14 ms·

Rising young worker despair in the United States

139 points by johntfella 1y ago

pmg101 1y ago
Terrible to read that young people's despair is now so bad that it's almost as high as mine, a person in my 40s
- devb 1y ago
  [flagged]
- lnsru 1y ago
  I am also there. Geographically I am in Germany. It’s a bit scary to think, that the same motherboard I design right now can be designed in other country 6 hours by car away for the half the price. And there is nothing special about me. The guy elsewhere will have similar education, same skills, same software and probably will be more hungry to work hard.
ipnon 1y ago
Most ongoing social trends in the United States can be traced back to this. When foreigners are puzzled and ask me why is X or Y happening in America, this is usually the best answer. The majority of young people, but not the majority of the electorate, are in a tough or even dire situation, and so they do not have much interest in maintaining the status quo. The result is social upheaval, the varieties of which I'm sure we're all familiar with by now, and need not be repeated.
- msgodel 1y ago
  At this point they've been so extremely neglected it probably doesn't make sense for around ~30% of them to even try with life. That's the real reason for the high number of drug related deaths IMO.
lordnacho 1y ago
Well, you can definitely sense it if you browse Reddit. Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market. I don't mean to dismiss their concerns, far from it. It does seem like we've been making it harder and harder for anyone to become an adult over the past few decades. Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem. > More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers. Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States. During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment (Feiveson, 2023).
- AtlasBarfed 1y ago
  Good news, AI monitoring is coming! Maximum corporate dystopia as a training bed for overall societal totalitarianism. Unions are the only counter to this, as depressing as that is. Possibly overreach by corporations combined with the collapse of globalism will reempower workers. But robotics and AI may completely undercut that.
  - owebmaster 1y ago
    Calling it globalism in place of globalization or just capitalism is so cringe
Zealotux 1y ago
I'm not American but I can sense the feeling is the same here in Europe. I wouldn't want to be a younger man right now. I feel like on top of every possible struggles they're facing: low wages, low sense of meaning, social media addiction, scarce opportunities for true connections... we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining", wish I knew how to help beyond my modest occasional contributions.
- pif 1y ago
  > they're just "whining" Many of them, indeed, are just whining. And they keep whining without realizing how spoiled they are. But (at least) a few of them are having good ideas and, especially, implementing them with professionalism and passion.
  - mindwok 1y ago
    Society is failing these people. In some ways, they’re given the most advanced amenities humanity has ever been able to offer: fastest internet, the nicest cars, affordable global travel. In other areas, society is completely failing them. Connection, meaning, career prospects. They’re spoiled in some ways, completely lost in others. It’s important we don’t ignore that.
    - exitb 1y ago
      I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people. Average person has no influence, not even a little bit, on any of those things. Meanwhile, a small subset of the people have all the influence and they mostly operate in their own self-interest.
      - mindwok 1y ago
        I don’t mean to discharge responsibility. We are society, and the onus is on us to push for a better way of doing things.
      - mschuster91 1y ago
thiago_fm 1y ago
Good luck for the fellow Americans that will pay up that 120%+ GDP/debt ratio, with 7% deficits and no spending cuts in sight. The rich in the US are taking advantage of it, by making the US pay for all welfare while they barely pay any taxes. If you are an American young professional which needs to work in order to survive, you are being ripped off everyday by just existing.
- ericd 1y ago
  If you inflate the currency, GDP goes up, and nominal debt stays the same. That’s the government’s current playbook, with its massive fiscal deficits.
  - darkfloo 1y ago
    That only works if rates don’t go up which is probably not a good premise to rely on
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      If you are in a balanced budget or continued deficit situation, then, yes, increased rates will eventually be a factor (but that's a lagging effect, even then) if you have a sufficient surplus that with the effect of inflation increasing its nominal size with the same real revenue and spending you can pay down debt at least as fast as it comes due, so you aren't going back to do new net borrowing, increase cost of borrowing doesn't matter much.
  - Gasp0de 1y ago
    The only thing missing is replacing the head of the federal reserve bank with a mindless puppet so they stop standing in the way of success (inflation).
  - tobias3 1y ago
    This works if all the debt is long term debt (>=10Y), which surely Jellen and Bessent have been selling, right?
saubeidl 1y ago
[flagged]
- rf15 1y ago
  Absolutely. As history shows though, you can't keep that last state particularly stable, so we will always have times of equality, times of oppression/exploitation and times of killing today's flavour of nobility, ad infinitum.
- philipallstar 1y ago
  > Only through class consciousness can we build a new society in which the fruits of labor are enjoyed by us all. They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time. And this isn't an inherent contradiction of capidalism. Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others. Lower prices are good for every one. Raising everyone's wages out of proportion to the value they create only raises all the prices.
  - regularization 1y ago
    > Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others. Heirs are made rich every day by being born.
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      Of course some[0] don't earn their wealth, but their wealth was earned by someone else still providing value. They got the output for nothing, but it was still earned. There are some people, such as Vladimir Putin, who just drain their country of its resources, enabled by the force of the state. But capitalism is about free exchange of value. So if someone gets rich; lots of other people got value. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_billionaires#2023_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_billionaires#20...
      - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
CalRobert 1y ago
The actual PDF is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34071/w34071.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34071/w340... From the conclusion: (I paraphrase) Mental Health has worsened rapidly in the last decade in the US, especially for young women. It goes on: """ It does not appear that the declining mental health of young workers is driven by a decline in the youth wage compared to the wage of older workers; this ratio has increased. Real wages have also been on the rise. As Feiveson (2024) has noted the relative prices of housing and childcare have risen. Student debt is high and expensive. The health of young adults has also deteriorated, as seen in increases in social isolation and obesity. Suicide rates of the young are rising. Moreover, Jean Twenge provides evidence that the work ethic itself among the young has plummeted. Some have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs. There is a good deal of supporting evidence from a variety of surveys including from Pew, the Conference Board and Johns Hopkins on the parlous state of young worker well-being in the USA that we documented here. The concern is that we are observing the consequences of past well- being shocks. We should note that 10.1% of workers aged 20 in 2023 said they were in despair. They were aged 17 when COVID lockdowns were implemented in 2020. They were 10 years old in 2013 as the smartphone and the internet exploded. In addition, of course, they were in high school ages 14-18 in 2017-2021. We know from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that the well- being of high school students deteriorated sharply around that time.15 Jean Twenge suggested to us that an explanation for this, maybe that childhood and teenage years with low levels of in-person interaction and more time online, such as have occurred since 2014 or so, results in depression and pessimism and dissatisfaction across many domains (including work). Social media glamorizes others' lives plus online news and social media encourage pessimism about jobs and the economy in general. This likely results in dissatisfaction across many domains, perhaps especially work. With an additional side element perhaps of "the whole system is rigged anyway, so why try?" This rise in despair/psychological distress of young workers may well be the consequence of the mental health declines observed when they were high school children going back a decade or more. Increasing access to the internet and smartphones seem to be the culprits. """
- javcasas 1y ago
  > Some have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs. That is such crazy level of spin it would make electrons orbiting atoms ashamed. So the young are expected to be happy to waste their life doing something they know is even less than worthless so that they can afford to survive. That is pure "let them eat cake", "children yearn for the mines" pure raw unadultered bullshit.
brcmthrowaway 1y ago
Has anyone looked up a HNer earning over $1mn posts from 10 years ago to see if they expressed the same despair?
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  The moderately to fairly rich are the bread and butter of a good number of psychologist and psychiatric practices. When the majority of fundamental Maslow hierarchy of needs are met, then comes the desire for "meaning", quarter-/mid-/three-quarter-life crises/thrill-seeking, and wild-hair philanthropy.
recsv-heredoc 1y ago
As in all things, there will be winners and those who fail to try with sufficient determination :) For those with the means to do so, try hire the Gen-Zs out there who want to succeed despite the circumstances - especially the ones skipping college. They’re some of the most capable, self-motivated people you will ever have the chance to work with!
- saubeidl 1y ago
  This individualization of systemic failure is not seeing the forest for the trees.
  - abyssin 1y ago
    Could the cynicism of some also be a byproduct of the circumstances?
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Societies fail too. Not just individuals. Some people are too absorbed in their own selfishness to see this. But as an individual you can do all the "right" things and still be casually steamrollered by larger social trends and pressures.
  - recsv-heredoc 1y ago
    Of course - but all things being equal, your odds will certainly be better if you give it your best shot! I'd intended my message to be one of actual hope and optimism - that those in the position to do so may affect a small positive change in the world at the individual level. This might be myopic by ivory-tower standards, but the intention was to empower and encourage people not to give up, and that their actions do have a measurable effect on their destiny. We might not be able to change the circumstances easily (We certainly should be trying to do so), but parallel to this we can support and encourage those going through the tough times. Many Gen-Zs are demonstrating remarkable resilience - this post was intended as a celebration of that, not to downplay the severity of the society-wide issues at play. Thanks for the fair critique.
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
[dead]
r_lee 1y ago
Same thing in Europe, there's a lot of hopelessness.
bananapub 1y ago
another side to this is how it's encouraging people to believe that the only way to get ahead is by more or less scamming. you can easily look at the world as a youngish person and see that getting ahead means affiliate marketing, or NFT scams, or crypto nonsense, or being Andrew Tate, or an "influencer" hawking crap on social media etc. it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc
- evklein 1y ago
  The way I think about this is if you split the money-making opportunities into two pools; one is rent-seeking/grifting/outright-scamming/beating greater-fool fallacy, the other is learning some sort of skill/trade and developing a career on that. At some point the perceived opportunity cost for the first eclipsed the latter, and now that's sort of where we're at. Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?
GlibMonkeyDeath 1y ago
As the parent of two mid-20's adults (one thriving, the other not so much) I actually downloaded the paper and read it out of curiosity (shocking, I know.) They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%) This is all US data BTW. Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time. But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers. So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...
- evklein 1y ago
  I'll defend that variable selection a little bit, as I feel that the measure they use to capture 'despair' is actually binary in reality. I'd categorize a handful of young men around my age as being in this category. What they seem to have in common with each other is a consistent downtrodden-ness that doesn't fluctuate much from day to day; it's pervasive to their entire personality, it's who they are. I imagine if you studied this is a less discrete, non-binomial method you'd see even sharper trends. I don't know a single person my age who feels the future has anything for them.
cashsterling 1y ago
I always try to communicate a strong sense of hope to my teenage kids. Many nations have an inverted population demographic, including the US (especially without immigration). I think the US is "as little as 10 years" away from a significant skilled labor shortage.
- scoofy 1y ago
  The US is also "as little as 10 years" away from losing currency reserve status, defaulting or inflating away our debt... or hilariously, maybe even raising taxes on young people to reduce it. All of these outcomes mean Americans just become very poor. People forget that our skilled labor force exists here because we have the resources to demand it. If we actually run this country into a ditch like it looks like we're trying to do, there is no reasons those jobs don't go to higher demand countries like the Nordics, China, or even just Canada. I think we'll be okay, but everyone is treating this outlook like it's a speed bump, when the consequences of wrecking your economy is a cascade of politically difficult problems that create incentives against investing in the future: see Argentina and Japan.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Henchman21 1y ago
Well, the Boomers won’t move on. They refuse to acknowledge their age. They refuse to give up a single iota of power. Their rictus grip on the entirety of the world will damn us all.
- olivierestsage 1y ago
  Whether this is true or not, it's an emotional reality for the Millennial generation. The Boomer/Millennial rift is fundamental, and only getting worse. Everyone I know (barely an exaggeration) is financially struggling, but has Boomer parents who are wealthy. They don't help out dealing with debts or starting a family, even though they are easily able to do so from a financial perspective, and constantly imply that it's their children's fault that they're in the situations they're in.
  - Henchman21 1y ago
    They're a selfish generation overall. In my personal opinion the world will be a better place when they're dead and gone.
    - missedthecue 1y ago
      It's not apparent to me that the following generations are any less self-centered.
- robocat 1y ago
  Most of the powerful capitalists are not boomers: Musk, Altman, Thiel, Andresson, Zuckerberg. Trump and Gates were the two stand-out boomers I found during a quick check. Plenty of powerful people are either younger than the boomers or older than the boomers (e.g. Elison, Biden, Buffett).
Havoc 1y ago
Can't really blame them: Housing unaffordable, pay-later bs, pervasive advertising, degree useless, family unaffordable, AI replacement, gig economy, social media dopamine nonsense, talk of another great conflict, national debt issues, climate change, weaponized media, offshoring, political polarization, lack of third place etc Prior generations faced arguably bigger ticket challenges (stormy beaches in Normandy) but there is a relentlessness and pervasiveness to the problems now that I think may be new and cumulatively more psychologically impactful.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
The mechanization of humanity has been deeply perverse. I wish technology was also offering more en-nobling ends, the option to lean in and become more of an expert on systems, but the tyrant of the application feels absolute: tech remains black boxes all the way down. Like corporatism at large, diluting responsibility seems to be the name of the game. I want to see tech that loves inviting people under the hood if they want, that's designed for plugins & the user's existing LLM/agents to come drive machine-toachone style. I don't necessarily know how that would help economically, but spiritually I think it would be lifting to have a different socio-techncial contract; I think tech could offer some dignity & open doors in a way that escapes the plight of rank consumerism that's eating humanity's collective soul away. It's really so so sad thinking that the US is so quickly developing such a similar "lie flat" hopelessness. I thought we had a lot more years before the mill of capitalism ground us down to this.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Not so much the mechanization, but the commodification of every facet of human life. The worse part is the culture of people who believe that social interactions should be an impersonal game to be transactional and won, and so present a very thin, superficial front but risk nothing real.
Tycho 1y ago
What I see is mass affluence. People spending hundreds of £s to see Oasis or Taylor Swift concerts. It used to be there were only so many high paying jobs like doctors, dentists, lawyers, but now you have eg. umpteenth product managers at Meta making hundreds of thousands for re-skinning the Marketplace app or whatever.
- plandis 1y ago
  I think research consistently shows that adjusting for inflation young adults make less than previous generations.
thedevilslawyer 1y ago
I think higher inflation is the answer for any new generation. Ensure the previous one isn't dumping it's crap on the newer one.

139 points by johntfella 1y ago

pmg101 1y ago

Terrible to read that young people's despair is now so bad that it's almost as high as mine, a person in my 40s

devb 1y ago
[flagged]
lnsru 1y ago
I am also there. Geographically I am in Germany. It’s a bit scary to think, that the same motherboard I design right now can be designed in other country 6 hours by car away for the half the price. And there is nothing special about me. The guy elsewhere will have similar education, same skills, same software and probably will be more hungry to work hard.

ipnon 1y ago

Most ongoing social trends in the United States can be traced back to this. When foreigners are puzzled and ask me why is X or Y happening in America, this is usually the best answer. The majority of young people, but not the majority of the electorate, are in a tough or even dire situation, and so they do not have much interest in maintaining the status quo. The result is social upheaval, the varieties of which I'm sure we're all familiar with by now, and need not be repeated.

msgodel 1y ago
At this point they've been so extremely neglected it probably doesn't make sense for around ~30% of them to even try with life. That's the real reason for the high number of drug related deaths IMO.

lordnacho 1y ago

Well, you can definitely sense it if you browse Reddit. Young people are freaking out about the job market, the house market, and the dating market. I don't mean to dismiss their concerns, far from it. It does seem like we've been making it harder and harder for anyone to become an adult over the past few decades. Here's the quote I found most relevant to my own experience of work. It really does come down to autonomy. I could be writing the exact same code and feel awful about it, if it were done in an office with a guy looking over my shoulder. If you're young, you're more likely to have this problem. > More broadly, employers are successfully deploying new technologies to minimize ‘break’ times, and exert greater control over production processes, often aided by close technological monitoring of work processes, which limit worker control and autonomy over ever-more-demanding processes, all of which – based on Karasek’s (1979) theory regarding the importance of worker control and autonomy for wellbeing – should result in a decline in the wellbeing of workers. Evidence from task-based studies of work, and social surveys in which workers report on the nature of job tasks, indicates there has been a growth in job demands and a reduction in worker job control in the United Kingdom (Green et al., 2022) which, presumably, is mirrored in the United States. During COVID, the shift to home and hybrid working, whilst beneficial in some respects, may have exacerbated feelings of social isolation experienced by the young in particular as they missed out on the social component of the workplace. The demise of collective bargaining and trade union presence in the workplace implies a diminution in workers’ bargaining power, making it even more difficult for workers to resist such changes and to alter their terms and conditions of employment (Feiveson, 2023).

AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Good news, AI monitoring is coming! Maximum corporate dystopia as a training bed for overall societal totalitarianism. Unions are the only counter to this, as depressing as that is. Possibly overreach by corporations combined with the collapse of globalism will reempower workers. But robotics and AI may completely undercut that.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  Calling it globalism in place of globalization or just capitalism is so cringe

Zealotux 1y ago

I'm not American but I can sense the feeling is the same here in Europe. I wouldn't want to be a younger man right now. I feel like on top of every possible struggles they're facing: low wages, low sense of meaning, social media addiction, scarce opportunities for true connections... we're treating them with very little empathy and consideration, they're just "whining", wish I knew how to help beyond my modest occasional contributions.

pif 1y ago
> they're just "whining" Many of them, indeed, are just whining. And they keep whining without realizing how spoiled they are. But (at least) a few of them are having good ideas and, especially, implementing them with professionalism and passion.
- mindwok 1y ago
  Society is failing these people. In some ways, they’re given the most advanced amenities humanity has ever been able to offer: fastest internet, the nicest cars, affordable global travel. In other areas, society is completely failing them. Connection, meaning, career prospects. They’re spoiled in some ways, completely lost in others. It’s important we don’t ignore that.
  - exitb 1y ago
    I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people. Average person has no influence, not even a little bit, on any of those things. Meanwhile, a small subset of the people have all the influence and they mostly operate in their own self-interest.
    - mindwok 1y ago
      I don’t mean to discharge responsibility. We are society, and the onus is on us to push for a better way of doing things.
    - mschuster91 1y ago

thiago_fm 1y ago

Good luck for the fellow Americans that will pay up that 120%+ GDP/debt ratio, with 7% deficits and no spending cuts in sight. The rich in the US are taking advantage of it, by making the US pay for all welfare while they barely pay any taxes. If you are an American young professional which needs to work in order to survive, you are being ripped off everyday by just existing.

ericd 1y ago
If you inflate the currency, GDP goes up, and nominal debt stays the same. That’s the government’s current playbook, with its massive fiscal deficits.
- darkfloo 1y ago
  That only works if rates don’t go up which is probably not a good premise to rely on
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    If you are in a balanced budget or continued deficit situation, then, yes, increased rates will eventually be a factor (but that's a lagging effect, even then) if you have a sufficient surplus that with the effect of inflation increasing its nominal size with the same real revenue and spending you can pay down debt at least as fast as it comes due, so you aren't going back to do new net borrowing, increase cost of borrowing doesn't matter much.
- Gasp0de 1y ago
  The only thing missing is replacing the head of the federal reserve bank with a mindless puppet so they stop standing in the way of success (inflation).
- tobias3 1y ago
  This works if all the debt is long term debt (>=10Y), which surely Jellen and Bessent have been selling, right?

saubeidl 1y ago

[flagged]

rf15 1y ago
Absolutely. As history shows though, you can't keep that last state particularly stable, so we will always have times of equality, times of oppression/exploitation and times of killing today's flavour of nobility, ad infinitum.
philipallstar 1y ago
> Only through class consciousness can we build a new society in which the fruits of labor are enjoyed by us all. They've done this a few times already, and it's very violent each time. And this isn't an inherent contradiction of capidalism. Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others. Lower prices are good for every one. Raising everyone's wages out of proportion to the value they create only raises all the prices.
- regularization 1y ago
  > Capitalism only makes people rich if they provide loads of value to others. Heirs are made rich every day by being born.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    Of course some[0] don't earn their wealth, but their wealth was earned by someone else still providing value. They got the output for nothing, but it was still earned. There are some people, such as Vladimir Putin, who just drain their country of its resources, enabled by the force of the state. But capitalism is about free exchange of value. So if someone gets rich; lots of other people got value. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_billionaires#2023_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_billionaires#20...
    - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago

CalRobert 1y ago

The actual PDF is at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34071/w34071.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34071/w340... From the conclusion: (I paraphrase) Mental Health has worsened rapidly in the last decade in the US, especially for young women. It goes on: """ It does not appear that the declining mental health of young workers is driven by a decline in the youth wage compared to the wage of older workers; this ratio has increased. Real wages have also been on the rise. As Feiveson (2024) has noted the relative prices of housing and childcare have risen. Student debt is high and expensive. The health of young adults has also deteriorated, as seen in increases in social isolation and obesity. Suicide rates of the young are rising. Moreover, Jean Twenge provides evidence that the work ethic itself among the young has plummeted. Some have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs. There is a good deal of supporting evidence from a variety of surveys including from Pew, the Conference Board and Johns Hopkins on the parlous state of young worker well-being in the USA that we documented here. The concern is that we are observing the consequences of past well- being shocks. We should note that 10.1% of workers aged 20 in 2023 said they were in despair. They were aged 17 when COVID lockdowns were implemented in 2020. They were 10 years old in 2013 as the smartphone and the internet exploded. In addition, of course, they were in high school ages 14-18 in 2017-2021. We know from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that the well- being of high school students deteriorated sharply around that time.15 Jean Twenge suggested to us that an explanation for this, maybe that childhood and teenage years with low levels of in-person interaction and more time online, such as have occurred since 2014 or so, results in depression and pessimism and dissatisfaction across many domains (including work). Social media glamorizes others' lives plus online news and social media encourage pessimism about jobs and the economy in general. This likely results in dissatisfaction across many domains, perhaps especially work. With an additional side element perhaps of "the whole system is rigged anyway, so why try?" This rise in despair/psychological distress of young workers may well be the consequence of the mental health declines observed when they were high school children going back a decade or more. Increasing access to the internet and smartphones seem to be the culprits. """

javcasas 1y ago
> Some have even suggested the young are unhappy having BS jobs. That is such crazy level of spin it would make electrons orbiting atoms ashamed. So the young are expected to be happy to waste their life doing something they know is even less than worthless so that they can afford to survive. That is pure "let them eat cake", "children yearn for the mines" pure raw unadultered bullshit.

brcmthrowaway 1y ago

Has anyone looked up a HNer earning over $1mn posts from 10 years ago to see if they expressed the same despair?

burnt-resistor 1y ago
The moderately to fairly rich are the bread and butter of a good number of psychologist and psychiatric practices. When the majority of fundamental Maslow hierarchy of needs are met, then comes the desire for "meaning", quarter-/mid-/three-quarter-life crises/thrill-seeking, and wild-hair philanthropy.

recsv-heredoc 1y ago

As in all things, there will be winners and those who fail to try with sufficient determination :) For those with the means to do so, try hire the Gen-Zs out there who want to succeed despite the circumstances - especially the ones skipping college. They’re some of the most capable, self-motivated people you will ever have the chance to work with!

saubeidl 1y ago
This individualization of systemic failure is not seeing the forest for the trees.
- abyssin 1y ago
  Could the cynicism of some also be a byproduct of the circumstances?
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
Societies fail too. Not just individuals. Some people are too absorbed in their own selfishness to see this. But as an individual you can do all the "right" things and still be casually steamrollered by larger social trends and pressures.
- recsv-heredoc 1y ago
  Of course - but all things being equal, your odds will certainly be better if you give it your best shot! I'd intended my message to be one of actual hope and optimism - that those in the position to do so may affect a small positive change in the world at the individual level. This might be myopic by ivory-tower standards, but the intention was to empower and encourage people not to give up, and that their actions do have a measurable effect on their destiny. We might not be able to change the circumstances easily (We certainly should be trying to do so), but parallel to this we can support and encourage those going through the tough times. Many Gen-Zs are demonstrating remarkable resilience - this post was intended as a celebration of that, not to downplay the severity of the society-wide issues at play. Thanks for the fair critique.

oldpersonintx2 1y ago

[dead]

r_lee 1y ago

Same thing in Europe, there's a lot of hopelessness.

bananapub 1y ago

another side to this is how it's encouraging people to believe that the only way to get ahead is by more or less scamming. you can easily look at the world as a youngish person and see that getting ahead means affiliate marketing, or NFT scams, or crypto nonsense, or being Andrew Tate, or an "influencer" hawking crap on social media etc. it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc

evklein 1y ago
The way I think about this is if you split the money-making opportunities into two pools; one is rent-seeking/grifting/outright-scamming/beating greater-fool fallacy, the other is learning some sort of skill/trade and developing a career on that. At some point the perceived opportunity cost for the first eclipsed the latter, and now that's sort of where we're at. Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?

GlibMonkeyDeath 1y ago

As the parent of two mid-20's adults (one thriving, the other not so much) I actually downloaded the paper and read it out of curiosity (shocking, I know.) They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%) This is all US data BTW. Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time. But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers. So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...

evklein 1y ago
I'll defend that variable selection a little bit, as I feel that the measure they use to capture 'despair' is actually binary in reality. I'd categorize a handful of young men around my age as being in this category. What they seem to have in common with each other is a consistent downtrodden-ness that doesn't fluctuate much from day to day; it's pervasive to their entire personality, it's who they are. I imagine if you studied this is a less discrete, non-binomial method you'd see even sharper trends. I don't know a single person my age who feels the future has anything for them.

cashsterling 1y ago

I always try to communicate a strong sense of hope to my teenage kids. Many nations have an inverted population demographic, including the US (especially without immigration). I think the US is "as little as 10 years" away from a significant skilled labor shortage.

scoofy 1y ago
The US is also "as little as 10 years" away from losing currency reserve status, defaulting or inflating away our debt... or hilariously, maybe even raising taxes on young people to reduce it. All of these outcomes mean Americans just become very poor. People forget that our skilled labor force exists here because we have the resources to demand it. If we actually run this country into a ditch like it looks like we're trying to do, there is no reasons those jobs don't go to higher demand countries like the Nordics, China, or even just Canada. I think we'll be okay, but everyone is treating this outlook like it's a speed bump, when the consequences of wrecking your economy is a cascade of politically difficult problems that create incentives against investing in the future: see Argentina and Japan.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Henchman21 1y ago

Well, the Boomers won’t move on. They refuse to acknowledge their age. They refuse to give up a single iota of power. Their rictus grip on the entirety of the world will damn us all.

olivierestsage 1y ago
Whether this is true or not, it's an emotional reality for the Millennial generation. The Boomer/Millennial rift is fundamental, and only getting worse. Everyone I know (barely an exaggeration) is financially struggling, but has Boomer parents who are wealthy. They don't help out dealing with debts or starting a family, even though they are easily able to do so from a financial perspective, and constantly imply that it's their children's fault that they're in the situations they're in.
- Henchman21 1y ago
  They're a selfish generation overall. In my personal opinion the world will be a better place when they're dead and gone.
  - missedthecue 1y ago
    It's not apparent to me that the following generations are any less self-centered.
robocat 1y ago
Most of the powerful capitalists are not boomers: Musk, Altman, Thiel, Andresson, Zuckerberg. Trump and Gates were the two stand-out boomers I found during a quick check. Plenty of powerful people are either younger than the boomers or older than the boomers (e.g. Elison, Biden, Buffett).

Havoc 1y ago

Can't really blame them: Housing unaffordable, pay-later bs, pervasive advertising, degree useless, family unaffordable, AI replacement, gig economy, social media dopamine nonsense, talk of another great conflict, national debt issues, climate change, weaponized media, offshoring, political polarization, lack of third place etc Prior generations faced arguably bigger ticket challenges (stormy beaches in Normandy) but there is a relentlessness and pervasiveness to the problems now that I think may be new and cumulatively more psychologically impactful.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

The mechanization of humanity has been deeply perverse. I wish technology was also offering more en-nobling ends, the option to lean in and become more of an expert on systems, but the tyrant of the application feels absolute: tech remains black boxes all the way down. Like corporatism at large, diluting responsibility seems to be the name of the game. I want to see tech that loves inviting people under the hood if they want, that's designed for plugins & the user's existing LLM/agents to come drive machine-toachone style. I don't necessarily know how that would help economically, but spiritually I think it would be lifting to have a different socio-techncial contract; I think tech could offer some dignity & open doors in a way that escapes the plight of rank consumerism that's eating humanity's collective soul away. It's really so so sad thinking that the US is so quickly developing such a similar "lie flat" hopelessness. I thought we had a lot more years before the mill of capitalism ground us down to this.

burnt-resistor 1y ago
Not so much the mechanization, but the commodification of every facet of human life. The worse part is the culture of people who believe that social interactions should be an impersonal game to be transactional and won, and so present a very thin, superficial front but risk nothing real.

Tycho 1y ago

What I see is mass affluence. People spending hundreds of £s to see Oasis or Taylor Swift concerts. It used to be there were only so many high paying jobs like doctors, dentists, lawyers, but now you have eg. umpteenth product managers at Meta making hundreds of thousands for re-skinning the Marketplace app or whatever.

plandis 1y ago
I think research consistently shows that adjusting for inflation young adults make less than previous generations.

thedevilslawyer 1y ago

I think higher inflation is the answer for any new generation. Ensure the previous one isn't dumping it's crap on the newer one.