> Saw a post on Paul Graham’s twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that’s a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho. That’s…honestly, exactly the combination of race and gender I would expect to be most depressed right now, even thinking only about expectations people have been raised with about the direction of progress for their own co…
Can you expand on your thoughts here? This is not a group whose lives I generally expect to be getting worse (in day-to-day life, barring social media effects).
now imagine spamming their phones with tik tok videos about the end of the world due to ____________. In your example, it's climate change. Maybe it's that, but it could also be that we can now mainline hours and hours of highly provocative content directly into a growing brain.
We grew up with the threat of nuclear destruction, as well as global warming, in the 1980s.
We did, but we didn't have endless short videos to scroll through.
Seeing as how my daughter has gone through ten years of therapy due to depression I'll throw my hat in the ring and tell you what I think at least part of the problem is: Late stage, winner-takes-all & loser-gets-nothing, Capitalism. Those of us who are well-entrenched in our careers may not understand how vicious the world is for the entry-level and those aspiring to launch careers. The secondary schools preach and…
The US is so close to a near ideal mixed economy. If the cartels holding oligopolies on housing, healthcare, and education were disbanded life would be dare I say pleasant in America. Today GDP keeps rising because of a few free money trees, while quality of life for many is deteriorating. Becoming middle class is stressful here, and while it shouldn’t necessarily be easy it should at least be formulaic. Young people…
The formula is disappearing before them and the formula is getting harder and harder to execute. Failure, or what's deemed as failure, is seen to carry more dire consequences than ever.
What we're seeing is exactly what you would expect to happen if the middle class is indeed disappearing.
I would love to explore Reddit's influence on this phenomenon. The timelines seem to sync somewhat and it seems like a perfect vehicle for adversarial nation states to use to influence public opinion.
Also falls perfectly within what Yuri Bezmenov (the KGB defector who explained the Soviet's plan to take down the West through ideological subversion) laid out. At around that time, you would have the first batch of fully indoctrinated (trained by Socialists from childhood to adulthood, with no oversight or counterbalance) graduating. That is also the group that sets the stage for the demoralisation phase of the plan…
In that interview he also talked about how the USSR was imminently going to take over the West because everyone had been indoctrinated to communism, so he's not exactly batting 1000. It seems to me he lays out a culture bleakness Rorschach test about "kids these days" that's easy to see ourselves in, and will be able to any point.
These always come up and there's always this internet-commenter tendency to be like "I KNEW IT: SMARTPHONES/INTERNET/LACK-OF-RELIGION/ABCDEFG ANYTHING OF THE LAST 20 YEARS I HATE", which is fine for a hypothesis and worth somebody saying once. But it's really just a hypothesis. Another hypothesis is that it's environmental. There's a lot of research showing depression and stress are correlated with inflammation. Ther…
Another hypothesis is electromagnetic fields. There are more now than ever. Cell phones, 5G, Wifi Sounds stupid right? There's a plausibility scale, and despite various hypotheses being possible, it's reasonable to rank them by what fits best with out prior knowledge, and social media is way more plausible than some post 2010 rise in inflammation, even if that could causally lead to depression in the first place.
> post 2010 rise in inflammation
You're assuming that depression and other mental illnesses only started in 2010, which is theoretically possible, but not an established fact.
We've actually seen a drastic rise in most mental illnesses diagnosed going back at least 50 years. There is a hypothesis that it's diagnosis, but again, merely a hypothesis.
Some of the cases which clearly aren't "diagnosis" (e.g. nearsightedness) we have no explanation for.
The article has a point, but there's no proof for cause & effect. A completely different explanation could be that our societies are so advanced by now that we can finally listen to mental illnesses and take them seriously - while in the past people just had to 'function', no matter what.
That wouldn't explain such a drastic rise in one demographic (teenagers)
Saw a post on Paul Graham's twitter about this, turns out white, liberal female teens were the most depressed, for whatever reason, that's a strange specific group to be extremely depressed imho.
Ah yes, his very area of expertise and authority. Did commentary include "interesting" and/or "looking into it"?
I recall seeing commentary recently from mental health specialists that noted that young people are increasingly facing a sense of existential dread over climate change - that there's nothing they can do to stop it, and will feel the impact more heavily than previous generations. I wouldn't discount social media and related issues out of hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's a contributing factor. I understand…
The evolutionary purpose of dread is to motivate people to leave dangerous situations. When you hear about people surviving dangerous animal encounters, they tend to notice that something is "off" before they actually spot the hungry bear or mountain lion. Feeling dread for something you can't control is completely irrational, however. It's inevitable that you'll succumb to age related illness, so it's logical to be concerned about it to a certain extent, and it can be good to channel that into motivating you to be healthy. However, the fear of death is motivating you to doomscroll WebMD and causing pain in your daily life, you have a psychological problem. The same goes for human climate change. Unless if you live in a place like Micronesia, climate doomerism is a product of social media more than actual climate change.