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Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress

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Re: Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress

#2
I don't get why this is framed as "nowadays". Bad stuff happened all around millennials too. I can has cheeseburger and related sites were huge almost as soon as they launched in 2007. Then the same thing happened with much older generations as well - my parents and a lot of people from that generation repeated lines from old political comedy shows - basically memes before the internet. Kilroy was a WW2 meme.

It's more "the same thing that always happened happens now, just increased by the presence of the internet".

Re: Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress

#5
post #2

I don't get why this is framed as "nowadays". Bad stuff happened all around millennials too. I can has cheeseburger and related sites were huge almost as soon as they launched in 2007. Then the same thing happened with much older generations as well - my parents and a lot of people from that generation repeated lines from old political comedy shows - basically memes before the internet. Kilroy was a WW2 meme. It's mo…

> I don't get why this is framed as "nowadays".

> "the same thing that always happened happens now, just increased by the presence of the internet".

Didn't you answer yourself? It's not that teens never had stress before, the article explores how they are coping with stress increase.

Re: Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress

#6
> [...] Gen Z cannot go online or be a part of a social setting without being exposed to the sheer amount of horrors happening around the globe. You can’t turn on the television without being shown the terrors of school shootings, the sorrow in the faces of refugees as they flee their county’s with nowhere to go, and all of this happening while our political structure crumbles.

Susan Sontag wrote about this in "Regarding the pain of others". Basically as soon as we had the means to know what is happening around the world almost instantly (at least as soon as the information is properly formatted) we opened this exposure to the collective suffering of the entirety of the human race. It is not something one can run from and everyone will eventually be exposed to it. The article goes more into detail of the naturalization of suffering and the ideia that knowing the horrors by recounts and pictures we think we know the horrors themselves. It is very well worth the read.

Re: Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress

#7

> [...] Gen Z cannot go online or be a part of a social setting without being exposed to the sheer amount of horrors happening around the globe. You can’t turn on the television without being shown the terrors of school shootings, the sorrow in the faces of refugees as they flee their county’s with nowhere to go, and all of this happening while our political structure crumbles. Susan Sontag wrote about this in "Regar…

> It is not something one can run from and everyone will eventually be exposed to it.

Oh you can. Just don't visit news sites or watch news TV channels. Paper news papers are way better and don't shove stuff down your throat the same way as rage baiting "this just in" news outlets -- who talks for a day about vague rumors.

I think people zoning out from the spam one thing news cycle is the reason The Man decided to start pushing propaganda in the Windows start menu and Facebook feed or whatever.

Re: Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress

#9

> [...] Gen Z cannot go online or be a part of a social setting without being exposed to the sheer amount of horrors happening around the globe. You can’t turn on the television without being shown the terrors of school shootings, the sorrow in the faces of refugees as they flee their county’s with nowhere to go, and all of this happening while our political structure crumbles. Susan Sontag wrote about this in "Regar…

> It is not something one can run from and everyone will eventually be exposed to it. Oh you can. Just don't visit news sites or watch news TV channels. Paper news papers are way better and don't shove stuff down your throat the same way as rage baiting "this just in" news outlets -- who talks for a day about vague rumors. I think people zoning out from the spam one thing news cycle is the reason The Man decided to s…

Agreed. There's a world of emotional difference between being philosophically and abstractly aware that the world has a lot of suffering, and spending each day reading/watching/listening up on the fresh new hell of the hour.

Re: Memes and mental health: How teens are coping with increasing stress

#10

> [...] Gen Z cannot go online or be a part of a social setting without being exposed to the sheer amount of horrors happening around the globe. You can’t turn on the television without being shown the terrors of school shootings, the sorrow in the faces of refugees as they flee their county’s with nowhere to go, and all of this happening while our political structure crumbles. Susan Sontag wrote about this in "Regar…

> It is not something one can run from and everyone will eventually be exposed to it. Oh you can. Just don't visit news sites or watch news TV channels. Paper news papers are way better and don't shove stuff down your throat the same way as rage baiting "this just in" news outlets -- who talks for a day about vague rumors. I think people zoning out from the spam one thing news cycle is the reason The Man decided to s…

Although I agree the scale in which we are exposed to shit on the internet is unprecedented, I disagree that we can run from it.

Just go to a library. Start browsing. Eventually you will stumble upon a book about the Secons World War. Or about Rwanda... In the information era, you will be exposed accidentally to these kinds of stuff, and learning to recognize that and to develop strategies that prevent this exposure to numb us I think is much more effective than trying to run away from it.

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