Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]

Do you by any chance use social media? Is it possible that your bleak assessment of the state of the world has been influenced by it, and the hopelessness you are promoting is acquired from your media environment, and is part of a socially contagious spiral of anxiety & depression that you are passing on to others through this particular social medium?

Doctors don’t generally say to patients “yes, your life really is terrible and you are right to be anxious and/or depressed”. The nature of the illness lies in our response to the reality of the world.

In my view you could come up with a list of bad things similar to yours for any age in history. This is not a uniquely bad time to be alive. (I’d argue there has never been a better time, but that’s a separate matter). What seems to have changed is our coping mechanisms.

Consider the early 20th century. Some ostensibly irrelevant political figure was assassinated which rapidly spiraled into the "war to end all wars" in which about 20 million people were killed, in a world population of 1.7 billion - so more than 1% of people. In relatively short order this led to the Great Depression in which over 10 years the global economy collapsed leading to mass suicide, starvation, and disorder.

And we were just warming up. After that it turns out that the war to end all wars was just the pregame show. An eccentric vegetarian artist with a knack for riling up crowds decided to declare a literal genocidal war on the world, and for some time it looked very much like he was going to win. It only ended after another 80 million deaths (about 3% of the world population this time), the deployment of nuclear weapons, and countless war crimes.

And then? Decades of people got to live in the great times where every day there was a real and legitimate concern of imminent nuclear war (which did nearly blast off multiple times) to the point that nuclear drills were a part of the classroom, and people building their own nuclear doomsday bunkers was not only not eccentric but just plain ole pragmatism.

The point of this is not just to emphasize that the past was unimaginably and exponentially worse than the present in every imaginable way, but rather that there was no widespread mental health collapse. And there was no "shielding" kids from anything, when the world was literally burning in front of their eyes. So clearly something has changed, and it's not just that things have just gotten bad or that people are now uniquely aware of that. I have my own hypothesis, but this post is already too long. I'll conclude with a song which this post reminded me of:

Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

Lyrics: https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Billy-Joel/We-Didn-t-Start...

Meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn%27t_Start_the_Fire#His...

Times are certainly tough at different points in history, but they are extremely mentally and emotionally taxing right now and we keep hitting new peaks. We continue to accelerate the destruction of the earth and yet nothing is being done about it. When the everyday person is obsessed with EV cars instead of composting and planting native plants in their yard instead of wastelands of homogeneous lawns and committing genocide against insects and other animals in their yard, it becomes extremely demoralizing.

People don't do anything useful about anything now, and I think that is the most depressing of all. There's rabble about stuff on social media, politicians don't do anything but move the U.S. more towards and oligarchy, and corporations keep selling us stuff to consume, which consumers then lap up.

The Internet is the single most divisive technology ever created by humanity, and it does nothing but distance us from one another. There's never been greater threats to humanity than the Internet and its woes and the already arrived environmental and climate crisis.

That's not even considering the deep financial stress people are under these days. Even just 30 years ago, my parents bought a lot and built a house for $100,000. That barely covers tuition at most universities, and a similar sized house now costs around $1,000,000 just to buy. Just as recent as the late 90s and early 2000s, gas was under a dollar. We're sitting at $4.50 now. People can't afford the number of kids people used to have and must delay even having one or two kids well into their 30s, often due to financial constraints. Minimum wage has barely doubled since my teenage years, and yet everything is exponentially more expensive. Then there is the onslaught of several other socioeconomic factors.

People, aside from the wealthy, are getting slammed from literally every direction, and there is no concerted effort to improve any of it. It's not hard to understand why people are depressed more than ever.

> Yeah, we will probably survive for the next 50 years at least.

I feel like you are fundamentally misinformed here. It has never been the case that IPCC predicted "end of the world" in terms of climate predictions, even in the worst case. And in fact things have been improving since the worst predictions. We are currently headed to a 3 degrees C temperature increase. Which will cause global hardship on a massive level, but it's not anywhere near what's needed to wipe out even civilization let alone all/most humans.

> Even if you don't live in one of those places, you'll be feeling the effects through shortages (as we're currently experiencing a very small taste of in Europe), refugees and political instability.

The shortages in Europe are largely self-inflicted by poor vetting of business partners and "perfect is the enemy of better" behavior and have basically no relation to climate change.

Yup, killing the family unit is a shot still heard.