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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

#631

Post by Nextgrid »

p1mrx wrote: post #385
robotelvis wrote: post #335

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 https://www.elks.org/who/missionStatement.cfm "To be accepted as a member, one must [...] believe in God" There are groups like UU and Sunday Assembly that don't have this requirement.

Belief is a spectrum and there is no way to externally verify it. In fact, even if you could externally verify, you'll find that there is a wide range of beliefs even among those who "legitimately" believe.

A cult of personality around a magic man in the sky is in the grand scheme of things not much different than a cult of personality around some celebrity or politician/party.

A requirement to "believe" in god has the advantage to provide a common ground for members as well as a set of baseline manners/behaviors. In retrospect, this is actually an advantage. Most social clubs/etc always need some common ground and a shared activity/belief they can congregate around. Whether it's a celebrity or a magic man in the sky doesn't particularly matter, but something is needed.

Unless the very tenets of the religion are so revolting to you (or if you actually believe in something else and this religion would be against what you believe), just fake it. Unless it's a very secluded and "practicing" religious group, you may find that a lot of other people have also varying beliefs but choose to play the game because the value of being part of the group outweighs the downside of faking it.

Also, most mainstream religions have at least some tenets you can get behind, even as an atheist. Just that the atheist would agree with them because it's just good morals as opposed to having to follow some magic man's orders, but they don't have to know that.

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

#632

Post by clarity20 »

the_gipsy wrote: post #460
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

You talk and sermon awfully much against individualism, shouldn't you quit being online and do some family or society work? Don't tell me you're done already, that would be hypocritical.

I think he (she?) makes some good points about why community & social life are falling apart and what might be done about it.

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

#633

Post by fragmede »

hot_gril wrote: post #169
brightball wrote: post #31

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

I recently moved. Most of my new friends aren't from here, they came here for work, but they consider it their own city now and are part of the community. It's different in a "commuter city" like San Francisco. That means the majority of people don't even live there during the day, and even their job might be temporary. Unfortunately most are there to make money, not friends.

that was definitely true pre-covid but is it still true?

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

#634

Post by mr_mitm »

ip26 wrote: post #464
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.

Phones must be orders if magnitudes more common than newspapers. It seems that no matter where you are in the world, everyone from age 12 and up has one on them 24/7 and uses it as soon as they have 20 seconds to spare. Newspapers were something only a few adults would use, and you usually have read all the interesting parts by the time you get your second coffee.

I agree that the tendency for wanting distractions has always been present in humans, but the hyper connectivity of today's world really taps into it unlike anything else we had before. It's a different quality.

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

#636

Post by frithsun »

frithsun wrote: post #44

We lack the moral courage to be honest about why real world community disintegrated and are therefore doomed to suffer these pedantic lectures that miss the point and point in random directions.

Immigration and assimilation policies in the west have been too rapid, faster than even those who think they're open minded can adapt to new people.

The result is a pervasive societal siege mentality with everybody retreating into their homes. The Starbucks data on where "third places" are thriving or dying aligns very well with this model.

The answer is as obvious as it is unwelcome, which is it slow down a bit and give people and families time to adapt to their strange new neighbors and neighborhoods.

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

#637

Post by schrectacular »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #427
nradov wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From whose perspective is restricting women’s access to healthcare trivial?

The question there is _which_woman_? The one going to get the procedure or the one on the sharp end of needle? So the question one might ask you is "from whose perspective is murder trivial?" Neither seem trivial to me, which is probably why it's such a contentious issue. Framing it like you do seems mostly just to dehumanize the other side. I'm probably with you in how we should treat this, but I also worry about the slippery slope problem - at what point is it no longer ok to abort? If six months, then why not six months and a day? Then why not a moment before birth? Then why not after birth? What is the magical moment where we say the "clump of cells" becomes "human"? Trying to answer that question feels like it unavoidably treads into religious grounds even for the non-religious.

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

#638

Post by pjc50 »

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…

This is all a very valid set of concerns; not quite a new one, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone (2000), but definitely a Thing.

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me.

People need to acknowledge how much the downside of this kind of closeness was conformism, enforced by shunning (or worse) the noncompliant. A lot of religious communities have coped incredibly badly with the sexual revolution of the 20th century; if the only foray of your church into politics is against abortion or LGBT freedom, it's not really surprising that young people and women are going to run in the opposite direction as soon as they get a chance - often facilitated by the Internet. While simultaneously responding to actual abuse with coverups and complicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...

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

#639

Post by jprete »

throwway120385 wrote: post #173
hot_gril wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What single entity did you have in mind? An HOA will spend dues on parks, a regular city will spend taxes on parks. A luxury apartment will have common spaces or even activities. They make these expenditures because enough residents will pay extra for it. And a church will run community events paid for by donations. No "brought to you by Carl's Jr." Tragedy of the commons is when there's no big entity with rules, and…

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…

Are these the techbros of community life? I can see a bunch of parallels.

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

#640

Post by 7thaccount »

arresin wrote: post #599
parineum wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is a system built by people that recognize that humans are reliably selfish and seeks to align their selfish interests as best as it can with the rest of the populous. No nation has ever achieved equilibrium but we are enjoying the most peaceful times in history during a time after the previous wave of capitalism-alternatives failed miserably or acquiesced. Just about every measure of human flourishing is…

And now the pitch.

They're not wrong. Late stage capitalism sucks, but the alternative systems out there seem to lead to mass starvation or total collapse. People have been lifted out of poverty worldwide as well. Some kind of balance seems necessary.
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