No, Teen Suicide Isn’t Rising Because Life Got Objectively Worse

What has changed since the 1970s is a greater proportion of productivity improvement has gone to capital vs labour. This means working people have to work much harder for comparatively less.

Ascribing the resulting unhappiness to departing from some sort of communal idyll where young people 'knew their place' is rather regressive I'd suggest.

> If there were more Republicans working as professors, we’d probably balance out this line of inquiry with papers asking whether rising levels of shootings and homicides also contribute to racial disparities in mental health. But there aren't. So even when all the research being done is good, we primarily see research looking at the questions that progressives think are interesting.

A study was conducted examining exactly this question. It turns out the bias is even worse: Not only are the 'wrong' questions unlikely to be asked, studies get rejected if they get the wrong results:

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

FWIW, it appears it's a free read for those of us who have never visited before.

It's a very thought-provoking article and one that deserves more time than just might lunch break to ponder. In particular, this quote at the end of the article articulates an increasing discomfort I've been feeling around conversations about harm:

> I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

> In many cases we have replaced those personal obligations (e.g. to take care of elders) with abstract government funded systems.

I can almost guarantee that young people don't have social security on the top of their minds. It's school school school internship work, that's it. Those bars are raised each year. Leisure time is social media and video games. All that got amplified in 2020. Not hard to see why they're depressed.

[Edit] I was standard college undergrad class of 2018, and right on the cutoff for gen Z. Our high school and college class was clearly more studious than class of 2016, and clearly less than class of 2020. I was also right there when childhood became virtual, starting with the iPhone and Facebook in middle school.

Can't agree that the improvements since the 70s have been marginal. The internet is one of the greatest quality of life improvements humanity has ever created, especially relative to its cost.