I remember peer pressure being a big factor in teen years, mostly in the negative. Couldn't the rise of always-connected social media have super charged this negativity and made most teens feel like outcasts, with a few "teenfluencers" determining who is in and who is out? That would be a kind of hell for me to live in who was a teen before all this.
The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
671–680 of 937 posts
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While it may be taboo to say so What does that even mean? You just said it, and it's also been said by countless people ever since the aforementioned 60s. It's not taboo, it's trite.
If it was trite, there wouldn't be as much resistance to it. It's important to use words accurately. Contentious, controversial, unpopular, iconoclastic maybe, not trite.
> If it was trite, there wouldn't be as much resistance to it.
How does that follow? It's a longstanding controversy. The same arguments have been made over and over again.
> It's important to use words accurately. Contentious, controversial, unpopular, iconoclastic maybe, not trite.
It can be both trite and controversial. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38939106
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#673Kids growing up too early when they should be playing and hanging out outside and having fun together. Real world social connection is essential to human happiness.
Adolescence is more prolonged than ever, the problems typically identified (isolation, excess social media, insufficient sunlight) aren't contingent on early adulthood unless we redefine adulthood to mean those things.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. Folks in the 60’s thru 80’s expected global nuclear annihilation with some probability.
It is a different sort of doom. Slim chance of something utterly catastrophic happening all at once vs seemingly inevitable failure to respond day after day, knowingly. I mean I enjoyed having neither but then most people weren’t lucky enough to grow up in the 90’s.
> ..Slim chance..
During the cold war it was quite literally minute by minute, alive or dead. Every day was news of airspace incursions, naval confrontations, proxy conflicts etc. "Slim chance" it was not.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do. I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always…
> I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly heh, i have to ask, what is so great/healthy/engaging/enlightening about staring blankly? I think anything, reading a book/newspaper, talking to a stranger, petting a dog, would have been better than "staring blankly".
Well, sitting and staring blankly has been socially unusual for decades at least. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE
That said: I don’t pull out my phone when waiting in line, I don’t usually have a book or newspaper handy, and I often don’t feel like talking with a stranger (though I will sometimes). That leaves me alone with my thoughts. Despite the implication of descriptions like “staring blankly”, though, my mind is absolutely active during those times. Sometimes it’s calm, sometimes it’s running a mile a minute. Maybe I’m daydreaming, maybe I’m replaying a book or movie scene in my head, maybe I’m making plans for the day, maybe I’m debating with myself or thinking philosophical thoughts or trying to work out what I should say in an upcoming meeting. Thinking thoughts is active, and I don’t consider it time wasted.
Humans don’t have to be fed stimulation 24/7—the mind is a self‐stimulating organ.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this has to be a huge chunk of it. I'm 40, have an established career, make the most money I've made in my life, live in a smaller city and I can barely afford to get by. I can't afford to take a vacation. I can't afford to buy land or a boat or something. Retirement situation looks grim, likely a bullet to the head. I have literally nothing to look forward to and every day gets harder and harder to tell myse…
Sorry to hear this. If you're now making the most you ever have, and continue to do so, hopefully if you live somewhat frugally and save, you ought to be OK in the long-term? Speaking as someone who for various reasons, mostly the need to support family members, doesn't have the big bucks a lot of tech workers have. I've no prospect of owning land or a boat. ;) Or a fancy car. But I don't really care. :) Vacations -…
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Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. I view phones as tool to 'solve' specific problems, such as communication. Apps and websites such as Outlook (email apps with notifications in general), LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, maybe also Hackernews etc. pose more of the role of ruining our downtime, as they are designed that way. At the end it would probably be about the lack of media competency, not kn…
> I wouldn't put phones as the responsible one so generally. From my experience, phone is an extremely common factor. If you randomly take a peek at any person in the 1st and 2nd world during their "downtime", I bet that you will 99% of the time see them on their phone. Phone have absolutely consumed everything we used to do. I cannot remember seeing a person just sitting on chair staring blankly, they almost always…
Well... there are other things you can do besides staring blankly. Reading a book, perhaps? Having a conversation?
Granted, these are two things that pretty much have a one-to-one counterpart on phones.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue I’ve been seeing in wealthy industrialized countries, is that people are becoming poorer as they grow older, the prices of energy are rising, the prices of land are rising, so simply getting people together is less viable than even 20 odd years ago. The internet gives you an instant connection to people who have interests specific to you better than even an expensive international convention can do for esse…
>If you decide this is worth it anyways, well you’re going to end up financially behind somebody using the internet in a cheap apartment on undesirable land, and that is going to undermine you bit by bit. Money can't help you when you're dead, so if you don't use it to improve your life or someone else's, it doesn't help at all. How is the depressed person living in an undesirable place ahead exactly?
In my thought experiment I’m trying to compare somebody who is perfectly happy in this new world spending much time behind screens, and somebody who needs more face to face interaction to be happy. I think the latter are doomed to try and keep up with the former by making personal sacrifices.
I think about this because in my youth the kids who spent all day in front of a computer were treated as disabled, disordered, and aberrant who needed to be pushed to be more social to succeed. Mostly boys were treated in this way. Yet I feel it’s these socially driven people who are fucked. Mostly women.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social media is nothing like books. It's also nothing like eBooks, Wikipedia, regular discussion forums, telephones, etc. Modern social media has some completely novel characteristics that are responsible for its damaging effects on mental health. - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. - It d…
> - It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction. Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles. That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting a…
Wikipedia doesn't have "infinite scrolling", you have to make a choice to look at associated content. Better still, you get to choose what you look at instead of having an algorithm choose for you. And you could even bookmark what you found and continue exploring at a later date!
Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.
Re: The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)
#680I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. It's 100% bad but it's just trash filling the hole society is making. Looking top down at the problem, humans need self actualization or propose to be happy. Originally we evolved to live in medium sized social groups that worked together to ensure their survival, we took care of each other and that was what drove our purpose, or rather why that need evolved, it…
> I think all the social media stuff is missing the mark. I think phones may well be responsible. Before smartphones, people regularly experienced true downtime - unstructured moments with nothing to do except be in your surroundings, feel your own boredom, experience your thoughts. Now, the moment our attention isn’t occupied by something external, we reach for our phones to have something to fill the silence. I bel…
>I think phones may well be responsible
take a smartphone, remove its internet connection and you'll quickly discover it's the internet access thst causes all problems