51–60 of 937 posts
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I certainly think a drinking age below the driving age is appropriate. Either by increasing driving, or lowering the drinking age.
Driving is different. It's a lot about harming others. Drinking and smartphone's is primarily about harming the users themselves.
I’m not a parent nor am I a teen so take my comments with a grain of salt. The one thing that has consistently jumped out to me on this topic is how quickly people seem to jump to convenient answers. Of course you can’t ignore the rise of social media since 2010, but what about the level of control, structure, and surveillance that most young people have been subjected to over the same arc of time? That gets no atten…
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a trend among parents to latch on to Haidt's anti-social-media advocacy while ignoring his recommendations for what we fill the time with instead (hint: free roaming independence!), but it's not because he hasn't been vocal about both aspects.
Do teens have much to look forward to? Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly. Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck. Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Debt is up. New wars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your parents know where you are with 3m accuracy it isn’t really free roaming. In other words, being watched or tracked will definitely affect a kids behavior.
If a kid changes behavior because of a parent watching then that kid absolutely needs watching. It's still free roaming because the kid is 100% in charge of where they will go. That's the part that matters, not that someone can tell where they are.
But what scares me more is how this trend has the potential to normalize surveillance in general. It's not uncommon to for people to treat their employer or the government as a surrogate parent. So why wouldn't kids raised in a digital surveillance family accept a digital surveillance state?
Do teens have much to look forward to? Climate change is already causing severe weather events, which are very likely to ramp quickly. Careers are a thing of the past, and it seems like no matter how hard you work you'll never "get ahead" and will be lucky not to spend your life living paycheck to paycheck. Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Debt is up. New wars.
> Life expectancy has gone down, markedly. Do you have a source for this? I'm curious in which country and by how much.
Put that down to a complete dogs breakfast response to handling an epidemic.
People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.
Spending time outside is good for you. Socializing with real people in front of you is good also.
Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe.
People blame social media, but they never ask why social media is like that. I think that the cultural changes that lead to that have been running for far more time than people give credit for, and that social media is just the proverbial canary on the mine that made things explicit. Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy f…
Social media is an artifact of the internet spreading, it will fade away or we'll adapt to it, but during the transition period, people who cannot deal with it are being rejected, somewhat violently. It's like blaming the depression of horse riders on the war policies of the time.
To me this growth has created a sense of anxiety in all teens and older. Now the societal structures, jobs, careers, education, medicine etc do not change over multiple generations but multiple times in single generation. This relentlessness has affected me for last 20 years and still does despite all success at surface level.
It’s not just social media. Free roaming and spending time outside on their own or with peers went down dramatically for the last 30 years.
But did it go down dramatically in particular in the early 2010’s? Because the data seems to suggest that the teen mental health situation accelerated dramatically in that time frame. One thing that comes to mind is that during my lifetime, and it’s difficult to pin down a specific time frame, the stigma surrounding mental illness faded pretty dramatically it seems. Now I don’t know if that change inflected dramatica…
I believe that this is a much larger component of the issue than many may realize. Never has it been as easy for young people to discuss what they’re going through, and that’s no doubt led to realizations that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
This effect likely extends well beyond teenagers, in my opinion. Across the board it’s become more socially acceptable to speak up when facing difficulties, which means a lot of things that used to get swept under the rug suddenly aren’t. It’s no longer required to keep up the appearance that all is well when it isn’t, and I think that’s probably a good thing.