in any company I know here (maybe it exists, but if it does, it would be rare), and income... well, people do care about that, of course, but as they have always done and more out of practical reasons than sheer competitiveness - in fact, many people would rather be a public sector worker with a super stable contract than earn a lot of money with more instability. And still, our teens are completely messed up. So I think either phones, or social networks, or a combination of both are more likely culprits.

balder1991 3y ago
The Latin cultures certainly don’t have the same hustle and competitiveness as the US seems to have. In fact, it always sounded strange to me how in English they have this concept of a “loser” as an insult, as if losing in the rat race means you’re worthless as an individual.
dividedbyzero 3y ago
I'm in Germany, not in Spain but I have family there. My impression is that young people in Spain do face quite a lot of insecurity and pretty dismal outlooks. Focusing on GPAs and the like is one way of dealing with that (that may be most prevalent in GP's bubble), but there are others. Lack of purpose and agency and a hopeful narrative for one's own future is pure poison to the mind though, and I think that's at the heart of GP's comment. Social media may very well just be the sniffing glue that makes misery more bearable, and indirectly fuel that misery, but not act as the (primary) cause of said misery.

cookiengineer 3y ago

> best we can be for our community This is the actual problem, because the scope of realization is way too small for humans to comprehend. That is the reason why we're in a climate crisis, plastic waste crisis, middle east crisis, and housing crisis - all simultaneously. How did that happen you might ask? Aren't people responsible for this? Humans are very, very, very _bad_ at planning the future, and they should be absolved of that task, and absolved from the burden of making those decisions. We're in this mess because old people with old opinions lead our nations, and they were trained all their lifetime to only think for themselves and their small little community. Right-wing populist propaganda works so well because they appeal to emotions around your "nice little community and its values", always painting a dangerous picture of change that people don't want to accept in their isolated world views. Why humans still drive cars powered by oil today is the best example. Because they're not good at making decisions, and their moral values are always undermined by economic incentives.

robertlagrant 3y ago
> Humans are very, very, very _bad_ at planning the future, and they should be absolved of that task, and absolved from the burden of making those decisions. What are you talking about? Who would do that?

worldsayshi 3y ago

We went rather quickly from a situation where it was quite easy to explain to kids what is expected of them - you hunt, survive or maintain a farm to survive - to a situation where the value of an action depends on a million things. And, just to add yet another layer of complexity, there are few certain things about the future regarding what you need to know or do to thrive in it. Most jobs today might be obsolete by the time kids graduate. .

candiodari 3y ago
THIS. But add the things you're not supposed to say: 1) a LOT/most people don't care about their own kids. This has not changed from history, of course. A lot of people have kids for a hundred different reasons, not to have kids. You're supposed to, to keep a marriage together, to get attention, to feel superior to others, ... 2) hence, they neither explain to kids what is expected of them, don't help. Kids grow up in a directionless vacuum. 3) People's (average) abilities have not gone up in 20-30 years. So this is a much worse problem than simply not wanting to help. A worse problem than simply adults needing to put aside 30 minutes every day for the kids. Adults don't have the knowledge expected in high school. Nor do they have practical knowledge (it's not that most adults don't know math, or don't know how to be a plumber or open a shop, it's that they know nothing) Which means most adults CAN'T provide direction for kids. Not even if they wanted to. Not before putting in a lot of effort themselves first. 4) The traditional escapes have been closed off: factory work, marriage (as a means to escape jobs), clergy (as a means to escape normal jobs). All this has diminished or even disappeared. The marriage thing is a double whammy since marriage helps both partners on a lot of different fronts. Not just jobs, but housing, stress, cooking, housework, calling the doctor when something's wrong (or generally administrative stuff), and of course an outlet, someone to talk to and even sex. 5) most easy jobs that have replaced this, have global competition. "Influencer" for example. So, they're not at all as easy as they look. 6) and the solutions for this are "psychology". In case anyone failed to notice, this fundamentally means blaming the kid (therapists are only supposed to fix the symptoms), while making it as hard as possible to see that you're blaming the kid. Psychologists/therapists are not capable people that will teach kids that, say, a career as programmer, consultant or engineer is open to them, and then learn them math, economics or ... Again: they're totally incompetent. They won't do that, as it's not expected of them, but they also can't. 7) and like any other neural network, if you don't a human mind enough feedback, it'll start by having wild swings in output, and eventually the signal to noise ratio in the output breaks down, which for humans probably means the person "in" the human mind effectively (eventually) disappears, replaced by wild, big, excessive, even violent impulses. 8) what therapy/psychologists do is ENTIRELY the wrong thing: they "focus on the negative", the symptoms. In other words, they take a human mind, and complain about the noise. Think of it like this: If you had to guess a number between 1 and 2 million, and numbers divisible by 314 (for example) are valid answers. If I only tell you "no", and discuss how bad your decision process to arrive at an answer is ... it'll take a while. If I help you and tell you how to arrive at the right answer, you'll have it in 2 or 3 guesses. It is almost impossible to overstate the difference you'll see in "performance" between a kid that is left directionless for their first 15 years and someone who is "led up the ladder". Constantly explaining what they're supposed to do, and where their reasoning is flawed. Now you can can overdo this, but frankly, if you overdo it, the kid will become angry ... and still be extremely capable. Perhaps not ideal, but hardly a situation where the kid's life will crash and burn.

dr_dshiv 3y ago

Running clubs and associations and churches and any nonprofit oriented community organization is hard work. Throw more parties. That’s one solution. It’s not easy either, but it isn’t pure hedonism. It’s creating real social bonds. And it takes real work!! Underappreciated.

Broken_Hippo 3y ago
Throw more parties Ok. So what do poor people do? Or folks living in spaces too small for such things?
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  Arrange for people meet up in a bar. There are meaningful costs to social organization, though. Important to note.
- lobocinza 3y ago
  Virtual reality. Though it sucks.
- photonthug 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place Not that building these is or was ever that easy for the impoverished, but hey, before civil society became more secular, folks still managed to throw together churches even without the Vatican. Not that I think we need more churches, but makerspaces are a very good idea, and should ideally serve a larger segment of their host community beyond just hardware and software nerds.

thefz 3y ago

In other words, capitalism is bad for the earth and for the humans. Who would have thought!

bluescrn 3y ago
But still better than the alternatives that have been attempted so far.
- thefz 3y ago
  Like asking the ultra rich to pay taxes?

barelyAHerd 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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