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

afterbabel.com

51–60 of 824 posts

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

#51

I have to assume that people leaving their home towns to work elsewhere is a huge driving factor of all of this.

I've begun thinking in that direction too, after seeing how my peers have been moving all over the country in the last few years - first for uni, then for a job, then another job... I'm one of the movers myself, and I know why I moved, but I feel the cost of lost relationships quite heavily.

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

#52
post #13

Not everything can/should be solved with technology, but would it be possible to get that sense of community back using e.g. VR and perhaps AI? (Research might also be useful for space missions)

Why? You want to solve the problems caused by the lack of social integration-interaction by not socializing using VR. The problem with VR, videochat, social networks,etc., is that you are not there, you do not face the challenges nor the consequences of social activities. People gets anxious just thinking about that sonthey never leave their comfort zone, thus causing more issues on the individuals and,obviously in t…

Why -> because it's now a chicken and egg problem. It's hard to find a sense of community when everybody is looking at their smartphones all the time.

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

#53
post #15

How do astronauts train for this when preparing for long missions without much company?

Astronauts are older than the teens mentioned in the article, a very selective sample (read We Seven if you haven't), and still train with a team and with a clear purpose of their goals.

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

#54
No, absolutely not. Young people are more connected than they have ever been before, just now they are connected in some of the most unhealthy and detrimental manners possible. Instead of connecting with friends in real life, they form communities on social media, in discord channels, in video games, etc. The consequences are just barely starting to show themselves.

As for the why, I think they are many reasons. The Internet is obviously an attractive and addictive place, but cities have gotten so much worse as well. Where I live the playgrounds I used to go to as a child are now full of drug dealers...

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

#55
post #25

Who knew utterly destroying cities and replacing them with gated communities with no accommodations for children whatsoever, and borderline criminalizing any activity which isn't closely supervised would have knock-on effects.

What percentage of the population do you think lives in a gated community? I know its common in some areas with particularly high amounts of break ins like South Africa and Brazil, but they're fairly rare in the USA.

They've also existed for far longer than the issues under discussion. The very wealthy have always tended to isolate amongst themselves.

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

#56
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…

> I've noticed an uptick recently of large brands to start referring to themselves as "The [Brand] Community"

I don't think I've ever seen that. What I have seen is non-sponsored people referring to "the [brand] community" or "the [product] community" as a shorthand way of saying they discuss brand or product with other people with that shared interest on a dedicated Discord server or forum. The Sega community, the Final Fantasy community, etc.

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

#57
Just a data point: In Valencia, Spain, in the 80s, children played in the street with no much supervision from parents. Occasionally we would stop the football match to let a car drive by. Forgetting your keys at home was no issue, you could get a glass of milk in ten different places while you wait for other (more attentive) members of your family.

Nowadays there is hardly a place to park your car. Parents don't allow kids to play in the street. And the ones that interact with each other are the ones who lived there in that period. It's very difficult for newcomers to integrate.

What are the reasons for this? My take: cars and lack of stay at home mums. They built the social network at that time. They took care of each other children, the were there to help each other. Nowadays households have both adults working (so nobody even asks for salt to the neighbor, all order a pizza instead).

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

#58
Personally I'm more positive about the impact of online communities than the author is.

But you for sure need offline friends and experiences, alongside the online ones, to keep yourself grounded in reality; the online experience has loads of biases, some obvious and others very subtle, and only by keeping one eye on the real world can you know when you're encountering them.

Also you're not going to meet your future wife or husband through HN.

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

#59

No, absolutely not. Young people are more connected than they have ever been before, just now they are connected in some of the most unhealthy and detrimental manners possible. Instead of connecting with friends in real life, they form communities on social media, in discord channels, in video games, etc. The consequences are just barely starting to show themselves. As for the why, I think they are many reasons. The…

The article clearly states that the connections you mention don't make up a community:

> Many praise the myriad benefits that smartphones and social media are said to bring; online connection can give a person a sense of “community,” we are told. We can find new friends, discover just about any idea imaginable, network, and even date through our phones. We can video chat with hundreds of people simultaneously from far-flung locations. We can pursue learning largely untethered from any physical space. Based on all of this, it would be easy to assume that place doesn’t matter.

> I disagree. Physical place actually matters far more than we realize, especially as our lives become ever more placeless.

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

#60
I have recently started traveling and working remote at "co-living" hotels. And I must say, this is the ideal way I wish to live my life in my 20s-30s.

Community makes life fun.

Someone needs to import co-living to the US. And I don't mean these "co-living" apartment complexes that exist in our major cities. I mean like, actual communities with character and life.

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