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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

#461

Post by watwut »

phil21 wrote: post #180
vegadw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

That is an atheist point of view. I grew up in religious environment too and people really believed in god. Some were hypocrites and some values stand in a real life way (commitment to not lie makes for the worst business), but the basic believe that god exist was really real. And when you play the part just for social reasons, then I think you are just a hypocrite. Which would be good reason for people to leave - so that they dont have to pretend.

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

#462

Post by ip26 »

vishnugupta wrote: post #101

One big change I've noticed between growing up in a small town and now where I'm in my mid 40s in a big metro city in India is increased "transactional" nature of interactions of my daily life. Back then we had a deeper ties with all those who served us by which I mean vegetable vendor, carpenter, doctor, knife sharpener, cloth shop, grocer, baker and so on. Whenever we interacted with them it would be a small chit-c…

I would call that the difference between a small town and a city, which isn't new. You establish those ties because you see the same grocer regularly - there's only two grocers in town, after all. Meanwhile, in the city, you could buy groceries twice a week and never see the same clerk twice.

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

#463

Post by diputsmonro »

saulpw wrote: post #279
diputsmonro wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...but that doesn't have to affect their ability to engage with trans people, or vice versa. I disagree. How am I supposed to trust and feel safe around someone who knowingly voted for a politician who loudly campaigned on removing my rights and demonizing my very existence? A politician who supports an esoteric policy that disadvantages me in some way is entirely different than one who loudly and plainly says that…

Bingo. I'm afraid, internet stranger, that you are part of the problem here. The original topic for this thread was about "community" and the mental health crisis. Community brings diverse people into contact with each other, which fosters communication and thus has the potential to heal division and increase empathy. Do you not realize that a lot of people think that abortion is literally murder? That voting for the…

I generally agree with your sentiment, and I do think open dialog is necessary to bridge the divide. It is way more easily said than done though, especially as political violence becomes more frequent.

But I will say - it's pretty terrible that the people being attacked and vilified in this situation are also expected to "be the better person" and bridge the divide. Why is the onus on the oppressed to make peace with their oppressor? Bystanders and allies should call out the bullies for starting the fight rather than blaming the victim for not advocating for themselves politely enough.

Sure, such misfortunes are a part of life and no progress is made without adversity. It is a pattern, though, that bystanders and allies should recognize and help reduce as much as possible.

> Pretend like you want to be a part of humanity instead of apart from it.

It's not me or my trans friends who want to live apart from humanity, trust me. We just want to live here, too - that's what the fight is about. It's the conservatives who are trying to push us out and remove us from society. The original sin of the fracture is theirs, not ours. If we live in a bubble, it's because they forced us into one, not because it's where we want to be.

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

#464

Post by ip26 »

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…

I'm not saying smartphones are never a problem. However, look at old photos of the bus or subway in the USA or UK from decades ago. Passengers were not having social hour - they were minding their own business, reading a newspaper, listening to music, staring out the window...

I'm more interested in the question of whether technology tethers us home more strongly, instead of venturing outside of our homes.

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

#465

Post by EGreg »

Yes, ever since Robert Putnam wrote his book "bowling alone", the problem has been growing. And now, Big Tech has exacerbated it.

Would like to get the feedback of people here. Journalists love to write about problems, but very few write about solutions. (It's just one of those things in the news media, it's like writing about good news and helping old ladies across the road.)

I have spent 12 years building an open-source platform that will hopefully unite our communities and restore public health. LA Weekly recently wrote about it:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

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

#466

Post by kylehotchkiss »

I want to share what I imagine would be a controversial data point but one that I hope has value to this conversation - I recently decided to join a church just to reconnect with faith that I had pushed aside back in 2016, and with the church, a small group. It's working for me. I am making older friends for the first time in my life, and despite me generally not aligning with people politically, I'm just biting my tongue and not letting that define who I will spend time talking to the same way I used to.

I'm not advocating religion specifically as a solution for others, just saying it works for myself. But my question is - why aren't there secular alternatives to religious community where people could just go bite their tongues and get along despite maybe some of our superficial cultural differences? Why can't there be larger weekly meetings for people, with smaller breakout groups, and a general sense of bringing people together in a community? Why is church the only place I can find that? I don't think the "fraternal clubs" are the solution here as they give off a certain "old mans club" perception that I can't get past (and the lack of windows on their buildings has been noted). But maybe somebody here could put one together and see what happens.

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

#467

Post by gen220 »

weitendorf wrote: post #408
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…

IMO the two culprits are high rents and efficient capital markets. Definitely many factors contributing to the first, but one of them is also the efficiency of capital markets. Basically it's too expensive to make spaces available for below market rate due to the direct cost of rents (a middle or upper-middle class person could drop $1000/month on a passion project, but not so easily $5k/month) and there's a very hig…

I don’t remember where I read this, but I remember reading recently how somebody justified their decision to leave “the city” to move to a rural area, with the phrase “I was tired of competing with my neighbors”.

I they were trying to convey sense you describe, of intense economic pressure to make a certain income to pay for a certain living or working space, or alternatively be kicked out because there are ten people in line waiting to take your space.

Perhaps a healthy culture cannot survive this degree of “efficiency”.

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

#468

Post by 5- »

jrussino wrote: post #411
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…

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…

> stories of some of those couples

this one, about two people having met online, was written in 1879 (not a typo):

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24353

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

#469

Post by throwway120385 »

hot_gril wrote: post #188
throwway120385 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What often happens in these small community organizations is one or two volunteers join and begin to do a bunch of work to "transform" the organization and expand its reach. They inevitably become "indispensable" to the new organization, which they have wrapped around themselves like a cloak. Then they squeeze it around themselves until everyone leaves and the organization's soul has been sucked out. They move on to…

Not sure about the resumé part, but I've seen these authoritarian volunteers. They still don't ruin everything. And I think my local church has enough of them that they cancel each other out :D

They don't ruin it every time, but I've seen it happen and have also seen the end result and I'm very leery of specific kinds of people in communities I'm new to because of it.

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

#470

Post by muffinman26 »

djom wrote: post #430
diputsmonro wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to get into a giant political debate here, but I would urge you to follow the spirit of this post and actually talk to some trans people, in person, to get their perspective before voting for people who demonize them and take their rights away. All of those are rooted in transphobia. The entire point of those bathroom bills to "protect women" is built upon the foundational idea that trans people are dang…

[flagged]

Do you realize that these laws that are supposed to "protect women" mean that I, a trans guy who was assigned female at birth but now have a full beard and look completely male in any clothes considered acceptable in public settings, am required to use the women's restroom and changing rooms in Florida? Is forcing an angry (trans) man to use the women's restroom your idea of "protecting women's spaces"?
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