I have to assume that people leaving their home towns to work elsewhere is a huge driving factor of all of this.
The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
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Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#32The cause is having a tiny computer in your hand all day. It's so glaringly obvious.
That doesn't seem very obvious to me. Would you mind elaborating?
Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#33I've noticed an uptick recently of large brands to start referring to themselves as "The [Brand] Community". The author pointed out Youtube here (who in an Orwellian manner calls their ToS "community guidelines") but I've also seen it with many other multi-million dollar companies such as Reddit, Twitter, etc. Young people today are reaching out for real support structures, but only receiving manipulation from corpor…
> while occasionally arguing with pseudo-anonymous internet strangers.
Even this has been eroding, the amount of comments made by bots I see across reddit/Twitter has increased exponentially since the 2010s. It only got worse after LLMs.
Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#34The cause is having a tiny computer in your hand all day. It's so glaringly obvious.
Indeed. The old trope of the asocial "computer nerd" too focused on the machine to talk to girls.
Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#35Who knew utterly destroying cities and replacing them with gated communities with no accommodations for children whatsoever, and borderline criminalizing any activity which isn't closely supervised would have knock-on effects.
Probably doesn't help, but we have similar issues here in Germany, yet those things you mentioned aren't.
Buying a home and getting grounded was the key for my community integration. It is very clear who are tenants and who are the owners. The owners came with cookies and Glühwein to remove together snow from our street. Tenants didn’t show up. They know and we know that they will be gone sooner or later. So why waste time with strangers?
Edit: what I want to say is that mobility does not create community and stability. I see this in Germany often: school system does not create community either. A child must go through at least couple schools. So the friends get lost and strong friendship does not happen in the last school.
Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#36How do astronauts train for this when preparing for long missions without much company?
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Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#37The cause is having a tiny computer in your hand all day. It's so glaringly obvious.
Is that the cause of the loss of community? Or is that a coping mechanism for the loss of community? Or a combination?
I agree it's related. But that it's glaringly obviously the cause? I'd need to hear more.
Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#38I've personally noticed that my own value of autonomy has often contributed to a reduction in social activity and community integration. I used to be very selective of what I did with others. If I had an invite from friends and the activity didn't seem immediately interesting to me, I'd decline. I've since learned to say yes more (but not always) to invites and particularly consider ones that are more outside my comf…
> If I had an invite from friends and the activity didn't seem immediately interesting to me, I'd decline.
I have seen many (usually younger) people make this mistake. The mistake is thinking that the point of the activity is the activity itself. It isn't. The point is the genuine social engagement.
(Edited to add:)
> I've since learned to say yes more
Years ago, I learned to change my default answer to things from "no" to "yes". It has been a key to my career success. But, more than that, I have lived a more interesting life than most as a result of that.
Making "yes" your default instead of "no" increases the chances that something bad will happen, this is true, but it also increases the chances that something good will happen. Personally, I've found that on the whole, the riskier path is the better path. But I'm quite certain that not everyone will feel the same.
Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#39The cause is having a tiny computer in your hand all day. It's so glaringly obvious.
The issue started long before that, it’s not like mental health was great in the 90s.
Loss of third places, TV, necessity to move around for studies then jobs (and moving your kids along if / when you got them), increased cost of living, … are all massive contributing factors.
Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community
#40The cause is having a tiny computer in your hand all day. It's so glaringly obvious.
And yet this loss of community has different levels across the world, and yet in all of those countries teenagers still have tiny computers in their hand all day.
I spent part of the summer in Spain, and you'd see teenagers hanging out in the park, or at the beach huddled together while looking at their own tiny computers.