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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

#431

Post by crooked-v »

vegadw wrote: post #165
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…

What frustrates me is that, it seems (Read as: the following is just my vibe) that the majority of 3rd places left are religious in nature, but I, personally, don't want to be religious or raise children that are. There are some options, of course, but they're limited and often of poor quality, at least locally. Libraries are trying to adapt to fill this gap, and maker spaces spring up but most don't have funding to…

One of the major issues with libraries these days is that because a lot of cities want to pretend really hard that homelessness doesn't exist, libraries end up as the only social resource available to many homeless people, which leads to other people avoiding them.

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

#432

Post by giraffe_lady »

nradov wrote: post #247
BobaFloutist wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree to disagree. It's pretty hard, and often unrewarding, to bridge such fundamental divides in values.

It's not hard, it just requires compartmentalization. This is a skill that can be learned like any other, and brings rewards in many aspects of life. Give it a try. And if you tune out the media and talk to ordinary Republicans and Democrats you'll usually find that there are few fundamental divides and that they mostly agree on the main points of political and economic philosophy. It's like Catholics and Protestants…

I'm glad you picked that example because it shows how the practical impact is not necessarily proportionate to the technical difference. Protestants and catholics have tortured and killed each other over group membership. The fact that their theology may have been, all things considered, very close does not matter when you're in real danger.

Politics isn't a sport or hobby, it is actually life or death for some people. The risk is not distributed equally, and those most in danger are not obligated to pretend the stakes are equally low for them.

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

#433

Post by vel0city »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #418
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.

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 thoug…

Lots of places around me have free refills on fountain soft drinks and tea. In fact, it is pretty rare for a restaurant to not have free refills on things like sodas. Something fancier like a craft lemonade or whatever wouldn't have free refills though.

This is true for a lot of the places I travel to within the US as well.

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

#434

Post by mschuster91 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #425
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well... yes, that is precisely what's needed to wean America off its unhealthy dependence on cars. HIGHLY disagree. If you want people off cars, you need to give them an alternative. Granted, I love cars. I would have cars whether I needed one or not, but I know I'm absolutely 100% in the minority on that issue, and like, when I say I would have cars either way, I mean fun cars. I wouldn't keep and maintain vehicle…

> If you want people off cars, you need to give them an alternative Never going to happen, outside of few dense city centers. Once an area is platted for detached single family homes and big box stores on stroads, the physical layout is incompatible with non car life, and hence you have to literally destroy everything and start over with narrow streets and smaller plots of land. The expense of this is not going to wi…

> Once an area is platted for detached single family homes and big box stores on stroads, the physical layout is incompatible with non car life, and hence you have to literally destroy everything and start over with narrow streets and smaller plots of land.

Not really. Repave the roads to make them slimmer, use the space gained to provide elevated sidewalks and bike lanes so people can see it with their own eyes that they can now participate in traffic without sharing infrastructure with cars. And whenever a reasonable sized lot goes up for sale, buy it up and convert it to a small store.

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

#435

Post by rexpop »

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 believe this is what Marx termed "commodity fetishism" in the first chapter of Capital.

> Adorno was born a German Jew at the end of the nineteenth century; he saw Hitler come to power via popular vote; and, in 1941, he was forced to flee Germany for the United States. Once there, however, he observed conditions of isolation and aloofness that made him worry: post-war American culture looked, to his eye, too much like pre-war Germany. The post-war “baby boom” had resulted in the growth of the American suburbs, sprawling sections of land developed for first-place functionality (private residence) and located within commuting distance to second-place nuclei (cities, office buildings, places of work). Adorno watched Americans shuttle back and forth in their cars between work and home, and he critiqued what he saw as ever-deepening habits consistent with conditions of social alienation. “He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest,” Adorno argues in his 1951 work Minima Moralia. In other words, Adorno says, isolation begets feelings of superiority, but not solely because the isolated individual lacks opportunities for comparison; rather, isolation begets superiority because the isolated individual has no audience but himself, no one to receive (and, perhaps, critique) his image of himself, to test whether or not it is even accurate.

--Sheila Liming, "Hanging Out" (2023)

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

#436

Post by lo_zamoyski »

nineplay wrote: post #382
mensetmanusman wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all religious societies are like that. Doing it properly looks more like exercise towards a higher good than fear of failure.

I think it's unavoidable in Christianity. Even if one's immediate religious society doesn't believe in hell, it is trivially easy to find other societies which do, and other societies that believe that everyone is damned except for people who've accepted the 'right' concept in the 'right' way. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I realized I could become an Atheist and mostly put the matter out of my mind. Quick…

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

#437

Post by mcmcmc »

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…

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

#438

Post by throwaway22304 »

hollerith wrote: post #424
Balgair wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How do you think Russia is going to retaliate? Maybe they will help NK and Iran build ICBMs that can accurately hit US city centers. They'd probably do it secretly, so if some US cities ever get nuked by NK or Iran, there won't be a strong case for our going to war against Russia in response (unless the secret leaked). ADDED. The secret is unlikely to leak if the Russians are careful: they could for example anonymous…

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

#439

Post by ZoomerCretin »

g9yuayon wrote: post #428

When I grew up in China, students in a school were divided into fixed classes. Those classes formed great communities, as we spent hours every day for at least three years and some for 6 years. Each class had a head teacher, who fostered the sense of community too. No one would mock people for geeking out. No one would mock people for not being good at sports. No one would mock those who struggled at academics. At le…

> No one would mock people for geeking out. No one would mock people for not being good at sports. No one would mock those who struggled at academics. At least not openly.

I always hoped there was a way to avoid US-style bullying. I hadn't considered that it might be yet another consequence of society existing at too big of a scale (ex: behaviors that are accepted or even optimal in a city of 20 million people is wildly different than in a social setting where everyone knows you, your siblings, your friends, your parents, your boss, your coworkers, your pastor, etc.)

Cohorts sound like a good, if imperfect solution, for managing this at school.

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

#440

Post by elliotto »

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.

His point is a criticism of the role of religion as a community accessible to everyone; what if you don't believe in it? What if you can't? This makes the idea that everyone should just join their local church group a non starter.
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