5 ms·

To be fair, it's not just the phones. It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials)

by imdsm 2y ago

To be fair, it's not just the phones. It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in. As it says, 'phones stop that [trusting everything is ok] from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch.' But I think at the same time, we're all so aware of the fragility of life so much more. My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. My generation, I feel, are aware that they can, and do. So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors. Is the world different now too? In the UK, you're never far from someone with a knife and an attitude problem. You know not to argue or protest, to intervene or become involved in anything, for fear of someone with a 'zombie' knife attacking you, and the problem is kids are more mixed, not yet sorted into their social bands as we adults are. So your nice to do child might be mixing with a zombie knife carrier which increases the probability that something could go horrible wrong. And the above is just one example of how people are thinking ahead, but multiply this by several different potential areas of concern and yes, you have a parent that worries. But was it better to have parents that didn't seem to care?

mschuster91 2y ago
> It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in. The problem at the core is that we rapidly went from high-trust societies where you could literally leave your door unlocked or even open so the cat could have free dominance over the local bird population and nothing would happen to a low/zero-trust society where you have to fear even a locked door isn't a guarantee that some crackhead didn't break in to get something to pawn for their next hit. And to be very clear: more police, deporting migrants or whatnot else that conservatives/far right reliably preach as a "solution" will not help, because the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  "the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else" That sounds like article of faith. The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society? What about other poorer European countries? In a cross-border comparison, there is no obvious strong correlation between the parameters you mention and violent crime, how could there be a causal relationship then? And if we limit ourselves to the US, what about crime development in time? It certainly didn't rise and fall in lockstep with poverty, income and wealth inequality, not even in the last decades.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society? It got way worse during the Thatcher years and especially following them, with the formerly mighty heavy industry all but collapsing, and the Brexiteers made heavy bank on that. The aftershock of first Covid and then Ukraine with the gas price and general inflation was yet another heavy blow.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      I live in a Czech city where the formerly mighty heavy industry collapsed spectacularly, after decades of being propped up by the previous regime for ideological reasons. Knifings are still pretty rare here. I have met and lived with plenty of poor people and mere material precariousness won't remake one into a callous psychopath who behaves like a violent predator. Drugs will, though. Frying the brain, as they say.
  - mattgperry 2y ago
    The UK has been described as an Eastern European economy with London bolted on. Poverty is very obviously increasing there, for anyone familiar with the country.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      Come visit us in Eastern Europe and see for yourself that a lower income doesn't equal to "people behaving like wolves". My grandpa grew up without electricity in his home, seven people in a single wooden hut. He was always a kind old man, even though a bit of a drunkard.
snickerer 2y ago
I immediately wanted to answer: you are wrong about the violent knife guys, that's only a feeling, look at the statistics, the crime rate in UK is decreasing like everywhere else. Then I looked for the link to support my argument. OMG, statista says that the violence rate is skyrocketing since 2015, at least in England and Wales. This is not the case for other Western European countries. Quite interesting! I try not to interprete these numbers, because I don't know the reasons behind them.
- weberer 2y ago
  >This is not the case for other Western European countries. It is in some of them like Sweden for example.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    There is a very strong correlation between two factors here, one of them being violent crime, that Western Europeans are very hesitant to acknowledge. Sweden is well known for having high levels of this other factor right now, so your observation about violent crime is not surprising.
    - maccard 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        I've been poor, flat broke for years in fact, but I've never felt any compulsion to stab some stranger on the street. Can you explain the mechanism linking poverty to murderous impulse?
        revert_to_test 2y ago
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/ Also, private observation : Poland was relatively safe country during communist rule, although everyone was very poor. Then '90s happened, income disparity went through the roof, unemployment skyrocketed, and you could be greeted on the street by a group of young gentlemen asking you for your possessions, not to mention extreme gang violence and fights between hooligans.
fxtentacle 2y ago
It's almost as if showing young people lots of movies where people murder other people who move weirdly (the zombies) might lead to kids imitating this behaviour. And I'm pretty sure this perfectly correlates with poverty. Both parents working means the kids are at home without supervision and with unlimited access to the TV and streaming services. In my childhood, it was still pretty easy to see that zombies were a movie invention, but with modern CGI, I can't tell the difference anymore.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  The link between zombie movies and people stabbing each other with ""zombie knives"" (which I've never seen featured in zombie movies...) seems extremely dubious. I don't think these stabbings are caused by people acting out things they saw in movies.
- imdsm 2y ago
  I'm not sure about the first point. I grew up watching zombie films, playing resident evil, all those games, and have no feelings of going out and doing it to actual people. Yes, graphics were worse when we grew up (assuming same rough age) but we still looked at them and said "Wow so realistic!" so I don't think that the issue is that people now see realistic zombie films and think, great, I'll go stab someone on the bus for disagreeing with me. I think its more the case that people are living in dangerous neighbourhoods, so they carry a knife for protection and are amped up ready to use it and so at the first sign of confrontation, they do. What used to be a fist fight is now a knife fight. What used to be a sore head is now a dead body. But, I do agree with the poverty link. I grew up in poverty, I saw the lifestyle, the way people act, the way they aren't raised by their parents. It's been this way for thousands of years. It'll never change.
chiefalchemist 2y ago
> So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors. So we evolved to create a device / technology that creates expectations and an environment that are entirely counter to our evolutionary upbringing? We now expect to stop what is impossible to stop (i.e., life)? And we can't stop ourselves to stop wanting to stop that thing (again, life)? And we've normalized and culturalized all this to the point that we blame the device and anyone but ourselves for our own decisions and actions? Surveillance Capitalism... is a certified success. p.s..Parents have / did care. But they generally didn't feed an unhealthy paradigm. They had a reasonable sense of what mattered, when, and why. Their foundation was trust, not fear; and often they had faith (which is something the paradigm has convinced so many they don't need).
jajko 2y ago
Nope. Previous generation didn't care? Thats properly insulting to whole generation, maybe its your situation and I am sorry in such case, but please stop making such wrong accusations. Death was around, from time to time some kid would die - hit by car, fell down something, got sick etc. If anything parents were more resistant to suffering, just sucked it up and moved, they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude. They also didn't know that well to talk about their emotions or even process them effectively, so just bottled them up and continued. Its up to each of us to create for our kids environments we want them to raise in. You are a control freak or helicopter parent? Well there will be consequences. You run in cca full trust mode with your kids and just manage things like healthy food, tons of physical activities, a lot of time spent in wild nature and let them figure the rest? They can have it too, but some trust into them not killing themselves is required. You don't like the place you live in? Change it if you can or leave it otherwise, world is big and plenty of good places to spend rest of your life in.
- imdsm 2y ago
  Apologies if it upset you, not my intention, but the prevailing feeling (in the UK at least, and these are UK HN hours) is that Gen X were quite absent parents for the most part. They weren't as strict as TGG or Boomers, but weren't as switched on and present as Millennials. > they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude > Previous generation didn't care Allow me to make one small change then - Previous generation didn't care + Previous generation didn't care as much
- lupusreal 2y ago
  > They also didn't know that well to talk about their emotions or even process them effectively, so just bottled them up and continued. If that method of handling their emotions made them more resilient to hardship, then maybe it was the correct way after all.
  - jajko 2y ago
    The problems you don't even acknowledge are there won't ever be resolved nor addressed. Sure, you can keep ignoring them, but as life goes on the pile of stuff just sitting there that you constantly have to keep looking away from grows significantly. Not life I want to live, nor a parent I want to be.
lelanthran 2y ago
> My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. I think that, as a not yet fully developed adult, you weren't exactly noticing that they did care.[1] Think about it this way: remember all those times they stopped you from doing something stupid that would have hurt yourself? Yeah - that was them caring for your wellbeing. [1] Fair enough, you say 'seemed to not care' and not 'did not care'
- mysterydip 2y ago
  I think it's more the "the time is 9pm. do you know where your children are?" PSAs and such of the time, where kids were expected to be outdoors or on their own playing for extended periods of time. ref: https://youtu.be/jBy9VDEWKOE?si=maH8tfgA35KF8osf https://youtu.be/jBy9VDEWKOE?si=maH8tfgA35KF8osf
- imdsm 2y ago
  Unfortunately growing up in poverty, there weren't that many times they stopped us doing stupid things. I feel like it has given us street smarts, yet at the same time, I couldn't imagine doing the same to my children. Weak strong cycle perhaps.

by imdsm 2y ago

mschuster91 2y ago

> It's that we've been conditioned for instant gratification over many years (most of our adult lives if we're millennials) and this extends to knowing someone is OK. There's no more 'simply trusting that all is well, because there’s nothing else you can do' until that's the only option, and that's when worry can creep in. The problem at the core is that we rapidly went from high-trust societies where you could literally leave your door unlocked or even open so the cat could have free dominance over the local bird population and nothing would happen to a low/zero-trust society where you have to fear even a locked door isn't a guarantee that some crackhead didn't break in to get something to pawn for their next hit. And to be very clear: more police, deporting migrants or whatnot else that conservatives/far right reliably preach as a "solution" will not help, because the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else.

inglor_cz 2y ago
"the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else" That sounds like article of faith. The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society? What about other poorer European countries? In a cross-border comparison, there is no obvious strong correlation between the parameters you mention and violent crime, how could there be a causal relationship then? And if we limit ourselves to the US, what about crime development in time? It certainly didn't rise and fall in lockstep with poverty, income and wealth inequality, not even in the last decades.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society? It got way worse during the Thatcher years and especially following them, with the formerly mighty heavy industry all but collapsing, and the Brexiteers made heavy bank on that. The aftershock of first Covid and then Ukraine with the gas price and general inflation was yet another heavy blow.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    I live in a Czech city where the formerly mighty heavy industry collapsed spectacularly, after decades of being propped up by the previous regime for ideological reasons. Knifings are still pretty rare here. I have met and lived with plenty of poor people and mere material precariousness won't remake one into a callous psychopath who behaves like a violent predator. Drugs will, though. Frying the brain, as they say.
- mattgperry 2y ago
  The UK has been described as an Eastern European economy with London bolted on. Poverty is very obviously increasing there, for anyone familiar with the country.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Come visit us in Eastern Europe and see for yourself that a lower income doesn't equal to "people behaving like wolves". My grandpa grew up without electricity in his home, seven people in a single wooden hut. He was always a kind old man, even though a bit of a drunkard.

snickerer 2y ago

I immediately wanted to answer: you are wrong about the violent knife guys, that's only a feeling, look at the statistics, the crime rate in UK is decreasing like everywhere else. Then I looked for the link to support my argument. OMG, statista says that the violence rate is skyrocketing since 2015, at least in England and Wales. This is not the case for other Western European countries. Quite interesting! I try not to interprete these numbers, because I don't know the reasons behind them.

weberer 2y ago
>This is not the case for other Western European countries. It is in some of them like Sweden for example.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  There is a very strong correlation between two factors here, one of them being violent crime, that Western Europeans are very hesitant to acknowledge. Sweden is well known for having high levels of this other factor right now, so your observation about violent crime is not surprising.
  - maccard 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      I've been poor, flat broke for years in fact, but I've never felt any compulsion to stab some stranger on the street. Can you explain the mechanism linking poverty to murderous impulse?
      - revert_to_test 2y ago
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/ Also, private observation : Poland was relatively safe country during communist rule, although everyone was very poor. Then '90s happened, income disparity went through the roof, unemployment skyrocketed, and you could be greeted on the street by a group of young gentlemen asking you for your possessions, not to mention extreme gang violence and fights between hooligans.

fxtentacle 2y ago

It's almost as if showing young people lots of movies where people murder other people who move weirdly (the zombies) might lead to kids imitating this behaviour. And I'm pretty sure this perfectly correlates with poverty. Both parents working means the kids are at home without supervision and with unlimited access to the TV and streaming services. In my childhood, it was still pretty easy to see that zombies were a movie invention, but with modern CGI, I can't tell the difference anymore.

lupusreal 2y ago
The link between zombie movies and people stabbing each other with ""zombie knives"" (which I've never seen featured in zombie movies...) seems extremely dubious. I don't think these stabbings are caused by people acting out things they saw in movies.
imdsm 2y ago
I'm not sure about the first point. I grew up watching zombie films, playing resident evil, all those games, and have no feelings of going out and doing it to actual people. Yes, graphics were worse when we grew up (assuming same rough age) but we still looked at them and said "Wow so realistic!" so I don't think that the issue is that people now see realistic zombie films and think, great, I'll go stab someone on the bus for disagreeing with me. I think its more the case that people are living in dangerous neighbourhoods, so they carry a knife for protection and are amped up ready to use it and so at the first sign of confrontation, they do. What used to be a fist fight is now a knife fight. What used to be a sore head is now a dead body. But, I do agree with the poverty link. I grew up in poverty, I saw the lifestyle, the way people act, the way they aren't raised by their parents. It's been this way for thousands of years. It'll never change.

chiefalchemist 2y ago

> So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors. So we evolved to create a device / technology that creates expectations and an environment that are entirely counter to our evolutionary upbringing? We now expect to stop what is impossible to stop (i.e., life)? And we can't stop ourselves to stop wanting to stop that thing (again, life)? And we've normalized and culturalized all this to the point that we blame the device and anyone but ourselves for our own decisions and actions? Surveillance Capitalism... is a certified success. p.s..Parents have / did care. But they generally didn't feed an unhealthy paradigm. They had a reasonable sense of what mattered, when, and why. Their foundation was trust, not fear; and often they had faith (which is something the paradigm has convinced so many they don't need).

jajko 2y ago

Nope. Previous generation didn't care? Thats properly insulting to whole generation, maybe its your situation and I am sorry in such case, but please stop making such wrong accusations. Death was around, from time to time some kid would die - hit by car, fell down something, got sick etc. If anything parents were more resistant to suffering, just sucked it up and moved, they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude. They also didn't know that well to talk about their emotions or even process them effectively, so just bottled them up and continued. Its up to each of us to create for our kids environments we want them to raise in. You are a control freak or helicopter parent? Well there will be consequences. You run in cca full trust mode with your kids and just manage things like healthy food, tons of physical activities, a lot of time spent in wild nature and let them figure the rest? They can have it too, but some trust into them not killing themselves is required. You don't like the place you live in? Change it if you can or leave it otherwise, world is big and plenty of good places to spend rest of your life in.

imdsm 2y ago
Apologies if it upset you, not my intention, but the prevailing feeling (in the UK at least, and these are UK HN hours) is that Gen X were quite absent parents for the most part. They weren't as strict as TGG or Boomers, but weren't as switched on and present as Millennials. > they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude > Previous generation didn't care Allow me to make one small change then - Previous generation didn't care + Previous generation didn't care as much
lupusreal 2y ago
> They also didn't know that well to talk about their emotions or even process them effectively, so just bottled them up and continued. If that method of handling their emotions made them more resilient to hardship, then maybe it was the correct way after all.
- jajko 2y ago
  The problems you don't even acknowledge are there won't ever be resolved nor addressed. Sure, you can keep ignoring them, but as life goes on the pile of stuff just sitting there that you constantly have to keep looking away from grows significantly. Not life I want to live, nor a parent I want to be.

lelanthran 2y ago

> My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. I think that, as a not yet fully developed adult, you weren't exactly noticing that they did care.[1] Think about it this way: remember all those times they stopped you from doing something stupid that would have hurt yourself? Yeah - that was them caring for your wellbeing. [1] Fair enough, you say 'seemed to not care' and not 'did not care'

mysterydip 2y ago
I think it's more the "the time is 9pm. do you know where your children are?" PSAs and such of the time, where kids were expected to be outdoors or on their own playing for extended periods of time. ref: https://youtu.be/jBy9VDEWKOE?si=maH8tfgA35KF8osf https://youtu.be/jBy9VDEWKOE?si=maH8tfgA35KF8osf
imdsm 2y ago
Unfortunately growing up in poverty, there weren't that many times they stopped us doing stupid things. I feel like it has given us street smarts, yet at the same time, I couldn't imagine doing the same to my children. Weak strong cycle perhaps.