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With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

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Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#221

Post by olympus »

Diederich wrote: post #213
Spooky23 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn is like baseball cards when I was a kid. There’s two metrics for dick-measuring contests, size of network and quality of network. Linkedin is there to show, yeah I’m a badass who got the to link to me, or look at me, I have lots of cards. There is some actual stuff happening there, but the bread and circus that brings the crowd are those two metrics.

Huh. I have never heard anyone brag about the size of their linkedin network.

LinkedIn network size is almost treated as a binary big/little category to recruiters, because after 500 connections it just shows "500+" instead of the actual number of connections.

So a recruiter sees "500+ connections" and thinks, "this person is serious about [finding a job/networking with professionals/staying connected with colleagues]," or the recruiter sees "79 connections" and thinks, "this person is only on LinkedIn as a formality."

It's not really something to brag about and if you're a perfect fit for a job I doubt your network size will keep you from getting hired (unless you are in a social-heavy career like marketing). But, if you've got 475 connections it's probably worth it to send out 26 more random connection requests to get past past 500 and into that space where the recruiter doesn't know exactly how big your network is.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#222

Post by sheepmullet »

lsc wrote: post #140
whatshisface wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them . Imagine yourself as if you went to highschool in the society where you now work (so that now, the people you used to know are twice as educated and lots of them are far more wealthy), or perhaps im…

> If you really do look down on your old friends and acquaintances like that (so that you see their posts as all about being poorer and less articulate than you), then you're probably the one making posts that depress them. Sometimes, yes, and that is the cause of some negative self-reflection on my part, but I think that there's another factor at work... I think that especially the "racist memes with spelling mistak…

> For many of them, they see education as a negative attribute

Yes it's an unfortunate byproduct of the link between education and left wing ideology.

We often joked that people who go away to college come back dumber than when they left.

As an example when my daughter was in college she came to visit us and was talking about how I was contributing to the patriarchy and enabling the oppression of women and how women have it so much worse.

And I'm sitting there thinking what happened to my sweet girl and why am I working a stressful job with long hours to help pay for her to learn this kind of crap.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#223

Post by cyphunk »

that is a cheap shot. while it could be screens, it could also be the polarization of society. and while the polarization may also relate to the decentralizatoin of media and it's arbitration (enabled by screens), this too is more complex that just the screen.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#224

Post by akhilcacharya »

MIKarlsen wrote: post #25
deckard1 wrote: post #12

They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.

Not as much as LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a fairytale-land for adults, and it's bizzare (to me) that anyone wants to participate. It's not even humblebragging anymore. It's "Look what I made, and what I achieved" packed into casual "Oh this thing? Yeah it's just my perfect life"-packages...

I definitely do this and it is not helping.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#225

Post by [deleted] »

lsc wrote: post #67

Tuesday, this was the theme at my toastmaster's debate club[1] - I got stuck arguing that social media doesn't make you depressed. And... my problem with my argument wasn't that it was untrue, but that it was kinda mean. I don't feel jealous of the lives of almost anyone I went to high school with; quite the opposite. A lot of them post "racist memes with spelling mistakes" - which is sad on many levels; If nothing e…

[deleted]

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#227

Post by andrei_says_ »

deckard1 wrote: post #12

They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.

Curation comes to mind. I follow accounts dedicated to art, design, nature photography, and a cartoonist.

So I’m mostly exposed to beauty, mostly invited to learning and delight.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#228

Post by djsumdog »

Before I even started reading, I knew it was going to be an attack at the phone. A few centuries ago, they'd attack books. Look back at videos from the 1950s and people didn't talk to each other on the train back then either, their noses were in books, magazines and newspapers. By the 80s, the nerdy kids had headphones and cassette players. By the 90s, people had discmans.

The trouble with articles like this is they don't explore the other factors. Maybe the simply access to information makes kids more nihilistic. And nihilism isn't a bad thing. The universe is absurd, we have no meaning except what we give to ourselves (through religion or belief of whatever). Maybe kids are just realizing this, and it has nothing to do with technology? Maybe they're realizing that because of technology.

Maybe they see a wold that's yelling at them, calling them entitled, where they know they'll be in more debt and less paid than any other generation before them. Maybe it's just the pure knowledge of our place as cogs in the gears.

There are tons of factors for where we are today. The income gap is getting wider, parents are struggling to give their kids a good standard of living. Many parents can't pay for their kids educations like the previous generation could because it's getting too expensive.

The article says "every region in the country." Are they just looking at the US? If you didn't find similar numbers in Europe, where they have the same access to cellphones and technology, they you have to address the other issues such as health care, better pubic welfare, freedom of transportation and high standards of living.

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#229

Post by nojvek »

deckard1 wrote: post #12

They did a study using Facebook. But I'm more curious about Instagram. "Look at all these rich beautiful people with millions of followers sailing around the world on their yachts." Ten minutes on Instagram is enough to fill any sane person with existential dread and bring about severe depression.

Yeah stopped using Instagram and Facebook since 2016. Life has been great!

Re: With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit

#230

Post by Momquist »

rdm_blackhole wrote: post #185
lumberjack wrote: post #62

Too quick to blame, "the screen". Is it really just the existence of social media that caused this, or is it maybe a change of culture that emerged with the spread of the Internet and social media? For example, today a child from a religious community might encounter atheism at 12 or 13 whereas previously they would encounter it when they went off to college. Maybe that child happens to be suffering from depression a…

So religious people never get depressed? What a stupid argument! Believing that some (unproven and nonexistent) entity is going to solve all your problems is completely delusional.

You're exagerating the parent's claims. It is possible that religion can reduce stress, and help against depression without being an absolute defense. Our brain may just be wired that way. This doesn't even involve God or the supernatural actually existing for these effects to be real.

You should check some of the talks, and lectures by Robert Sapolsky (an atheist), who advances this in several of them.

Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI

Religion Is Nature's Antidepressant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oldj11NEsc0

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