Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be worth considering other crises and their impact on teen mental health. I grew up in the UK in the 80s during two crises. First, it was the Cold War and there was a very real risk of nuclear Armageddon; we were all aware of it because it was all over the media. Second, it was the height of IRA bombing campaign in the UK and we heard of children our age being blown to bits while out shopping with their pare…
I think these examples reinforce my point: both the Troubles and the Cold War felt (and ultimately were) resolvable, while climate change (in the popular conception) feels fundamentally unresolvable. The former were also fundamentally social concerns, with avenues for social activism; the latter contains social concerns but is fundamentally a global coordination problem that’s roughly equivalent to achieving world pe…
Re: Why some researchers think I’m wrong about social media and mental illness
#251The Cold War absolutely did not feel resolvable at the time. The popular conception was that of present day North Korea cranked up to 100; there were crazy people in Moscow, they had thousands of nukes pointed at the rest of the world, and they’d successfully set up a system to prevent sanity from being restored. (In Russia, my understanding is that they generally saw it as a story of capitalists who could not stand to let a worker’s movement survive; in the rest of the Warsaw Pact, they saw it as a permanent system where the country must remain communist because the Red Army will invade otherwise.)