Live data from Hacker News

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

theconversation.com

281–290 of 456 posts

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

#281
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Cal State psychology professors are “rich”? Twenge has a salary of about $100,000/year. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/california-s... Plus whatever she brings in by writing non-fiction books, delivering paid speeches, doing market research consulting, and maybe some summer job. That’s probably quite a bit lower than the average reader of this forum.

Rofl, $100k/yr is rich.

Median household income in her city for her age group is about $80k/year. $100k/year puts her in the top 35% or so of all households, but probably not “rich” by local standards under a typical definition of “rich”.

When someone says “that guy is rich”, “oh what a sheltered rich guy who can’t understand the struggles of the rest of us”, etc., I’m imagining someone who eats expensive restaurant meals 5 times a week, vacations all over the world, puts their kids in exclusive private schools, maybe owns a sailboat or a small plane, buys luxury cars, etc... Someone who can just afford to buy a house and put 3 kids through college and save for a modest retirement seems pretty solidly “middle class” by most standards. You might have a different definition.

Obviously if you compare to rural peasants or developing country factory workers, $100k is a very high salary, but compared to working professionals in urban California with a similar amount of training and experience, state university professors are at the low end of salaries.

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

#282
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Facebook/Twitter/Instagram is blocked at a lot of work places, while LinkedIn is not...

That's ironic. To me, the implication of browsing LinkedIn at work is that you're looking for another job. Whereas if you're browsing Facebook or Instagram you're just wasting time.

That's how I've seen it, definitely. At my old job it was at the point where you could tell who was pissed off at what time by seeing who'd been working on their LinkedIn profile... and after a company-wide announcement, everyone would update within a day or two.

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

#283

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.

For my son (17 y.o.) it is online games and phone use in general. He has - I hope - mild depression, which - I believe - is caused by his online habits. His mom and I thought taking his PC away from him would fix it. But then he falls into school-sleep cycle, that looks like full-blown depression. Yes, his grades are affected and in not a good way. What works for now is to participate in his life with him. As of now…

I have no advice, but you have both my sympathy and respect. Seriously good job looking after your boy! If you ever need someone to talk to/get a pat on the back from, my email is on my profile.

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

#284
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various possible con founders were discussed at length in the article. The obvious one, depression leading to social Media use: “Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who av…

isn't this just bias some of the original time and motion studies that the act of changing something effected the results found? The example my course gave was first increasing lighting production went up then when the reduced the lighting production went up not down as expected

Only the third study would be open to that criticism. Which is fair, except that it’s unreasonable to ignore the context provided by the other two.

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

#285
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That... is not what Nihilism is though? I mean someone who is a nihilist might think that but it’s not a logical consequence of, or foundational feature of, nihilism.

It sort of is, though. Nietzsche in particular didn't actually portray nihilism as a good thing, but just an inevitable stage in human development, which could be either very good or very bad depending on what kind of values system (if any) arose from that nihilism. There are in my opinion some similarities between the direction we're heading and what he called "The Last Man", which was basically the worst possible o…

There is more - a lot more - to nihilism than Nietzsche.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What types students are you mentoring? I've observed that groups of the best-performing students look down on those "addicted" to their phones and some have switched to flip phones.

Comp-Sci/Electrical Engineers - I've never seen any of them without a smartphone, or even heard them talk about their friends switching. Sounds like a good idea though :)

I would try switching to a flip phone but the problem is I want a cool modern flip phone not something that looks vintage.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Cal State psychology professors are “rich”? Twenge has a salary of about $100,000/year. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/california-s... Plus whatever she brings in by writing non-fiction books, delivering paid speeches, doing market research consulting, and maybe some summer job. That’s probably quite a bit lower than the average reader of this forum.

According to this she's at least in the 8th percentile ( http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/ ). Meaning she doesn't have to worry about keeping a roof over her head or how to feed herself (that's 1 in 6 btw https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-hunger-us ). So yeah, she's safely rich enough to be insulated from being wrong about poverty. And people will listen to her because she has a title (ie rich enou…

>35% of all households in San Diego make at least that much (something like 180,000 people), and the percentage is significantly higher if you only look at mid-career professionals.

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

#288
While the unemployment rate may have "improved" it doesn't track people "leaving the workforce " due to giving up or running out of benefits. It was a considered a somewhat jobless recovery actually. With regards to smartphones "correlation does not imply causation." Needless to say I only read the first few paragraphs before determining this wasn't a well reasoned article.

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rasing tuition from $50 a year for baby boomers in the 70s to 25k a year any generation facing a life of indentured servitude when their parents got to be human beings is going to be nihilistic.

Income and money are weakly correlated to happiness.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full

Kahneman would disagree. Correlation is only weak for those above the median income. Furthermore, a lower than median income appears to amplify other negative factors (illness, stress, etc.)

Note that the study data is 10 years old. It would be interesting to know what today’s kids today believe is the median.

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

#290

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…

Gotta say I think theres a big difference between cassetes and the level of intensity some kids use facebook and the like.
Post reply on HN