161–170 of 624 posts
Teens aren't doing drugs, smoking, drinking, or having sex. And the suicide rate has never been higher.
> Teens aren't ... having sex. Nor are people in their 20s (that is, both groups are having much less sex). That is the most worrying thing to me. People are not even engaging in the most fundamental, unavoidable, pleasurable human drive. They seem very much like traumatized people, on a massive scale, just trying to survive.
Teens aren't doing drugs, smoking, drinking, or having sex. And the suicide rate has never been higher.
I've had is persisting thought that, we as a society have been delaying adulthood, thus extending childhood, with each decade for a while. And we've now pushed it so far that the current cohort of teens simply are effectively young children on a social/emotion perspective making them unprepared to handle the stresses their age is exposing them to.
If you have kids, do you see them as less mature than how you perceived yourself at their age ?
TBH I feel the opposite: current kids have a lot more to deal with, and are expected to be much much more down to earth than a few decades ago. The most basic things: a single post on an SNS can stick with them for the rest of their life, yet we moved half of our social life online.
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If everyone is switching from drugs to social media, then that's progress. Twitter and Facebook won't harm your body. They're also free, so your habit will never make you poor and desperate. This kind of revolution in improving our health makes me proud to work in the tech industry. The worst that can happen is you'll feel sad if people bully you online, but that's the fault of people, not the technology. We can impr…
I strongly disagree with this. Social media companies are incredibly valuable specifically because they are effective at getting people to spend their money on things they otherwise wouldn't have. Depression, suicide, and other serious mental health disorders are strongly linked with social media use. Is that better than more kids drinking and smoking pot? I don't know, it's complicated. It's certainly not clearly be…
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I've had is persisting thought that, we as a society have been delaying adulthood, thus extending childhood, with each decade for a while. And we've now pushed it so far that the current cohort of teens simply are effectively young children on a social/emotion perspective making them unprepared to handle the stresses their age is exposing them to.
I would agree that modern childhood is protracted to what is perhaps a damaging extent, but would also argue that the stresses and anxieties of everyday life are more constant and overbearing than the human psyche is equipped to handle. It’s mot healthy for well-adjusted adults either. We’re built for dangers and stresses that come in relatively short bursts, not those that are without end.
We are simply blind to how much even the relatively recent past sucked.
Ample bodycam footage of people on drugs, or overdosing is widely available. I’d like to imagine that many people’s first exposure to drugs is seeing the terrifying things it leads them to do.
There’s regular news articles about people straight up dying from dodgy pills. Why would you take that risk. There is no way to safely use drugs when a single pill could kill you instantly.
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You still need crypto, no?
Nope. Don't even need the dark web. All you need is social media. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/who-needs-the-da...
Or do teenagers get legal access to credit cards in the US ?
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> you typically need to be unsupervised with friends to get into drugs, something teenagers no longer have access to compared to 10-15 years ago. They don't? I'm pretty sure I saw unsupervised teens hanging out at a mall even just a few days ago.
Not to sound snarky, but please consider interpreting comments like these as making a statement about rate rather than an absolute binary.
Not all locations are the same though, so maybe there has been a noticeable decrease where you're at. Personally, I think I've felt an increase if anything.
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I strongly disagree with this. Social media companies are incredibly valuable specifically because they are effective at getting people to spend their money on things they otherwise wouldn't have. Depression, suicide, and other serious mental health disorders are strongly linked with social media use. Is that better than more kids drinking and smoking pot? I don't know, it's complicated. It's certainly not clearly be…
Drug addicts sell their children (in the worst way) for the next hit. It's not the same.
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Nope. Don't even need the dark web. All you need is social media. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/who-needs-the-da...
I don't see anywhere how they actually buy the drug. Or do teenagers get legal access to credit cards in the US ?