The teen mental illness epidemic is international (2023)

I still work remote, but go to a co-working space most days even if it's just half a day.

Getting dressed, out of the house, and seeing real people face-to-face is a huge boost to my mental health.

A spiritual void, a loss of social cohesion, isolation, alienation, a loss of a culture that reinforces ways of life that enable flourishing, radical individualism. The decline of traditional religious faith in the West. The sexual revolution and its dreadful distortion of human sexuality. The culture of consumerism and the worship of desire and appetite divorced from reason and one's objective good.

So what's a smell that suggests this is the case? According to the triple melting pot theory, in countries like the US, ethnic identity, under the tendency toward some kind of assimilation, gives way to religious identity as not only religious identity, but a substitute for ethnic identity.

So what happens with the waning of religious identity? Various dehumanizing ideologies start to look attractive. This explains both the appeal of the sexual, racial, and ecological ideologies that have become popular recently. These ideologies promise identity and social belonging, perhaps even an alleged higher purpose, which is to say they offer false and flimsy identities, ones that have political utility for those who control them. Various subcultures, many created by corporate interest around various products, do the same thing. You have "communities", so-called, that center around owning a particular brand of something. Corporate brand constructed false identities.

People don't know who they are. They've alone. They don't know the address of the destination, or even that there is an address. Their horizon goes only as far as satisfying their base appetites, and they pay lip service to ideologies to avoid being shunned from groups without which they cannot satisfy those appetites. And when they do, they discover that their satisfaction isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Here follows the realization that no hope is to be found in what has been sought. From here: suicide, or some higher realization.

There are so many different kinds of scrolling though.

For me:

- HN scrolling to find ideas/inspiration, staying longer if I find something interesting

- Twitter scrolling to get a glimpse of what's going on in the world and then staying if I get baited by something :D

- Facebook scrolling, usually for a particular purpose these days (maybe once every other week on average, to check up on someone in particular I happen to think of), then staying scrolling for a bit, past irrelevant posts for a while, where I might get warm/happy/nostalgic by some updates

- Instagram scrolling takes literally 30 seconds before I get annoyed by the ads and close the app (happens 100% of the time although I might last 1-2 minutes some times)

Those are all quite different experiences and I could do them all in quite different ways. I used to mindlessly scroll FB for example while not using Twitter at all. The psychological effects were quite different, but perhaps more socially attuned?

Nowadays I scroll less overall and more for intellectual reasons.

But... getting caught in the "must... scroll.... more...." mode is the same for all of them psychologically (Youtube as well), the same addictive behavior.

So yeah. I think there needs to be a distinction between scrolling for a (moderately healthy) while and doomscrolling. The algorithms can be quite very helpful in presenting relevant data, but they're also a potential black hole.

Oh and I'm not sure why I was replying to you specifically. I guess you got to be my therapist today.

Haidt is referring to the heckling and deplatforming of speakers on (US) university campuses because some group disagrees with their message. And one aspect of "safetyism" invoked to that end is claiming that to allowing said (lawful, non-inciting) speech itself per se makes students "feel unsafe", aka the "words are violence" trope Haidt mentions frequently. See e.g. 2016 NYU The Forum: "Right to Say: Freedom, Respect, and Campus Speech" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTU3hxgr2Kc

(As to to who ultimately has agency in inviting/platforming/deplatforming/protesting/canceling speakers on US campuses, that's a very long-running story, can involve media, donors, boards of regents, not just the students etc. But yes, noone's compelling the students to attend and listen, and in any case they can speak in response.)

A 2020 article on "safetyism" as defined by Haidt and Lukianoff in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind: “Safetyism refers to a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.” : https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/safetyism... . One incident commonly cited was the 2015 Yale Halloween costume matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Christakis#Yale_Hallo...

The unspoken truth is daycare is highly regulated and that regulation compliance is much of the contributing factor. Either compensate constituents for the externalities of your protective legislation or go back to letting any jill turn her house into a an unlicensed daycare center which is the dirty truth of how people got by for an affordable price before.