301–310 of 565 posts
I think the constant drip feed of dopamine that smartphones give you fucks up your brain chemistry, and that especially affects young people.
While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…
40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type). Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State, University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common.
It is also possible that some people competed for selective programs but failed to get in.
Finally, it's possible that even people who didn't realistically need or want to get into a selective program still feel a social expectation that they keep up with those who do.
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I honestly see value in having scars, both the physical and mental varieties. Scars create resilience. We saw this during the recent pandemic. The upper-middle class "high achieving, high anxiety" types who had never faced any real danger or hardship were the most likely to panic and demand all sorts of ridiculous lockdowns and mandates, even though the vast majority of them were never at any significant risk. Wherea…
I don't think that's why the upper middle class demanded lock downs and blue collar didn't. I think the driver was financial stability. Upper middle class likely has a nice emergency fund and could do their job from home. Essentially a nice vacation. Blue collar workers got to choose between welfare and starving.
Rather than being in a cube farm with the A/C recycling the air over and over.
Another possible explanation is that we are simply diagnosing these kind of mental health issues better – due to decrease in stigmatization and/or more attention to it – but that our treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher rates of self-harm and suicide. I have no idea if that's the case – and if it is a factor at all it probably doesn't account for all of it – but it seems something worth exp…
I think the opposite could be true – that we're too quick to diagnose mental illnesses in kids today. In the last few years I've witnessed several kids in my family get referred to doctors for potential mental illnesses and then end up on a cocktail of drugs as a result. It's something I've found really difficult because I was never personally convinced they were mentally ill in the first place and in many cases thes…
In the last several years since getting diagnosed I have done a lot of reading on the brain, trauma, mental illness etc. I've come to learn that actually a surprisingly large number of people have something going on, and whatever that something happens to be is complex enough that laypeople aren't in a position to understand it very well or at all.
Anecdotally, I was (as probably many here were) ahead of the curve in digital devices usage when I started hanging out in IRC and various web forums as a teenager in early 2000s. At some point I noticed that just using computers induced some amount of anxiety compared to "old tech"; whenever there was some period of time when I used my computer less (like christmas, vacations, etc.) and joined back to the "world of t…
I have another hunch: that working as a programmer, and maybe with computers in general, is anxiety-inducing. As Campbell put it, computers are like old testament gods: lots of rules and no mercy.
While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular).…
> I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. If this was true, you'd expect there to be a similar trend between Major Depression and college admissions. The data doesn't seem to show that[1][2] [1] https://educationdata.org/wp-content/uploads/74/Historical-C... [2] http://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a6... Most teenagers…
Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally how social media and other similar systems effected the day-to-day of my younger siblings through their teen years. It was not positive. Maybe someone younger can attest to my observations: - more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their attention in internet communities - less c…
> It was not positive. Can you elaborate? I only ever see children like 9-14 happy doing the latest Instagram or TikTok dance craze in the park/at the mall/with groups of their friends.
Many characters in "Nosedive" (Black Mirror episode) looked really happy as well.
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>I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process. I am 100% behind this, and a lot of my professional career has been spent in higher education, specifically working with college access programs for pre-college students. The amount of pressure kids are under today is just astounding. When I was looking at colleges, the pressure started slightly in…
> My oldest plays baseball, he started in kindergarten, and has played all the way to high school now. He loves the game, but we also made sure it was a game, not a job. All kids in his class who could afford it were on travel teams, starting in first grade. All but three have private coaches for whatever position they specialize in. . . starting in first grade. The parents sponsored tournaments. The parents made sur…
One of the core dilemmas of raising the next generation: 1. We base much of our own sense of self-worth on difficulties we have overcome and our ability to take care of others. 2. We fairly extend that same metric to others and judge others by the difficulties they've overcome and what they do for others. 3. Therefore, the better we are at living up to our own values and improving the lives of the next generation, th…
> wanting to tune out of the horror show that is the world by staring at their phone. Yikes—dead wrong way to do it. About the only other way to get 1/10 as much exposure to the "horror show" would be cable news.
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40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type). Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State, University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common.
You’re going to get a bias in here because a lot of folks are STEM focused / high achieving high anxiety types :)