Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 125 posts

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#111

Post by coldtea »

BjoernKW wrote: post #106
coldtea wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the questioning them is often equally mindless (oh, it's old, should be of no use). E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

I disagree. Questioning ideas is the foundation of enlightened thinking. Questioning something doesn't mean doing away with it just because it's old. It means asking yourself (and others) if it still makes sense from today's point of view.

>I disagree. Questioning ideas is the foundation of enlightened thinking.

Not "mindless questioning" though, which is the kind I explicitly wrote about, and which amounts to knee-jerk rejection.

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#112

Post by SimonPStevens »

eecc wrote: post #19
blfr wrote: post #5

Better behaved and less hedonistic or just more passive?

We’re turning our own human ecosystems into a panopticon, no wonder newbies are scared of straying off. Anything can and will be used against you, eventually. (I’m not talking about fascist-kind repression and dissent wipeout, that’s out of our collective memory anyway and eventually only a problem for politicized individuals. No, it’s the much more concrete and pervasive peer control made possible by Facebook, Insta…

Interesting similarity with 'the light of other days'.

It's about a privacy invading technology and several sections deal with how different groups evolve that deal with the lack of privacy in different ways, both embracing and circumventing the technology.

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#113

Post by aor215 »

I’m surprised no one has brought up how extreme punishment has become for engaging in these behaviors. I don’t have data to back this up, but my sense when I was in high school in the mid 2000s was that any slip up in any of these areas - smoking, drinking, etc. - would result in professional ruin. If caught, the punishment in many “zero tolerance” schools is expulsion and no top college admits students who have been expelled, except in very special cases.

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#114

Post by jimktrains2 »

manigandham wrote: post #101
jimktrains2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of it is the rise of the exurbs, where you live by many people, but never talk to them and there is very little community to speak of.

It's even worse in dense cities where you may share a building with thousands but not know any of them. It seems the more crowded a location is, the more isolated the people within become.

I've always found the opposite to be true.

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#115

Post by eecc »

blfr wrote: post #76
eecc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re turning our own human ecosystems into a panopticon, no wonder newbies are scared of straying off. Anything can and will be used against you, eventually. (I’m not talking about fascist-kind repression and dissent wipeout, that’s out of our collective memory anyway and eventually only a problem for politicized individuals. No, it’s the much more concrete and pervasive peer control made possible by Facebook, Insta…

Yes, maybe. Although I'm a little older than subjects of this article, coming of age on the cusp of the smartphone era but before Facebook and before any of my friends had even a half-decent camera in their phones, and already suspected that the social energy was much lower than it was for people a few years older.

Yup, also late genX here. Alternative narrative could be that after decades of marketing driven needs system people are exhausted - see Adam Curtis “Century of Self” - and quite probably also broke. Not to mention all the aggressive neoliberal politics that took away so much that people started to notice and suspect it was all a distraction plot

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#117

Post by dominotw »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #2

If the downstream consequences of this: > Teenagers are also having less sex, especially of the procreative kind. In 1991, 54% of American teenagers in grades nine to 12 (ages 14-18) reported that they were sexually experienced, and 19% claimed to have had sex with at least four partners. In 2015 those proportions were 41% and 12%. America’s teenage birth rate crashed by two-thirds during the same period. Is this: >…

I wonder if there is co relation to immigrantion from traditional cultures.

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#118

Post by auxbuss »

noobermin wrote: post #90

Something I think that needs to be discussed more is the fact that loneliness in society is actually starting to become a real social issue. People who are lonely are seemingly told by society that their loneliness is internal and must ultimately be their fault...but given the fact that studies like the above show that it is becoming much more prevalent in society seems to suggest there might be societal/structural c…

I read Tribes yesterday: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28119237-tribe

It’s an up and down sort of book — 6/10, imo — but it makes some interesting connections with the social past of homo sapiens and the tendency of contemporary society to remove the individual from their community (often due to financial independence) countering more than 1m years of human experience.

A couple of interesting quotes:

“Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

“We are not a good society. We are an anti-human society. We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: children; spouse, perhaps parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that."

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#119

Post by darepublic »

gtt wrote: post #84
a_humean wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the debate in the article body. Less hedonistic meaning they are having less sex and so fewer unintended and teenage pregnancies, less drinking and drugs and so less violence and anti-social behavior, better relations with the parents and in particular their fathers, and more pursuing further education. Basically every metric of bad behavior that used to be a cause of concern for 80s and 90s teenagers is acros…

I don't think drinking less and doing less drugs makes you more depressed, stressed, sexless and lonely. I think the reverse is true with possible exception of loneliness, but you are better off without the type of company booze and drugs provide.

More social isolation could lead to both less drugs and sex. Less drugs is probably good but if it is only because people are becoming depressed shut-ins, that's bad

Re: Teenagers now better behaved and less hedonistic but lonelier and more isolated

#120

Post by TulliusCicero »

coldtea wrote: post #93
spodek wrote: post #89

" Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. " This quote is hundreds of years old, often misattributed to Socrates, but applies perennially. It describes not…

When things are often repeated across generations, they can: a) always be true (we generally go to lower standards from the viewpoint of the previous generation, or even from an absolute viewpoint). b) always be false c) Sometimes be true and sometimes be false. I'm not sure why people immediately jump to (b). Perhaps it's comforting to dismiss any worry of decline, and to always attribute it to change. Or it's not f…

The problem is that "values changing" looks an awful lot like "values degrading" to those who held the older values, so it's impossible to tell which is which, until perhaps much later on when you have the benefit of hindsight.

E.g. gradually increased acceptance of homosexual behavior is considered an obvious sign of moral values degrading among many (perhaps most) of the elderly (and percentage-wise this is even more obviously the case if you go back to the 90's).

Post reply on HN