Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

afterbabel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 824 posts

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#331

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

the_snooze wrote: post #98
bustling-noose wrote: post #62

About 9 years ago I traveled to the US from India for education. Smartphones were still not very common in India cause data was not as cheap as it is today. When I was in the bus commuting everyone’s head was buried in their phones. I thought to myself this is such a sad thing. Look outside talk to each other but the every single person had an iPhone and was doing something on the phone. Fast forward to 2024 and ever…

When I'm out at a sit-down restaurant, I always make a mental note of everyone who has their phone out on the table. It's usually 50-50. Not necessarily using them, but within view, as if they're waiting for something else instead of prioritizing the people who took the time to be physically around them in the same place and time. No wonder lots of people feel disconnected. They forgot how to connect in even the most…

Some people struggle with social situations and have made about as much progress there as they're going to.

Still other people struggle with social situations, sometimes.

I'm in the latter group; I rarely-to-never eat out. It's exhausting to put on a convincing production of Pretending To Enjoy Myself.

Using a device to ease that burden seems super reasonable to me.

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#332

Post by ars »

lawlessone wrote: post #241
StopTheWorld wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ ). In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school. In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it ha…

I'm surprised dating sites work well enough that 50% of customers meet via it. They've no incentive to help you leave.

There is no shortage of potential customers, there is a shortage of actual customers. Anything they can do to attract more business helps them. So if they have tons of success stories they'll get far more business.

It would be different in a saturated market, where they might want to try to keep people on the site, but that's not the case here.

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#333

Post by aikinai »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #264
Filligree wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. > I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. It is a problem, but…

I am surprised this needs to be pointed out, but people generally believe their religion to be true and do not find it at odds with reality at all. That doesn't mean you have to agree with them just because they believe it, but it is certainly not the case that religion is false in a provable sense, nor that religiosity is incompatible with valuing reality.

Well since we ended up with the most popular religions being monotheistic, it follows that regardless of what is true, most religious people are wrong. We just can’t prove which ones.

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#334

Post by NickC25 »

Kids don't even play video games together in the same room any more. LAN parties were a thing in the 90s but everyone was in the same room(ish). Even when playing console games people don't game together in the same room or home.

That's kinda odd. Online gaming is cool but my favorite gaming memories are playing with the person sitting next to me.

I miss those days, and wish kids knew what it was like to play games together as a physical experience AND a digital one.

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#335

Post by robotelvis »

I recently joined my local Elks club and the experience has been amazing.

Being social is effortless. I just show up at the lodge and people I know will be there.

As a parent I can let the kids run wild with other kids within the safe confines of the lodge and have adult conversations.

If I don’t have plans, I don’t need to sit home reading the internet. I go to the lodge.

It’s weird that groups like the Elks have declined so much in recent decades, because it feels they really are the solution to a problem everyone complains about.

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#337

Post by ars »

Barrin92 wrote: post #251
the_snooze wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality? Empiricism doesn't help you with the questions of "who are my people?" or "what matters?" You can make a legitimate case for some of religion's claims being empirically unsound, it doesn't take away from the fact that religion is very effective at giving a lot of people meaning and community, orthogonal to those specific claims.

It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith. There is this sort of strange very online revival of "trad" beliefs but you can literally tell that the people are trying to gaslight themselves into believing something they don't. Sort of a split-brain religion at best. Nietzsche's aphorism about God being dead was correct, as was his prediction about the future. Religion wouldn't…

> It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith.

At least for Judaism that not true at all. There are enormous numbers of Jews who do not believe, and yet consider themselves Jewish and go to occasional services, and find meaning in them even while not believing.

There are even pulpit Rabbis who do not believe and yet faithfully follow all the practices and teach.

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#338

Post by colechristensen »

philip1209 wrote: post #66

The books the authors cite are great and worth reading. Some personal observations: - The USA lacks a unified cultural identity now. There are lots of reasons for this. But, it's considered taboo to express a love of the USA - which hurts our community + culture. - People put a lot of effort into work, and work is becoming more transactional. No more "life-long employment with the buddies" kind of situation. - Americ…

>The USA lacks a unified cultural identity now.

The US _always_ lacked a cohesive cultural identity, it has always been manifold.

Basically the rise of television and movies post-WWII-ish depicted a single culture but it was just excluding everyone except essentially WASPs. This had nothing to do with reality and was just racism. Before the world wars there was even a considerable amount of greater cultural diversity among European immigrants and descendants, German being spoken very widely across the country and quite a bit more of people retaining the culture of their ancestors.

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#339

Post by mattgreenrocks »

Filligree wrote: post #203
phil21 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. We seem to be doing it w…

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. > I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. It is a problem, but…

What culture values reality?

In fact, how often is your own brain lying to you for one reason or another?

Re: The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community

#340

Post by yard2010 »

bilater wrote: post #255

My controversial take on this is that we are in the mid-curve of this tech, i.e., smartphones/social media are not quite there to replace IRL experiences and are even further off from real community...BUT instead of going back, we need to move forward to the right side of the curve where full VR / network states can solve a lot of these problems. I'm very bullish on IRL experiences. Community building is more complex…

That sounds both implausible and dystopic. But I believe this is going to happen and everything is going to be fine
Post reply on HN