Play some video games, research something interesting, stay in school but don't take it too seriously, and learn a marketable skill slowly. Do this, dgaf about everyone else, you'll be ok.
Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#122What bothers me most and even on HN, where you usaully get intelligent discourse, the alarmist pessimism. Everything is falling apart! Just another form of self-indulgence. There must be something compelling about pretending the apocolypse is tomorrow. Yes, there are problems in our social, political, ecomonic systems. They need to be recognized and addressed. Democracy makes that process slow and difficult. But the…
Well, the doom-scrolling is a feature not a bug of social media. If you think the world is ending tomorrow, don't you want to be there to watch it all end?
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#123Play some video games, research something interesting, stay in school but don't take it too seriously, and learn a marketable skill slowly. Do this, dgaf about everyone else, you'll be ok.
> dgaf about everyone else, you'll be ok
It sounds cool but it could be taken as serious advice. If that's how you truly feel and act, you are not ok and you are missing out on what is most rewarding in life.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#124Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#125My entirely anecdotal impression as a high school teacher is that media (in general, often but not always “social” media) is doing an exceptional job of sucking up teenagers’ every waking moment that is not actively demanded to be focused on something else. It’s pleasure without joy. Ennui without boredom. Their social skills (and social interest) appear markedly reduced even compared to even five years ago. So many…
As a parent of a 10 and 7yo your insight here is absolutely golden.
I worry a lot about my kids getting sucked into that world. Right now we're keeping them well away from social media, and very little and restricted screen time.
Your comment gives me confidence that this is the right approach, but I'm not sure yet how to navigate it as they enter their teenage years and all their friends have phones.
We are leaning them into non-digital pastimes and IRL relationships, which they fortunately enjoy. I hope this momentum can carry them through what I see as the danger years of teenage and early adulthood.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#126Is it really social media itself that's the major contributing factor? Or is it really that people are using social media as a distribution channel to propagate negative, defeatist beliefs en mass in response to the natural challenges teens face when growing up? I think it is the latter. One has but to open TikTok to quickly come across a video instilling negative beliefs about the opposite sex with tons of commenter…
I can buy this, but it might practically be a distinction without a difference. If social media is an amplifier, we have to be careful what we're amplifying. Most people have no regular practice for the cultivation of wholesome solace. The result seems unsurprising.
The way to control what is being amplified is to control what people are producing. You can try to do this by modulating what is allowed to be produced or you can modulate this on the demand side. The latter is more robust but harder to legislate. It can be done via greater public awareness though. We have multiple case studies for this sort of thing.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#127Everything in this country, in this life, is a competition. One big zero-sum game. It starts in high school. Social status, academics, athletics, and now social media followers and likes. I am very glad that when I was in high school, social media wasn't really a thing yet. I could leave it all at school. Just go home and read, play video games or go outside. Most of my mistakes were limited to the memories of those…
> One big zero-sum game.
Not relationships, marriage, work, or community. Even business is rarely zero sum, or the economy wouldn't grow. Generally speaking, business is win-win deals.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#128Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#129Social media definitely amplifies it, but consider the economic and social environment that teenagers have lived through their entire lives. Multiple major recessions, a global pandemic, rising inflation, housing and education getting more expensive by the day, prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation, climate that will be unlivable in a few decades, political extremism becoming the norm, and massive gov…
Agreed a whole lot. Social media is the new whipping boy, but no one is willing to confront that much of what it shows us is a genuine & real reflection, is just connecting us more accurately to the real state of things.
I think there's an incredible resillience especially in youth to not get bogged down in or at least to tangle with & find peace with the sad scary backdrop of the world. When they have elememts of hope, when they have positive role models, when they see successful adults having ok lives. And frankly that's a challenge, period; there's just little community, few role models left. Big employers are better quality of life but it's deeply depersonalizing, being so deeply embedded somewhere odd deep deep inside an org chart, with only modest chances of getting to work hard for a long time & then at best retire. The new work world is opaque, dis-real.
Reality is already very well built, well estaished, and there's little available space or reward for trying stuff out & finding ourselves. We see less making life happen.
A lot of this difficulty is because of so many of these sad scary hopeless background factors. But rather than try to tackle endless symptoms as problems, i keep feeling like there's rootstriking we could be doing by trying to develop & support a more youthfully active world, by directly trying to support & enable people interested in taking chances in getting things started. In building the world. Not just working in it. Some real signs of positive life, creating role models of people who have real hands in shapimg their lives, have established good locus of controls: this is just wild spouting hypothesis, but I think that would make such a difference. Some signs of reality within reach.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#130The government's abject failure to invest in fixing climate change, or education, or health care for young people, or general human rights?
No, surely what's got teens down is congress not regulating social media hard enough. Thank you, senators.