6 ms·

While we're all playing armchair sociologist-cum-psychologist, I'd say IMHO it boils down to the lack of a compelling future. Which is to say there's a general

While we're all playing armchair sociologist-cum-psychologist, I'd say IMHO it boils down to the lack of a compelling future. Which is to say there's a general disillusionment with the state of humanity (as far as values, realizing our full potential, whatever that means, etc.) I'm not saying it's an accurate belief, but that doesn't make it less real to those who subscribe to it. It might explain why rich kids are even more depressed than poor ones. If you're already rich and you hate life, it's harder to dream about a better life. You're "supposed" to be happy already. I "blame" the sudden rise of social media and western society reorienting itself to highly addictive dopamine-hit loops. Before that, the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent weaponization of mass media. All without an accompanying evolution of cultural, social, moral norms (!= rules) to aid navigation in this brave new world.

chrisweekly 3y ago
(+1, insightful) 100% agreed. Along these same lines, the endlessly demoralizing narrative around climate change is likely another big factor. I think many more people need to read and internalize things like Hannah Ritchie's book "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet". Highly recommended.
- jplusequalt 3y ago
  "How we *CAN* be" is doing a lot of lifting there. Boomers, GenX, and older Millennials all had ample opportunities to do something before we arrived here.
  - fhd2 3y ago
    Didn't downvote you, but that's not a hopeful attitude. If the damage is done, figuring out who to blame doesn't repair it. Sometimes we gotta clean up somebody else's mess or nobody will. As programmers, quite routinely I suppose :P
    - viraptor 3y ago
      But it sure is useful to figure out what policies and who did that... considering those are basically still the people in power. For any world-wide change you need to either change them or wait for them to die.
  - skinkestek 3y ago
    We / they did a lot. We actually took steps and saved the Ozone layer. Invented and made the solar panel economically viable. Electric cars aren't exactly designed by the youngest generation either. We / they have taken big steps to stop trade in tropic hardwoods. The generation before us built the systems and societies that we today take for granted. To the best of their abilities, very many of them worked very hard to give something better to us than they got themselves. Go further back and they actually stopped the most well oiled war machine that has ever existed, the nazis. Later they stopped the Soviet by outcompeting them. Hindsight is 20/20. But a little humility should be mandatory I think. And ironically, we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load (and also several times less
    - triceratops 3y ago
      > we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load Ask yourself why environmentalists succeeded in shutting down nuclear power, the one viable alternative to fossil fuels, when they failed at literally everything else. That might lead you to who was actually responsible.
      - skinkestek 3y ago
        Because of Chernobyl. And they did not fail at everything else. They succeeded in a lot of cases. For a rather large win, as I mentioned, the Ozone layer was saved. Another big one was banning of DDT and introduction of regulations on everything from new pesticides / herbicides to emissions (or fuel saving as we used to refer to it until recently).
    - fulafel 3y ago
      This blaming the environmentalists for nuclear's failures is quite a tired argument. In addition to being false (environmentalists didn't have the political capital for it in the critical decades) the enormous public subsidies towards nuclear power in the past 80 years were an opportunity cost away from renewables. If we had spent even a small part of that on renewables r&d investment starting in the same timeframe (40s/50s) we could have transitioned from fossil fuels decades earlier.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but I don't think so. All the sociopolitical difficulties that hinder solutions today were just as, if not more, insurmountable for all those generations. And the technological landscape is much more promising today than at any point since this problem was identified. And people from all the generations you listed are strongly represented among the people who created and began scaling those technologies. No generation has been better positioned to contribute to solving this problem than the one entering adulthood today. It will be a damn shame if most of them but into doomerism and let it keep them from taking their shot.
  - fulafel 3y ago
    The "don't look up" mindset practiced by generations both current and previous reaches a new height of cognitive dissonance. The interesting question is that why such a thing didn't cause more widespread mental health problems before (though it did for many).
- sanderjd 3y ago
  This is fundamentally why I find the technology / media narratives fairly compelling. I tend to agree that the first order issue is that people seem to increasingly subscribe to "demoralizing narratives". But not just climate change. I see the same phenomenon, just with different narratives among my more "right wing" loved ones. Instead of the demoralizing narrative being climate change, it is that society is crumbling due to the decline of religion, or because men aren't manly enough and women aren't womanly enough, or because people like them are being censored into oblivion, etc. But why is it that all these different kinds of doom narratives seem to be spreading so much and getting so much traction now, when they didn't seem to in the past? I have trouble seeing what else has changed significantly enough to cause this, if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    I think blaming it on the phones themselves though is incredibly useless. Yes, the phones and networks permitting the construction of these echo-chambers are a problem that does warrant attention, but it doesn't change the fact that there are numerous, wide scale, huge problems that we are just not dealing with as a society. Is it healthy to have those problems shoved in your face non-stop? No, of course not, but it's arguably even more unhealthy to pretend they don't exist, especially when many of these are existential threats to us as a species. Basically: Climate doomerism is a problem, yes. But climate change is also a problem, one that our power structures seem completely unwilling to address. And in such an environment, Climate doomerism is kind of a logical outcome: we know there's an issue, scientists have known since the 70's, yet we do precious little about it and fundamentally our leaders seem content to ride out the collapse of the biosphere and cash their checks. Of course that's fucking depressing.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Collectively, we might do more about climate change (and other problems) if we weren't spending all our time and energy on our phones...
      - 3y ago
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I wonder what it feels like WRT climate change, for the next couple generations. For millennials, it was really depressing because the previous generations left this giant problem for us, but at least there was the slight mitigating factor that, while the situation was pretty well understood by scientists, at least it wasn’t totally obvious to the whole population. Our parents might have been gullible but that’s a non-malicious failing. We’ve also done sweet fuck-all about global warming though. We can say it is because we haven’t been able to grab the reins, but we’re hitting our 40’s pretty soon. We owed the next generation a revolution but we seem to be taking a “maybe I’ll get promoted” approach to things. It wasn’t enough. I wonder if all we managed to do was kill the hope that “awareness” is actually going to accomplish anything.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Fauntleroy 3y ago
      We can't really ignore Climate Change, as it is something that is currently occurring and unlikely to stop. Also, it is slowly but surely having disastrous effects on society at large.
      - datadrivenangel 3y ago
        Odds are decent that if we ignored climate change it would cause billions of people to die and create massive disruptions in the lives of those who live over the next several centuries. It would only be catastrophic, not existential. We should work hard to reduce the risks and mitigate the impacts, but the species will go on even if we ignore it. And, almost everything is getting better faster than anyone predicted. There's a strong case for climate optimism, and a future that we can improve by continuing to take action and put in the hard work of fixing the world.
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        You personally can because you have no control over it. Unless you become the next ruler of China, India and Russia plus control three houses of US government what you personally do won't matter. So stop living in terror, not sleeping at night, thinking the world is hopeless. The cold war was more serious and things worked out unexpectedly. World War I and II were more serious and they ended different than how everyone thought. Landfills filling up was the concern now it's used for power generation. ACID rain.. holes Ozone layer. We fixed them. Carbon in the air will be used to generate food as we find new ways to 3d print food. You will see. Our future problem will be not enough carbon
- underlipton 3y ago
  The narrative around climate change, i.e., that it's happening and that we need to do something about it, is not demoralizing. What's demoralizing is that the people with the power, money, and influence to take the biggest steps refuse to do so. Someone has figured that the only way to get them to care is to badger them with the facts until they do, and a lot of us are okay with that. It's preferable to the alternative, which is ecoterrorism. Trying to sweep the situation under the rug while things become more troubled and people become more desperate just makes the latter more likely. In this case, the opposite of mopey and depressed isn't optimism, it's rage.
jaggederest 3y ago
It's literally just mobile devices. Specifically the introduction of the iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the world for the worse if he only knew. Rich kids can afford more mobile devices at a younger age, therefore suffer worse. I'm no luddite, mobile devices are amazingly useful, but their effect on people has not exactly been unmitigatedly positive.
- itishappy 3y ago
  The Hidden Brain podcast came to the same conclusion in the Escaping the Matrix episode featuring Jonathan Haidt. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/escaping-the-matrix/ https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/escaping-the-matrix/ TL;DR: It's phones and social media. We're social creatures who rely on dynamic networks of diverse opinions, but social media perverts this. We build static networks affirming our own opinions and that leaves us afraid of the unknown. My favorite point Jonathan made is that if you look at the world as a whole, the spectrum of morality is actually incredibly diverse! Nobody sets out to build an evil ideology. Empires, caste systems, and communism were all built from moral foundations, even if their values are alien to us. In light of this, instead of asking why so much of the world looks backwards from an American liberal perspective (full disclosure: my perspective), a more interesting question is why American liberals adopt such a narrow view.
  - redthrow 3y ago
    Tyler Cowen also did a podcast with Jonathan Haidt where he questioned Haidt's conclusion that the smartphone/social media are the cause of (some) younger people's poor mental health. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQoNd9oEeoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQoNd9oEeoI (The discussion on Haidt's book "The Anxious Generation" starts at 13:08) Cowen also questioned Haidt's prescription about how social media companies and the government should regulate social media through (stricter) age verification etc.
- neuralRiot 3y ago
  It’s not the the medium itself or the message it carries, it’s the lack of emotional support that has been eroded for years now. It might sound cliché but in the end what every human wants is to be loved, even when teens and pre-teens want to reveal against parents and their rules and teachings they still need them. How can a teen learn and accept that possessions do not guarantee happiness when everyone they see looks happy and successful and their parents look and fight everyday for the same empty goals and they’re absent escaping reality on their devices too. Let kids be kids and teens be teens parents don’t need to be “cool” they need to be parents.
paulpauper 3y ago
It might explain why rich kids are even more depressed than poor ones. Celeb culture helps implant the notion that rich people are more dissatisfied with life or have more dysfunctional lives, because ordinary people who are depressed or dysfunctional get no media coverage.
- airstrike 3y ago
  That's fair. I was mostly replying to someone's statement elsewhere on the thread. I don't know if rich or poor are more depressed.
ramesh31 3y ago
Paradoxically there has never been another moment in all of human history greater than right now for an individual to seek their own happiness. A lot of this just comes down to comparison. We see wealth and excess as the norm to strive toward now, and that anything less is considered failure. There is no "honor in the struggle" anymore. It's just "Why don't I have that thing already? My life sucks".
- watwut 3y ago
  Nah, I really don't think so. There were periods of economic booms and less inequality, those gave people more margin for error.
- m2024 3y ago
  What if your own happiness is contingent on the well-being of the planet and the other life here, which we are rapidly extinguishing? For people who are not soulless, wealth-chasing imbeciles there is no possibility of finding happiness. Soon though these same forces of human nature that are destroying our environment will come back to kill all of us, and that is the only silver lining!
  - pirates 3y ago
    yep, definitely no middle ground between “happiness contingent on the well-being of the planet and other life” and “soulless wealth-chasing imbecile”
- jwells89 3y ago
  > There is no "honor in the struggle" anymore. I’m not sure this is true. From my point of view, struggle is valued no less than it ever was, at least when it’s clear there will be a payoff at the end. Struggling to chase a carrot on a stick that can never be caught isn’t admirable, it’s a waste.
- xetsilon 3y ago
  I am not sure it is really a paradox though. It is straight from Buddhist text that the desire for things that are not easy to get leads to misery. It isn't a paradox that a culture predicated on the idea that happiness comes from the acquisition of things that are hard to get would find itself producing misery if Buddhist text are correct. That is exactly what they say will happen.
jwells89 3y ago
Sounds plausible to me. People need things to look forward to — not just for themselves, but also for the wider circumstances that surround them — in order to be able to get out of bed in the morning and feel good about living. This seems like it’d apply to teenagers even more than adults, between the combination of emotions running hot and having so many years ahead of them. It’s easy to see how someone might become depressed if they believe that their next 60-80 years are going to be some degree of awful.
User23 3y ago
There was a time in living memory when a young adult could expect to buy a house straight out of high school and pay it off in 15 years. Edit: note that baby boomers are not the oldest living generation.
- philipkglass 3y ago
  Among my Baby Boomer parents and their siblings (my 9 aunts and uncles), 15 years after high school only one of them lived in a house with the mortgage already paid off. None of those people even grew up in economically disadvantaged households. Did the majority of people in that generation (or an earlier one, if that's what you mean) actually own a house outright 15 years after graduating from high school?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - User23 3y ago
    My greatest generation grandfather paid off his mortgage in about five years with a sixth grade education. I grant that was in part due to the postwar boom and his real wages skyrocketing after closing, but it’s worth remembering that the working class stopped sharing in real productivity gains in about 1965. We’ve had similar economic booms but real wages have remained flat, or actually sharply declined in terms of housing.
spencerflem 3y ago
26, this feels so right. not sure what I'm supposed to be looking forward to. All the movements I could be happy about are regressing (trans rights, women's rights, hell even gay rights which seemed incredibly solid). Climate change is going to ruin everything and we're not going to do anything about it. Gaza is a neverending parade of tragedies. It feels like all there is to do is sit around and feel bad and wait for things to get worse.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  I’ve got a career I like, a wife and kids I love, and a city I enjoy. I’m also sharing a planet full of a species that has endured and conquered plagues, slavery, centuries of war, and the threat of nuclear war, amongst other hardships. Things have been much worse and we will continue to improve. Check out the book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know for a counter to your doomscrolling. So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that, all things considered, the world is getting worse? Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, observed, "There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less time—compare the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time needed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on."' News is bad news; steady progress is not news.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tekla 3y ago
  You are way too old to have such a childish outlook on this. The world continues to spin and most people continue to live their lives.
  - trashface 3y ago
    49 and have the same outlook so I guess i'm childish too. Modern life seems to be mostly just waiting around for the next bad thing to happen, to me or someone else I know or maybe both. Wasn't like this in my 20s thats for sure, it does appear to be a new thing.
iblmfrgmntation 3y ago
What we need is a Defragmentation tool for our world. I will posit that the current state of it is a natural evolution of the process of breaking things down and creating choke points/friction to produce more value. Up to the point that each generation loses track of it's reference points little by little therefore repeating history under a different disguise.

chrisweekly 3y ago

(+1, insightful) 100% agreed. Along these same lines, the endlessly demoralizing narrative around climate change is likely another big factor. I think many more people need to read and internalize things like Hannah Ritchie's book "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet". Highly recommended.

jplusequalt 3y ago
"How we *CAN* be" is doing a lot of lifting there. Boomers, GenX, and older Millennials all had ample opportunities to do something before we arrived here.
- fhd2 3y ago
  Didn't downvote you, but that's not a hopeful attitude. If the damage is done, figuring out who to blame doesn't repair it. Sometimes we gotta clean up somebody else's mess or nobody will. As programmers, quite routinely I suppose :P
  - viraptor 3y ago
    But it sure is useful to figure out what policies and who did that... considering those are basically still the people in power. For any world-wide change you need to either change them or wait for them to die.
- skinkestek 3y ago
  We / they did a lot. We actually took steps and saved the Ozone layer. Invented and made the solar panel economically viable. Electric cars aren't exactly designed by the youngest generation either. We / they have taken big steps to stop trade in tropic hardwoods. The generation before us built the systems and societies that we today take for granted. To the best of their abilities, very many of them worked very hard to give something better to us than they got themselves. Go further back and they actually stopped the most well oiled war machine that has ever existed, the nazis. Later they stopped the Soviet by outcompeting them. Hindsight is 20/20. But a little humility should be mandatory I think. And ironically, we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load (and also several times less
  - triceratops 3y ago
    > we have the environmentalists of the past to thank for the fact that we don't have several times as much nuclear power for base load Ask yourself why environmentalists succeeded in shutting down nuclear power, the one viable alternative to fossil fuels, when they failed at literally everything else. That might lead you to who was actually responsible.
    - skinkestek 3y ago
      Because of Chernobyl. And they did not fail at everything else. They succeeded in a lot of cases. For a rather large win, as I mentioned, the Ozone layer was saved. Another big one was banning of DDT and introduction of regulations on everything from new pesticides / herbicides to emissions (or fuel saving as we used to refer to it until recently).
  - fulafel 3y ago
    This blaming the environmentalists for nuclear's failures is quite a tired argument. In addition to being false (environmentalists didn't have the political capital for it in the critical decades) the enormous public subsidies towards nuclear power in the past 80 years were an opportunity cost away from renewables. If we had spent even a small part of that on renewables r&d investment starting in the same timeframe (40s/50s) we could have transitioned from fossil fuels decades earlier.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but I don't think so. All the sociopolitical difficulties that hinder solutions today were just as, if not more, insurmountable for all those generations. And the technological landscape is much more promising today than at any point since this problem was identified. And people from all the generations you listed are strongly represented among the people who created and began scaling those technologies. No generation has been better positioned to contribute to solving this problem than the one entering adulthood today. It will be a damn shame if most of them but into doomerism and let it keep them from taking their shot.
- fulafel 3y ago
  The "don't look up" mindset practiced by generations both current and previous reaches a new height of cognitive dissonance. The interesting question is that why such a thing didn't cause more widespread mental health problems before (though it did for many).
sanderjd 3y ago
This is fundamentally why I find the technology / media narratives fairly compelling. I tend to agree that the first order issue is that people seem to increasingly subscribe to "demoralizing narratives". But not just climate change. I see the same phenomenon, just with different narratives among my more "right wing" loved ones. Instead of the demoralizing narrative being climate change, it is that society is crumbling due to the decline of religion, or because men aren't manly enough and women aren't womanly enough, or because people like them are being censored into oblivion, etc. But why is it that all these different kinds of doom narratives seem to be spreading so much and getting so much traction now, when they didn't seem to in the past? I have trouble seeing what else has changed significantly enough to cause this, if the explanation is not mass adoption of a new kind of media.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  I think blaming it on the phones themselves though is incredibly useless. Yes, the phones and networks permitting the construction of these echo-chambers are a problem that does warrant attention, but it doesn't change the fact that there are numerous, wide scale, huge problems that we are just not dealing with as a society. Is it healthy to have those problems shoved in your face non-stop? No, of course not, but it's arguably even more unhealthy to pretend they don't exist, especially when many of these are existential threats to us as a species. Basically: Climate doomerism is a problem, yes. But climate change is also a problem, one that our power structures seem completely unwilling to address. And in such an environment, Climate doomerism is kind of a logical outcome: we know there's an issue, scientists have known since the 70's, yet we do precious little about it and fundamentally our leaders seem content to ride out the collapse of the biosphere and cash their checks. Of course that's fucking depressing.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Collectively, we might do more about climate change (and other problems) if we weren't spending all our time and energy on our phones...
    - 3y ago
bee_rider 3y ago
I wonder what it feels like WRT climate change, for the next couple generations. For millennials, it was really depressing because the previous generations left this giant problem for us, but at least there was the slight mitigating factor that, while the situation was pretty well understood by scientists, at least it wasn’t totally obvious to the whole population. Our parents might have been gullible but that’s a non-malicious failing. We’ve also done sweet fuck-all about global warming though. We can say it is because we haven’t been able to grab the reins, but we’re hitting our 40’s pretty soon. We owed the next generation a revolution but we seem to be taking a “maybe I’ll get promoted” approach to things. It wasn’t enough. I wonder if all we managed to do was kill the hope that “awareness” is actually going to accomplish anything.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Fauntleroy 3y ago
    We can't really ignore Climate Change, as it is something that is currently occurring and unlikely to stop. Also, it is slowly but surely having disastrous effects on society at large.
    - datadrivenangel 3y ago
      Odds are decent that if we ignored climate change it would cause billions of people to die and create massive disruptions in the lives of those who live over the next several centuries. It would only be catastrophic, not existential. We should work hard to reduce the risks and mitigate the impacts, but the species will go on even if we ignore it. And, almost everything is getting better faster than anyone predicted. There's a strong case for climate optimism, and a future that we can improve by continuing to take action and put in the hard work of fixing the world.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      You personally can because you have no control over it. Unless you become the next ruler of China, India and Russia plus control three houses of US government what you personally do won't matter. So stop living in terror, not sleeping at night, thinking the world is hopeless. The cold war was more serious and things worked out unexpectedly. World War I and II were more serious and they ended different than how everyone thought. Landfills filling up was the concern now it's used for power generation. ACID rain.. holes Ozone layer. We fixed them. Carbon in the air will be used to generate food as we find new ways to 3d print food. You will see. Our future problem will be not enough carbon
underlipton 3y ago
The narrative around climate change, i.e., that it's happening and that we need to do something about it, is not demoralizing. What's demoralizing is that the people with the power, money, and influence to take the biggest steps refuse to do so. Someone has figured that the only way to get them to care is to badger them with the facts until they do, and a lot of us are okay with that. It's preferable to the alternative, which is ecoterrorism. Trying to sweep the situation under the rug while things become more troubled and people become more desperate just makes the latter more likely. In this case, the opposite of mopey and depressed isn't optimism, it's rage.

jaggederest 3y ago

It's literally just mobile devices. Specifically the introduction of the iPhone. Steve Jobs changed the world for the worse if he only knew. Rich kids can afford more mobile devices at a younger age, therefore suffer worse. I'm no luddite, mobile devices are amazingly useful, but their effect on people has not exactly been unmitigatedly positive.

itishappy 3y ago
The Hidden Brain podcast came to the same conclusion in the Escaping the Matrix episode featuring Jonathan Haidt. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/escaping-the-matrix/ https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/escaping-the-matrix/ TL;DR: It's phones and social media. We're social creatures who rely on dynamic networks of diverse opinions, but social media perverts this. We build static networks affirming our own opinions and that leaves us afraid of the unknown. My favorite point Jonathan made is that if you look at the world as a whole, the spectrum of morality is actually incredibly diverse! Nobody sets out to build an evil ideology. Empires, caste systems, and communism were all built from moral foundations, even if their values are alien to us. In light of this, instead of asking why so much of the world looks backwards from an American liberal perspective (full disclosure: my perspective), a more interesting question is why American liberals adopt such a narrow view.
- redthrow 3y ago
  Tyler Cowen also did a podcast with Jonathan Haidt where he questioned Haidt's conclusion that the smartphone/social media are the cause of (some) younger people's poor mental health. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQoNd9oEeoI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQoNd9oEeoI (The discussion on Haidt's book "The Anxious Generation" starts at 13:08) Cowen also questioned Haidt's prescription about how social media companies and the government should regulate social media through (stricter) age verification etc.
neuralRiot 3y ago
It’s not the the medium itself or the message it carries, it’s the lack of emotional support that has been eroded for years now. It might sound cliché but in the end what every human wants is to be loved, even when teens and pre-teens want to reveal against parents and their rules and teachings they still need them. How can a teen learn and accept that possessions do not guarantee happiness when everyone they see looks happy and successful and their parents look and fight everyday for the same empty goals and they’re absent escaping reality on their devices too. Let kids be kids and teens be teens parents don’t need to be “cool” they need to be parents.

paulpauper 3y ago

It might explain why rich kids are even more depressed than poor ones. Celeb culture helps implant the notion that rich people are more dissatisfied with life or have more dysfunctional lives, because ordinary people who are depressed or dysfunctional get no media coverage.

airstrike 3y ago
That's fair. I was mostly replying to someone's statement elsewhere on the thread. I don't know if rich or poor are more depressed.

ramesh31 3y ago

Paradoxically there has never been another moment in all of human history greater than right now for an individual to seek their own happiness. A lot of this just comes down to comparison. We see wealth and excess as the norm to strive toward now, and that anything less is considered failure. There is no "honor in the struggle" anymore. It's just "Why don't I have that thing already? My life sucks".

watwut 3y ago
Nah, I really don't think so. There were periods of economic booms and less inequality, those gave people more margin for error.
m2024 3y ago
What if your own happiness is contingent on the well-being of the planet and the other life here, which we are rapidly extinguishing? For people who are not soulless, wealth-chasing imbeciles there is no possibility of finding happiness. Soon though these same forces of human nature that are destroying our environment will come back to kill all of us, and that is the only silver lining!
- pirates 3y ago
  yep, definitely no middle ground between “happiness contingent on the well-being of the planet and other life” and “soulless wealth-chasing imbecile”
jwells89 3y ago
> There is no "honor in the struggle" anymore. I’m not sure this is true. From my point of view, struggle is valued no less than it ever was, at least when it’s clear there will be a payoff at the end. Struggling to chase a carrot on a stick that can never be caught isn’t admirable, it’s a waste.
xetsilon 3y ago
I am not sure it is really a paradox though. It is straight from Buddhist text that the desire for things that are not easy to get leads to misery. It isn't a paradox that a culture predicated on the idea that happiness comes from the acquisition of things that are hard to get would find itself producing misery if Buddhist text are correct. That is exactly what they say will happen.

jwells89 3y ago

Sounds plausible to me. People need things to look forward to — not just for themselves, but also for the wider circumstances that surround them — in order to be able to get out of bed in the morning and feel good about living. This seems like it’d apply to teenagers even more than adults, between the combination of emotions running hot and having so many years ahead of them. It’s easy to see how someone might become depressed if they believe that their next 60-80 years are going to be some degree of awful.

User23 3y ago

There was a time in living memory when a young adult could expect to buy a house straight out of high school and pay it off in 15 years. Edit: note that baby boomers are not the oldest living generation.

philipkglass 3y ago
Among my Baby Boomer parents and their siblings (my 9 aunts and uncles), 15 years after high school only one of them lived in a house with the mortgage already paid off. None of those people even grew up in economically disadvantaged households. Did the majority of people in that generation (or an earlier one, if that's what you mean) actually own a house outright 15 years after graduating from high school?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- User23 3y ago
  My greatest generation grandfather paid off his mortgage in about five years with a sixth grade education. I grant that was in part due to the postwar boom and his real wages skyrocketing after closing, but it’s worth remembering that the working class stopped sharing in real productivity gains in about 1965. We’ve had similar economic booms but real wages have remained flat, or actually sharply declined in terms of housing.

spencerflem 3y ago

26, this feels so right. not sure what I'm supposed to be looking forward to. All the movements I could be happy about are regressing (trans rights, women's rights, hell even gay rights which seemed incredibly solid). Climate change is going to ruin everything and we're not going to do anything about it. Gaza is a neverending parade of tragedies. It feels like all there is to do is sit around and feel bad and wait for things to get worse.

williamcotton 3y ago
I’ve got a career I like, a wife and kids I love, and a city I enjoy. I’m also sharing a planet full of a species that has endured and conquered plagues, slavery, centuries of war, and the threat of nuclear war, amongst other hardships. Things have been much worse and we will continue to improve. Check out the book Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know for a counter to your doomscrolling. So why do so many smart people wrongly believe that, all things considered, the world is getting worse? Way back in 1965, Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, observed, "There is a basic asymmetry in life between the positive, which is difficult and takes time, and the negative, which is much easier and takes less time—compare the amount of time needed to bring up and socialize an adult person and the amount of time needed to kill him in an accident, the amount of time needed to build a house and to destroy it in a fire, to make an airplane and to crash it, and so on."' News is bad news; steady progress is not news.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tekla 3y ago
You are way too old to have such a childish outlook on this. The world continues to spin and most people continue to live their lives.
- trashface 3y ago
  49 and have the same outlook so I guess i'm childish too. Modern life seems to be mostly just waiting around for the next bad thing to happen, to me or someone else I know or maybe both. Wasn't like this in my 20s thats for sure, it does appear to be a new thing.

iblmfrgmntation 3y ago

What we need is a Defragmentation tool for our world. I will posit that the current state of it is a natural evolution of the process of breaking things down and creating choke points/friction to produce more value. Up to the point that each generation loses track of it's reference points little by little therefore repeating history under a different disguise.