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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

#91

Post by philip1209 »

silverquiet wrote: post #80
philip1209 wrote: post #66

The books the authors cite are great and worth reading. Some personal observations: - The USA lacks a unified cultural identity now. There are lots of reasons for this. But, it's considered taboo to express a love of the USA - which hurts our community + culture. - People put a lot of effort into work, and work is becoming more transactional. No more "life-long employment with the buddies" kind of situation. - Americ…

I don't disagree with the comment, but whenever people talk about a "love of the USA", I always want to ask what is it that you love? To stereotype a bit, I'm guessing that it will not be the federal government (despite a strong reverence for the flag of that government).

The deeper issue is that a pessimism about our country will become self-fulfilling. So, it's not useful.

I think the USA is amazing in that it attracts the most ambitious people in the world, provides relative stability for them to work and live, and that it has managed to create such a stable society given the heterogeneous nature of its culture. It has a lot of problems, but I'd much rather be here than in the communist former-country my mom was born in.

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

#92

Post by sleepingreset »

drooby wrote: post #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.

there's a few cool groups working on this, specifically for academics & ambitious young people as the beginning market. https://www.livetheresidency.com/

:)

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

#93

Post by hot_gril »

Sol- wrote: post #77

Is the "youth mental health crisis" confirmed? I remember reading there was a bit of back and forth in that topic. Some unhappiness was also concentrated among young progressive girls etc. It fits nicely with the pessimistic vibes that everything gets worse, but I wonder to what extent it's media bias and that actually things are normal or even good.

It's real. My class was the start of it, and it got worse after.

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

#94

Post by squigz »

aklein wrote: post #88
abcrawf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drownings and ice cream sales also track nicely, but it doesn’t mean it’s the ice cream that’s causing the drownings.

Right, you need a mechanism. (Ice cream makes you fat, fat people can't swim, ergo drownings). Haight clearly outlines the mechanisms by which social media and smartphones have detrimental effects on mental health, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l2TdinWoM8

But ice cream doesn't make you fat. Eating too much ice cream makes you fat.

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

#95

Post by sleepingreset »

grahamjameson wrote: post #23
astrodust wrote: post #10

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.

Risk is an important ingredient to a fulfilling life. As we continue to de-risk our lives, we lose our ability to evaluate risk and aggressively criminalize what we do not understand because we perceive it to be dangerous. There are many types of activities which, while not criminalized yet, are “anti-social” in certain environments and can cost you your job.

such as?

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

#96

Post by throwaway96378 »

piva00 wrote: post #33
weberer wrote: 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…

> while occasionally arguing with pseudo-anonymous internet strangers. Even this has been eroding, the amount of comments made by bots I see across reddit/Twitter has increased exponentially since the 2010s. It only got worse after LLMs.

[dead]

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

#97

Post by Tade0 »

Sol- wrote: post #77

Is the "youth mental health crisis" confirmed? I remember reading there was a bit of back and forth in that topic. Some unhappiness was also concentrated among young progressive girls etc. It fits nicely with the pessimistic vibes that everything gets worse, but I wonder to what extent it's media bias and that actually things are normal or even good.

Suicide rates among young people - especially females, have been on the rise for close to a decade now.

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

#98

Post by the_snooze »

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…

When I'm out at a sit-down restaurant, I always make a mental note of everyone who has their phone out on the table. It's usually 50-50. Not necessarily using them, but within view, as if they're waiting for something else instead of prioritizing the people who took the time to be physically around them in the same place and time.

No wonder lots of people feel disconnected. They forgot how to connect in even the most conducive settings for it.

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

#100

Post by sologoub »

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…

To take this a step further, I’d argue such framings encourage either creation or amplification of risk perceptions in order to sell the remedy (and for political gain), at least in the US. Kids aren’t really allowed much autonomy the way even their parents enjoyed. All interactions are in a sense supervised and structured.
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