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

afterbabel.com

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

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed the same thing even on airplanes, where everyone is offline. Unfortunately in that case almost everything is either sleeping, consuming corporate entertainment, or reading books. BUT there are always a few people who are open to talking. I prefer talking to being on the phone when I'm in flight. I get to have a long conversation about 1/4 of flights. If you read old books like Pilgrim's Progress you see…

At least in the US, most aircraft have internet now - many people are not offline. And even if they're not paying for the internet service, a number of airlines deliver their free entertainment services through personal devices - so they may be watching the same sort of content that would be in a seatback TV on other airlines. Speaking personally: I also tend to just load entire books onto my phone for flights. Readi…

Does anyone remember when the TVs on airplanes hung down from the ceiling and there was only one or maybe two movies on the flight? There was either nothing on the back of the seat, or there was a very expensive satellite telephone.

I still do what I did then - read. I just read on a Kindle now instead of a stack of paperback books bought at the airport.

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

#372

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…

The church that I was raised in and grew up in for the first 18 years of my life... I became a militant atheist when I left that church at 18, close to 30 years ago. In my 30s, I started to drift between Zen Buddhism, Druidry, wicca, paganism, looked into Daoism, and on and on it went. And I finally realized, quite recently, that I had a God-shaped hole running right through the center of me. I still haven't quite fi…

I asked many of these same questions when I lost my faith. I found compelling answers as to why I had a god shaped hole in D.S. Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. It’s taken 15 years, but I also finally have plans about what the fuck we should be doing about it.

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

#373

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 de…

> 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.

Social orgs can supplement a healthy community. They can't replace one, however.

A healthy community is one where it is trivial for kids to go on their own to a safe space. A place where they can Kid together, free from interfering adults.

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

#374
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is stating as fact several things that have not and cannot be proven by tools such as the scientific method. Seems ironic, given the subject matter. :)

The list of claims made by religion which have been disproved by science is innumerable, and the list of claims made by science which have been disproved by religion does not exist. But sure, let's pretend religion and science are equally valid....

Hey now, you're moving the goal posts quite a bit there! :)

I was just pointing out that you said several things as if they were proven facts, and they are not. That's all.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed the same thing even on airplanes, where everyone is offline. Unfortunately in that case almost everything is either sleeping, consuming corporate entertainment, or reading books. BUT there are always a few people who are open to talking. I prefer talking to being on the phone when I'm in flight. I get to have a long conversation about 1/4 of flights. If you read old books like Pilgrim's Progress you see…

I apologize if this comes across as 'how dare you talk about pancakes when I prefer waffles', but I just want to mention that, like a lot of people, I destroyed my hearing when I was young and now I struggle to hear on busses and planes. If someone talks to me on a plane I say "Sorry, my hearing is really bad", and its really embarrassing when they respond by speaking so loudly the whole plane can hear for the rest o…

Hope this advances faster https://masseyeandear.org/news/press-releases/2023/04/mass-e...

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

#376
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's considered taboo to express a love of the USA American here. First-generation immigrant. Came from Germany at age 5. This misses a crucial part of the problem. It is considered taboo to express a love of the USA in certain social circles . In others, it is considered taboo not to express a love of the USA. The problem is that the two sides have very different ideas of what "loving the USA" means. Among the fir…

Really great comment! You noted: > The problem is that the two sides have very different ideas of what "loving the USA" means. Among the first group (liberals) the USA is envisioned as an inclusive melting pot where all are welcome. Have you had the chance to talk with a 3rd group who believe that the US is malignant and think that the most moral action they can take is to undermine the state? I think there is even a…

Undermining with no recognition of the ideal goal is just stupid though. Eg republicans tend to want to starve the beast of government without a good definition of what the ideal governing philosophy would be.

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

#377

The articles thesis on loss of community plays a role but has always existed in some context depending upon the individuals location. The primary cause (in my opinion) of the youth mental health crisis and falling happiness rates was the introduction of the smart phone. Blaming social media is a clever cop out, it's the actual device and inability of people to stop looking at it. Totally abnormal to human life. Will…

Counter-take: Smartphone addiction, like other addictions, it a coping mechanism for other issues, see https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-tea... > But Alexander wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were…

I've considered the rebuttal and study you cited. I can't envision any social environment that would permanently stop people from obsessively looking at their phones.

It's possible to provide an activity that would temporarily redirect the obsession but we're talking about 24 hours. At some point the individual will resume the obsessive behavior.

I also bet that the rat park study would eventually fail given a long enough amount of time. The rats would eventually get bored of their environment and experiment with the drug filled bottle. I speculate all this of course. Can't be positive.

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

#378
post #21

I'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…

Remember what we will regret on our deathbeds: “I wish I had spent more time arguing with random people on the Internet”

Time was, we appreciated great rhetoric.

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

#379
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God is not a testable hypothesis. There is no empirical way to conclude God does not exist except by assuming that anything that cannot be tested does not exist. Such an assumption also rules out morality, as there is no empirical basis for that either. Assuming you're utilitarian, you're working off of the untestable belief that making people happier has some property called 'goodness', and that there is some inhere…

Faith in something doesn't need presuppose faith in anything supernatural. And theists have no empirical basis for their morality either, because faith by definition is belief in the absence of such evidence. People just believe what they believe. I prefer to be fed rather than starve, I prefer peace to suffering, I prefer liberty to slavery. I'm a social being capable of empathy and extending my beliefs about myself…

Faith in something that is the basis for any morality absolutely does presuppose faith in something supernatural. If you know of anything in the natural world that proves the existence of right and wrong, by all means let me know.

I don't disagree that theists lack empirical basis for morality, both because I don't think anyone does and because I don't believe there is an empirical basis for God.

But it doesn't sound like you have a morality*. It sounds like you have preferences. One doesn't decide one's preferences, and even if they did, they would need a morality to do so rightly. This suggests that your being a good person is strictly luck of the draw. If my friend Bob the sadist says he loves it when people starve, would you be in the right to tell him he's wrong? On what grounds?

*Don't take this the wrong way- I don't mean to insult you, and I fully expect you do have morality. I'm only criticizing the argument here.

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably have some internal churn targets to hit, else people will start to figure out that the app isn't worth their time and try a different one

It creates a much worse problem actually. Why have a committed relationship when you can always press a button to look at hotties and have a pull at the sex slot machine? If they design the system right, their audience just won't marry or have long term stable relationships

online dating (apps) did not invent uncommitted sex.

debatable if it got more prevalent because of them, as afaik the statistics indicate both, less short _and_ less long term relationships, so :shrug:

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