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Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

economist.com

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Re: Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

#2
Mayhaps not just Teenagers.

My grandfather has slowly been slipping into a deep depression. Not trying to slap correlations with a causal label, but man oh man how he has started to rely on social media.

To continue being anecdotal: getting rid of my Facebook has (after a few years) greatly helped me feel butter (intentional typo, you betcha).

Re: Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

#3
Governments all over the world will use the agenda "social media is bad, people need to be protected from it" to regulate how we interact with each other over digital media. This will stifle our ability to communicate and organize against laws and government actions that are not right.

Meanwhile school homework gets more and more ridiculous and children get medicated with who knows what kind of psychoactive substances because they cannot deal with it, but no, that's not the cause of teenager mental health problems.

Re: Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

#4
These days I use facebook just for its messenger. On my computer, I skip facebook.com and go to messenger.com directly. On mobile (I refuse to install their apps), I go to mbasic.facebook.com because Facebook doesn't let me access the messenger tab in the mobile facebook website, nagging me to install their messenger app.

Messenger is a really useful tool to stay connected. Pretty much everyone I know is available there, so using it is a net positive for me. Can't say the same about the news feed itself.

(I know that the article isn't talking about Facebook in particular, but I just thought this is worth sharing.)

Re: Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

#7
post #4

These days I use facebook just for its messenger. On my computer, I skip facebook.com and go to messenger.com directly. On mobile (I refuse to install their apps), I go to mbasic.facebook.com because Facebook doesn't let me access the messenger tab in the mobile facebook website, nagging me to install their messenger app. Messenger is a really useful tool to stay connected. Pretty much everyone I know is available th…

Also, you can export the event and birthday calendar to a different calendar app (https://www.facebook.com/help/152652248136178?helpref=uf_per...).

Re: Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

#8
I'd say this is more a problem with human nature, that social media is just exposing at a whole new level. It's basic biology to want to be the best, in order to attract the best mate etc. Social media has blown open a world where not only is there always someone better, more attractive, more fun, more social-able etc than you but also that the levels these people reach will always be unobtainable for you.

Re: Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

#9
post #4

These days I use facebook just for its messenger. On my computer, I skip facebook.com and go to messenger.com directly. On mobile (I refuse to install their apps), I go to mbasic.facebook.com because Facebook doesn't let me access the messenger tab in the mobile facebook website, nagging me to install their messenger app. Messenger is a really useful tool to stay connected. Pretty much everyone I know is available th…

Messenger is at least as good as a decent IRC server, with your friends all agreeing to use an IRC client app, instead.

Super weird to see that we're coming full circle; it used to be that you had to install a special app to chat with your friends, same as it ever was today ..

Re: Teenagers are growing more anxious and depressed

#10
Did this trend start with social media? We are doing lots of stuff to teenagers these days that we didnt do before. They are beholden to expectations far narrower than we were.

We treat them as adults in school (by making them responsible for their own performance through grading and measuring) from a very young age, yet we don't really cut the umbelical cord (grant them autonomy) until they're in their twenties.

Socially they're expected to act in their long term interest, at the expense of social and emotional self-realization (i.e. "maturing") for a long time, and the only alternative is failure (now on prominent display on social media heh...)

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