My 2 cents: "it's the economy, stupid"
Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#312Social 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…
I grew up in Germany, so I was told stories of my grandfather, who lived through an entire world war, his home, home town, home country being entirely destroyed, being denied the return to his home since it was annexed and now behind the iron curtain, civilians he knew being murdered, pieces of butter being the best currency available, the nonexistence of any infrastructure such as roads, the very definition of polit…
The difference is the overall trajectory and the volume of information available.
During WWII and the Cold War, other than the present or looming threat of war, things were generally improving. Also, without the internet, people did not really care about far away events.
On the other hand, many of the challenges of today have been known for deacades(plural). A good portion of the anxiety is caused by watching in real-time slow-motion the unfolding of the global selfinflicted trainwreck and observing that all countermeasures are ineffective.
The end of the Cold War set the premises for humanity to have a bright future, yet humanity seems to prefer self-destruction.
Compared to then, humanity now is in a crisis of hopelessness.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just wrong. Teenagers don't know or care about recessions or inflation as it doesn't affect them. Nor do they know about the cost of housing and education. Teenagers don't care much about the government either. Social media blows up the fear about climate change (it definitely will not be "unlivable") and political extremisism. Being misinformed about things you can do nothing to change isn't good for mental…
> it definitely will not be "unlivable" Yeah, we will probably survive for the next 50 years at least. But climate events will be making life a lot harder. Droughts, floods, forest fires and tornados will be wrecking havoc in many places. 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 politi…
> Droughts, floods, forest fires and tornados will be wrecking havoc in many places.
If you don't quantify the increase, it means nothing. We already suffer those things and we cope fine.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#314Our descendants will look back on us allowing children access to unadulterated social media the way we look back on smoking.
I don’t think limiting information is the solution at least among older teens/young adults. I think people have a right to know the world’s ugly, harsh facts and crazy opinions. Not knowing something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I think the solution is to remind them of all the good facts and reasonable opinions. Warn about particularly bad stuff like gore (and do block this content from children until they reach y…
We already see tobacco ads from the 50s as barbaric (e.g. take a smoke to relief the pain of pregnancy) so it's not inconceivable that we may one day see unregulated social media of today the same
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Climate change drastically changes that equation. Not only will life expectancy go down, but life itself will probably become harder for many people in many places - droughts, heat waves, floodings, hunger and famine, mass migration, etc.
Except, people have been saying exactly this with the same unshakable confidence, literally since the beginning of recorded history. In the 70s, it was said that we would have experienced all of those things by 2000, and yet, life continued to get dramatically better for everyone, particularly for the poorest. So, no. Life will continue to get better despite global warming. Or, not doing so is an extraordinarily clai…
I wasn't alive then, so can't judge on that. I can however see the obvious changes that are happening, and the trends. Nobody serious is saying the planet will become uninhabitable, but swathes of it will. Wildfires, heat domes, massive floods are events that are getting more frequent. Texas's "once in a hundred years" winter that now has occured twice in 10 years; the massive floods in China and Germany; the heat and now cold waves that have hit Europe in the past few years. Burying your head in the sand won't make all that go away.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in Germany, so I was told stories of my grandfather, who lived through an entire world war, his home, home town, home country being entirely destroyed, being denied the return to his home since it was annexed and now behind the iron curtain, civilians he knew being murdered, pieces of butter being the best currency available, the nonexistence of any infrastructure such as roads, the very definition of polit…
The difference is the overall trajectory and the volume of information available. During WWII and the Cold War, other than the present or looming threat of war, things were generally improving. Also, without the internet, people did not really care about far away events. On the other hand, many of the challenges of today have been known for deacades(plural). A good portion of the anxiety is caused by watching in real…
I disagree. Within the cold war, the immediate threat was a nuclear war so devastating it would completely wipe out humanity's habitat, and most of humanity as well. The fear of that was known since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Most people nowadays do not carry that fear. There's much more reason for hope today: Most of the problems, as you said, seem solvable, they've been known for decades. It's unlikely for Europe or the US to get nuclear bombed in the near future. This is a privilege my parents did not have. Yet, they hoped, hoped no nuclear war would break out. I fail to see why people today shouldn't be able to find hope.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#317Social 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…
This is just wrong. Teenagers don't know or care about recessions or inflation as it doesn't affect them. Nor do they know about the cost of housing and education. Teenagers don't care much about the government either. Social media blows up the fear about climate change (it definitely will not be "unlivable") and political extremisism. Being misinformed about things you can do nothing to change isn't good for mental…
This is a wildly false claim
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk but in France, when I was still a teenager, it was not that uncommon to talk/joke about the fact that we will never be able to retire. In high school, most of my classmate already started to have a political conscience and where thinking about this kind of stuff. Same with the environment. We already had social media at the time (mostly facebook) and yes, I won't deny that there was already something anxious abou…
I can subscribe to the last sentence more than the rest. French are generally very interested in politics from youngish age, for better or worse (the amount of outright communism supporters there among young anywhere I spoke to is disheartening, especially for somebody like me who went through proper communism and saw first hand how it always fucks up individuals and nations for generations, and consistently fails to…
They support communism because they see the current leading power, unbridled capitalism, also has its downsides. It's a classic case of figuring out consumer desires from what they say.
Most of them just want some kind of regulation which keeps greed in check and allows them to be confident in a future of relationships, family, home ownership and security. Surely the success of games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Sims and and such would showcase how important this is to individuals.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#319Social 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…
Mmm, what? The things you are listing don't concern "teenagers" in their young teens, at all. They start being a problem for young adults, maybe.
The study in question debates young teens, ages 11-13 and 13-15, well before college.
In my experience as a parent of young teens, while they're sensitive to climate issues and of course "suffered" [1] during the pandemic, they aren't politicized, don't care about house prices, and don't know what "inflation" even means.
What they do know is what TikTok is, and what it means to be excluded from a Whatsapp group, and to spend hours each day wondering how they should reply to a perceived slight on some Discord channel.
I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat (I don't use them myself, at all) but can't really outlaw Whatsapp because all communications go through it.
It's an uphill battle but as a parent I'm extremely resentful to FAANG to put us all through this.
[1] I put this in quotes because my kids quite liked the lockdown; they didn't have to go to school and could play in the yard all day. (Of course their experience would have been different if we lived in a city with no yard.)
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Edit: Many angry replies; it seems my original post failed to make its point clearly. Let's try again.
I was replying to a comment that said, in essence, that environmental factors (the economy, politics, climate change) were probably more to blame than social media as an explanation for teens' mental health.
As a parent of young teens, I disagree on that specific argument. I think social media is much more to blame than anything else, for harming teens' mental health.
But in no way do I dismiss the existence of said environmental factors, or their effects on the well-being of people, in actual terms as well as in consequences on our anxiety levels.
Re: Teen mental health is plummeting and social media is a major contributing cause [pdf]
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk but in France, when I was still a teenager, it was not that uncommon to talk/joke about the fact that we will never be able to retire. In high school, most of my classmate already started to have a political conscience and where thinking about this kind of stuff. Same with the environment. We already had social media at the time (mostly facebook) and yes, I won't deny that there was already something anxious abou…
I can subscribe to the last sentence more than the rest. French are generally very interested in politics from youngish age, for better or worse (the amount of outright communism supporters there among young anywhere I spoke to is disheartening, especially for somebody like me who went through proper communism and saw first hand how it always fucks up individuals and nations for generations, and consistently fails to…
> French and some other southern states have really rich social support, even in decades it will be above-average for western world. So french complaining about it going south need to travel the world a bit and get a reality check.
No. We are just not naive and we know that all of our social support comes from the WWII aftermath, thanks to communist politics. This implies that we'll probably not have anything more than what we have now and we know it. Most of the french don't want anything more, but we will absolutely fight against every aggression against our social security net because we are really confident that anything we lost is lost basically forever.