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The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#561

Post by everdrive »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #490
latentcall wrote: post #57

Not just social media, but always online mentality. Spending all your time online gives you a skewed perception of the world and I believe being online always is a major negative. 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.

> Not sure if we can ever go back to that without some major catastrophe. We easily can. With the network effect, we can just encourage everyone we know that socializing with real people in real life is important and set up some coffees, lunches, dinners, walks, board games, etc, and then encourage those people to do the same with the people they know. Won't take very many hops to reach everyone this way and get back…

This is like saying we can easily stop the obesity epidemic. The problem is pretty simple conceptually, but it's not going to be solved. The requirements for ignoring social media and practicing true impulse control lay outside of the bell curve of impulse control for much of humanity. People _could_ stop using social media, but they're not going to. Same reason why most people are fat. Yes, I know there are environmental factors, but all those do is squeeze a tighter box around the percentile of people who have the impulse control and resources to eat and exercise properly to maintain a good physique.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#562

Post by dgfitz »

serf wrote: post #470
drukenemo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past we could stay online for long hours doing some few activities (chatting, playing games, browsing few sites). These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference.

>These days we can barely survive without a mobile phone always on, permeating every little interaction we have with the world. It’s quite a difference. reading all of these 'royal we' anecdotes makes me feel grateful that I can survive without a mobile quite fine. HN is as close to social media as I get -- so I guess i'm stuck wondering : are all these 'conditions' of the modern world inexorably linked and self-perp…

> I don't know. But it is interesting, and wildly segmenting, that everyone around me refers to these problems that 'we' have -- but I don't. I can't be alone in this feeling.

I feel the same way. HN is as close as I get to social media, I don't even look at reddit.

I think it is a "good thing" people use your "royal we" term in that at least people see phone addiction as a problem. It is usually always couched in the tone of "the problem is too far gone" which isn't a good thing.

I wonder what it would be like if an entire country picked one hour during one day, and everyone just somehow disabled data on their phones, calls only, with the idea being that you only make calls that are required, not to stymie boredom.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#563

Post by Ashken »

WalterBright wrote: post #502
jampekka wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation and government involvement in economy very much so. This was/is the core of the neoliberal turn.

Consider all the labor regulations since. All the complexity of the taxes. The design of cars today is completely driven by regulations - for example, the tendency for cars to all look alike comes from regulation of every aspect of them. Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here. In what area has government been reduced?

Education, for sure.

In tech, while there are some regulations, I definitely believe that more need to be established, especially regarding the topic of the article. Tech is a bit too loose right now, with the exception of the health industry.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#565

Post by hydrok9 »

granshaw wrote: post #214
nradov wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that cultural change in attitudes can be traced back to the Etan Patz kidnapping case in 1979. That case received widespread, prolonged media attention at the time which made many parents more fearful. He was one of the first missing children to be featured on milk cartons which made it impossible to ignore. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/etan-patz-case-verdict-pedro-he...

It seemed free roaming was still widely accepted in the 90s though? What changed since the 2000s?

The change happened gradually throughout the 90's. People born in the late 80's typically had free-roam experience, while those born in the miid-late 90's did not,

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#566

Post by croutonwagon »

rescbr wrote: post #545
croutonwagon wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the inflection point was about here: https://imgur.com/ALMObBv Not that I am blaming porn. I am not. But once the screens and bandwidth became large enough, UI's easy enough to navigate etc AND the devices themselves became quite commonplace, the always online mentality became one used much less for essential communication and business and transitioned more to a cultural way of life (porn is just an easy…

Infinite scrolling was also present in desktop. I blame the pivot from the chronological feeds to algorithmically generated feeds based on engagement (or whatever other metric).

It was. And I agree that plays a part. But Desktops are, by nature, much less accessible. Even a laptop is.

You didnt have people nearly as commonly doomscrolling on the subway on the way to work, or in the car, or in the living room around family, when the computer was restricted to a specific space/time etc.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#567

Post by stainablesteel »

ativzzz wrote: post #474
cf1241290841 wrote: post #137

The increase in depression numbers might be a rational reaction to the current environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been

This is why for pretty much the majority of human history, we had some form of religion to trick ourselves into ignoring this. Now that religion is on a decline...

religion gave purpose, it didn't hide a lack thereof

people need purpose not to hide from the truth, they need religion and purpose to embrace it

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#568

Post by kjkjadksj »

dbbk wrote: post #504
samr71 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deny a drinking age is necessary. From what it sounds like, the kids should be out there drinking more!

The drinking age is also entirely irrelevant to teens because it just means they drink at house parties rather than bars.

It also means they get arrested and the older brother who bought the case of beer could face jail time. Stupid laws that have harmed far more people than they’ve helped.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#569

Post by pixl97 »

naasking wrote: post #363
watwut wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about mental health crisis being international. Meanwhile, German, French, Swiss, Japan or Scandinavian kids walk around towns free without adults. They walk to school at age of 6 or even sooner. If it was just about independence, countries like Germany or France would not had the issue.

Exactly. Everybody just immediately jumps to their pet theory without actually digesting the full set of data that needs to be explained. The article very clearly lays out why those other explanations are less plausible than social media, and the cross-cultural nature of it is a big point. All that said, the authors who publish on that site are also very pro-unsupervised free play and think its decline has caused men…

People are really bad about interpreting complex multifactor causations, it seems in every discipline.

I think human social systems have a lot of 'anti-fragile' built into them. That is any one factor, unless it is insanely serious, isn't going to cause a mass collapse of society. We adapt and smooth things over. This is something we see in ecological systems all the time. The problems start cropping up when multiple stressors are introduced to the environment. For example, I'd say the disappearance of 'third places' forces more youth to social media thereby increasing said harm of social media.

Also, social media likely needs broken into a series of different factors on what is harmful about it. You have the direct "Kids going things to kids", but neglecting what social media is doing to their parents would be missing the forest for the trees. The 24 hour news cycle tapped into the fear sells, and online has taken it to 'fear gets eyeballs'. Add in advertisers being unscrupulous, and countless bots attempting to manipulate you, it's no wonder we're not all insane.

Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

#570

Post by bigstrat2003 »

goodpoint wrote: post #259
sureglymop wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is puzzling because "shelter" (right to adequate housing) is directly a human right we once agreed upon. But when we view this as a commodity and allow housing to be an investment vehicle it really displays the lack of empathy and care for the humans around us we have.

> we once agreed upon That's the issue. All the basic human rights have been rolled back especially in the anglosphere. Housing, public health services, employment (proper jobs, non gigs)

The other issue is that we didn't actually agree on this. It may be that something like the EU declaration of rights says that housing is a human right, but humanity overall has never agreed that is the case.
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