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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

#411

Post by jrussino »

StopTheWorld wrote: post #145
kelseyfrog wrote: post #82

Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and t…

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…

Interestingly, there was another big shift happening from 1940-1980:

- in 1940, the top 3 were: met through family, met through friends, met in primary school. In that order, but pretty much equal

- From 1940-1980, two of those three (family, primary school) trended sharply downward, as did "met in church", while these trended upward: met through friends, met in bar or restaurant, met as or through coworkers, met in college. "met through friends" was by far the most common circa 1980

- starting in 1995 "met online" sees a sharp rise, and by 2010 it has overtaken them all.

The only other category that was still on the rise after 2010 was "met in a bar or restaurant". Is that really increasingly common? I have a strange feeling that some of those are just people too embarassed to say they met online...

Anyway, my point is there was (perhaps unsurprisingly) already a big shift going on 1940-1980, namely that the immediate family, church, childhood friends became less dominant in people's lives and friends, work, commercially-facilitated interactions (bars and restaurants) became more central. Did we learn anything from that adjustment? Were people in the 80's and 90's talking ad worrying about this the way we're talking today about the way social interactions are replacing the "old" ones?

(also, the values for "met online" on that graph seem to be small but non-zero in the 1980s! I'd like to hear the stories of some of those couples...)

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

#412

Post by lo_zamoyski »

goethes_kind wrote: post #183
kelseyfrog wrote: post #82

Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and t…

I'm in my 30s but I'm feeling this so hard. Growing up we used to have these kid/youth centres that were run by local Catholic organizations. We used to hang out there after school. Ostensibly the point was that there'd be 30 minutes of catechism doctrine, but we didn't really care about that. To us it was just a the place where everyone would be. I miss that so much. A place where you can just go and meet people you…

Consider the following:

1. The chief unit and source of community is the family. The married couple, the family, have been deteriorating for some time. It shouldn't be surprising that the consequences would spread outward. Societies are a manner of extended family organized according to the principle of subsidiary.

2. American culture especially is hyperindividualistic. It conceives of people not as persons, but as individuals, which is to say, atomic units that might enter into various transactions, if it suits them. There is no sense of moral duties I did not consent to. There is no real sense of a common good that is a superior and prior good. If you deny the social nature of human beings, and conceive the social sphere as transactional, a sphere for odious exchanges and extraction and gorging, then why should we be surprised that social life has gone south?

3. A common culture binds people together and give them a common heritage, a language without which you cannot communicate. Culture is far more than that, and I do not mean to belittle or instrumentalize it (some are already instrumentalizing religion, which is not the purpose of religion, even if it has that effect). But with the decay of ethnic culture and its replacement with an empty corporate pop culture (note how much discussion revolves around the latest episode of a show), we are robbed of a common identity. This explains the identity crises in the US. Subcultures, racial ideologies, sexual ideologies, and so on are just attempted substitutes for ethnic identity. Given how unsuitable they are for this purpose, it is also unsurprising that people feel alienated from society, as there really is no real society, just some people coexisting.

4. What we call "religion" is a fancy word for worldview with a superlative highest good that is worshiped and a tradition orienting us in life and our ultimate end according to it. Everyone has a religion, in that sense, because someone takes something to be the ultimate good. It's impossible otherwise, because it is by means of the ultimate good that we understand and order all other goods in relation to it. The religion of the US is liberalism (as in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill, not any particular partisan affiliation; all American parties presuppose liberalism). In this liberal worldview, freedom as absence of constraint is worshiped, hence the preoccupation with "transgression" and "crossing boundaries" and so on. It is an evangelical religion, concerned with bringing the good news of liberal freedom to the world. Of course, as many throughout history have noted, freedom thus understood is a recipe for disaster, and not freedom in any real sense. To be free is to be able to do what is good as determined by your human nature, which is the same as saying the freedom to be what you objectively are, not in opposition to it. Thus, I am not free when I become a drug user, but I am free when I attain self-mastery and self-restraint, much as a man on horseback is more free as horseback rider when his horse is obedient to his rationally informed will. We are free to be what we are when we attain this mastery, in light of objective truth, over ourselves, our appetites, our passions, our intellects, our wills, etc., what we used to call virtue. The opposite, vice, is a recipe for misery and the worst kind of enslavement that can occur. In light of that, and given how indulgent we are, how our economies cater to and feed the worst with pornography, excessive food, buying stuff, and how, generally speaking, we worship consumption and embrace a view of life that consists of consuming (even people, sexually speaking, including in our imaginations and through various media), again, why the surprise that we are miserable? We are incapable of healthy relationships, and functioning as human beings. It takes effort to become human. It's not a given that just falls in your lap.

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

#413

Post by youainti »

swat535 wrote: post #361
kelseyfrog wrote: post #82

Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and t…

This is so true. I'm a practicing Catholic which gives me the advantage of having access to a big community and I even met my wife through Church events after Mass so it's wonderful. Also our Church offers many other programs like counseling, support groups, volunteering, career opportunities, etc. Of course no one should be forced to attend "Church" just to find a community, that's silly but its benefits are pretty…

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I have had the same observation as you that the access to community is so helpful.

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

#414

Post by Apocryphon »

rjzzleep wrote: post #301
fragmede wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't like being drunk that much, or like climbing, but, were your parents really that Catholic? We, as humans, need a dream to build towards, be in service of, and find our place in. What are we doing here and why are we doing it? For those of us who haven't figured it out yet, attaching to someone else's purpose gives us one and we don't have to figure it out ourselves. You need to find religion, just don't cal…

Parent poster doesn’t want to have to drink to socialize. And bar meets are just that. It’s actually a huge problem in society. Ever stream something or go to the cinema ? What does it show you? You’re happy => you drink to celebrate. You’re sad => drink out of sorrow. You want to hang out with friends => you go for drinks. DEFCON for example perpetuates that same behavior. Sure, one part is loss of community, but th…

Well, you can also go to the café.

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

#415

Post by nonameiguess »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #82

Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and t…

A lot of people seem to cite religious communities, if anything. It's consistently odd to me that no one on Hacker News ever seems to have been into sports. For me, the third places and communities of my youth were all oriented around some kind of physical athletic activity. This was mostly basketball personally, presumably because I passed 6 feet tall in 7th grade. Every park in the area and every school had outdoor courts and you'd just go down there early in the day with a ball, shoot around, wait for other people to show up, and play some pickup ball. The majority of my closest friends were just people I played basketball with.

It didn't need to be this. Richer kids might have been into swimming and water polo. I got into volleyball later and ad hoc sand courts were all over the place. Most of the parks near me also had tennis courts and I played tennis quite a bit. Even the more counter culture kids who weren't into team sports often did some combo of skating, surfing, and snowboarding and bonded over that.

Some of this is obviously mediated by where you happen to live. Southern California has a lot of open spaces, beaches and mountains, and the weather is pretty temperate all year. As much as Hacker News laments suburbs, the sprawl also means there are a lot of parks because there is so much space.

I've gravitated more toward individual athletic pursuits in middle age, so I'm not really involved in sporting communities any more. Seemingly, though, all this cheap, free to the consumer infrastructure in the form of concrete courts with nets still must exist, no? Nobody ever expected parks to turn a profit. They were just a thing cities and counties were expected to provide out of tax revenue and they're a minuscule portion of that compared to expenditure on schooling and law enforcement at the municipal level. There can't be any economically good reason to put them on the chopping block.

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

#416

Post by [deleted] »

Apocryphon wrote: post #414
rjzzleep wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent poster doesn’t want to have to drink to socialize. And bar meets are just that. It’s actually a huge problem in society. Ever stream something or go to the cinema ? What does it show you? You’re happy => you drink to celebrate. You’re sad => drink out of sorrow. You want to hang out with friends => you go for drinks. DEFCON for example perpetuates that same behavior. Sure, one part is loss of community, but th…

Well, you can also go to the café.

[deleted]

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

#417

Post by floren »

throwup238 wrote: post #365
HideousKojima wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to go out not-drinking with my coworkers (I've been a teetotaler my entire life). The place we went to had free refills for sodas so I downed half a dozen glasses of Fanta while my coworkers were paying $3-$5 a beer. Seems ridiculous to me how much people pay for alcohol.

A bunch of places now have "mocktails" which are just cocktails without alcohol so you can one up your alcoholic friends by spending $3-5 per glass of sugar water.

Visit SF, you can easily spend $10 on a mocktail out here.

Kinda makes sense, all the cost is in the labor and the cleaning, a shot of vodka is like $0.20

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

#418

Post by lotsofpulp »

HideousKojima wrote: post #350
nradov wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most communities there's no longer much social stigma against going to a bar/pub and ordering non-alcoholic beverages. The latest non-alcoholic beers are actually pretty good. (I do understand that the environment itself can be difficult for recovering alcoholics.)

I used to go out not-drinking with my coworkers (I've been a teetotaler my entire life). The place we went to had free refills for sodas so I downed half a dozen glasses of Fanta while my coworkers were paying $3-$5 a beer. Seems ridiculous to me how much people pay for alcohol.

Some portion of alcohol prices are a barrier to entry to create the desired crowd. You might not want to attract the type of person looking to get shitfaced for cheap. Usually, non alcoholic non tap water is not way cheaper, especially if it is a “mocktail”.

Of course, some portion is also high rents. And I have never seen a restaurant or bar outside of Costco with free refills for anything other than tap water though.

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

#419

Post by throwaway22304 »

Balgair wrote: post #223
dukeyukey wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a non-American who visited for the first time last year: > But, it's considered taboo to express a love of the USA American flags _everywhere_' Like seriously, I visited both liberal areas (Seattle) and conservative areas (Spokane's surrounds) and y'all patriotic as _fuck_. > Wars used to be a way to unify a country... Also because the US is just not threatened by anyone. I'd hope that going back to being…

> I'd hope that going back to being the Arsenal of Democracy for Ukraine (and maybe Taiwan or South Korea if things go bad) would've tied the US together, but man I was wrong there. I mean, it's not like we need to be rolling out a B-29 every minute or an aircraft carrier a week to defeat Russia there. Just cleaning out some of the stock from the 80's held them off for months. Logistically, the war in Ukraine just is…

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