"You think you've got it rough? Well six hundred years ago there was a conquest of the Mongols. I bet you feel pretty stupid about your suicidal ideation now!"

This one-upmanship about the problems people face is toxic, and frankly boomer logic.

Going through the hoops and figuring out how to do the things your parents don't want you to do is a healthy part of growing up, any parent that doesn't take that into account and actually thinks they're going to stop their kid from becoming an adult is making a mistake.

The goals are to remove easy access to damaging material, and to make them do difficult, clever things to get around it, and to make them think you don't know so that they don't outwardly demonstrate exposure. This limits exposure to the worst of what is out there, teaches them agency and problem solving skills, and prevents them from heavily internalizing whatever they are exposed to.

Yes, when they reach a certain age when they start to want to do things on their own, they'll find ways to be exposed to what they want to be exposed to. There's nothing wrong with this.

I wouldn't explain to a teenager about Instagram and tiktok, I'd DNS block them on all devices. They'll see it at their friends house or whatever, and then I can talk to them, and they'll get grouchy about wanting it just like they do about toys at the store. But at least I'll limit exposure to negative influences, which is my job.

I don't blame Obama. I supported him. My point isn't that Obama is the problem, my point is that politics is the problem.

> should be proof enough that our society was mentally ill far before social media.

That's the point. Politics was toxic and has always been. Politics, the source of toxicity, got injected into social media starting with Obama. Then the lgbt/news/leftists ran with it and injected more toxicity. Which led to an opportunist like Trump taking advantage and injecting even more toxicity.

Once again, politics is the toxic agent that is hurting people on social media. Not social media itself.

Back in the day you didn't get rape threats from 50 anonymous accounts, or see pictures of you photoshopped sucking dicks, or feel like even more of a loser because you see in 4K detail how everybody else in class is having more fun outside of school. The internet is a threat and embarrassment and envy machine. You feel like you're constantly losing a battle to be relevant and have a good time, and you pathologically monitor feeds of other people's lives to try to stay ahead. When that doesn't work you lose yourself in mindless entertainment to avoid mental stress, also avoiding processing hard emotions.

That's not all new, but it's at a level higher than ever before.

The kids we have seen mostly don’t engage with social media directly. But the ones who transition from cute 5-6 year olds to problematic 10-12 year olds have a key common factor. Tablets. You see kids as young as 2-3 hiding under a table engaged in some awful kiddie YouTube trash or a game. It ends up being a pacifier that induces anxiety, and I think that effect combined with social media is powerful and difficult for kids to manage.

In terms of targeting, i actually think that things are better today. Through lawsuits and reporting, I learned that my childhood Boy Scout Troop and church was infested with pedophiles. The Boy Scout leader basically roamed the country and landed in NYC where he was eventually arrested for an unrelated rape. Today, there’s extensive background checking everywhere and it’s more difficult for a known offender to be in that position of trust.

Sports and the college recruitment funnel are another thing hurting kids. I had a kid drop out of little league because his soccer academy coach flipped out that he, as a 10 year old, isn’t fully committed to soccer. So he’s playing “elite” soccer, at a cost of almost $4k, because that’s how you make the high school team.

On HN that's likely to be a popular opinion, given how many members here probably work in social media corporations.

I have lots of experience looking after relatives' kids in the UK and your points don't apply at all to them.

It's anecdata vs anecdata, but yours doesn't refute the article, and given your opinion may well suit HN biases well (we don't want to think of our work as causing mental illness) then I think the top voted comment needs a stronger counter argument than "my kids are like this".

It's not certain, but it looks pretty damn likely that social media has caused a dramatic increase in mental health problems amongst kids.

Maybe teachers could contribute something here with their experience? Parents see such a tiny sample size but teachers see 1000s of kids over a few years.

Whoever implemented the surveillance of children should burn in hell. Since that probably doesn't exist the next prison with strong similarities should be chosen. You teach them that this kind of 24/7 surveillance is normal and I think they have enough problems with peer pressure through social media. You also teach a zero trust behavior. That can be good in a context and it can be really bad if it becomes learned cynicism.

I could understand it until age 10 perhaps but at some point you want your kids to be independent. If they aren't bots by that age.

1. My kids have slack in their schedule. No, they aren't going to Ivy League schools. That's OK. They will survive somehow.

2. This is certainly true, but it's a complete joke to my kids. They aren't confused. They just wonder why all the adults are. Teenagers already think adults are incompetent.

3. This isn't true at my school. My kids have made egregious errors and the school takes it in stride. They know they are kids. They understand kids make mistakes. It's OK. We work through it and move on. The cops are not called and nothing is escalated. At most, the send us an email and we talk to our kids and that's the end of it.

3. I have no idea on this one.

My children don't have social media accounts and never will on my watch. Even as teenagers they don't because they are not allowed. They could, yes, but they don't. However, I have boys, not girls. Perhaps that would be a non-starter if I had daughters.

When I have no stress (on rare occasions I’m able to detach from my problems), my desire to use my phone at all is non-existent. So I think you are right that’s it’s difficult to attribute causality when kids are constantly under stress.

This study, in fact, appears to only assess correlation. Haidt also strikes me as someone guided by a maverick worldview (he’s a serious thinker usually and I’ll read anything he writes)

It's the War On Drugs all over again.

We understand addiction enough to be able to say that a person's mental, emotional, and psychosocial states are the greatest causes of addiction and not the drug itself.

Social media leads to an increase in a cortisol and dopamine. It also increased oxytocin by a large margin. Behaviors linked to its use are similar to that of other substances that increase those hormones directly.

Can you fill in the blank? I actually have no idea what you are referring to here.

Youth culture seems dead.

I remember being a teen and early-20 in the 90s-2000s and there were things like a hippie festival circuit, raves, goth culture, club culture, and so on.

I keep hoping I'm just old and don't see it, but I remember back then it would seep out and get covered by the media and get chatted about on the nascent Internet. I see nothing like it today. Sure there are concerts and IDM shows and the like, but they don't have a mystique. It's just entertainment, not a coming of age subculture. Subculture is dead.

I think this is a factor from personal experience. If I hadn't gotten into the rave/club culture in the late 90s I'd probably be dead from suicide.

These cultures were where kids that did not exactly fit the popular mold would be able to go out, make friends, have experiences, and have a sense of belonging. I still miss it to this day.

He's one of the leading authorities on the matter, and your take is...nah, not true.

It's a muscle. Anyone who hasn't done school for a while will have to rebuild that muscle. It was like that before social media, just gotta relearn how to learn.

Programming is similar. If you do nothing but CRUD for a while (for whatever reason), when you gotta do the hard stuff where you have to keep a bunch of structure in your head at the same time, you're probably gonna struggle with it. After a few weeks, you'll be in better shape.

Same with reading complex documents, writing, math, etc.

There could be a post about some crazy new performance optimization coming to firefox and the top comment will be a link to a 15 year old bug where the right click menu padding for the flags page isn't consistent when viewed on BSD. Concluding the browser is abandonware due to this.

I definitely have been limiting my intake of news over the past several years. Election cycles are the worst for doom and gloom, but they all sell it, all the time.

No. Parenting and schools have gone completely to hell. You're not wrong, everyone else is. I still can't believe schools started letting kids carry their cell phones with them to class all day. As early as elementary school. WTF.

For my part, I figure my kids can have an unrestricted cell phone (and so, unrestricted Internet) as soon as they can pay for the device and plan on their own. If they can hold down a job to cover the bill, they can probably handle it. Fuck giving 8-year-olds personal smartphones. Or even 12-year-olds. That's insane.

Only if you discount the rest of the sentence you quoted...

> ... although I have not yet found good data from those regions.

I hate to be the one but what's your sample count? What does, "I actually work with students on a daily basis" mean? Are you a teacher in a high school? University? Do they intern/co-op at your company?

I attend a few schools for part-time things here and there, and I'm exposed to students aged 14-70 regularly. Politics are involved as a means of an identity, even if they realize that they are powerless to do anything.

The lack of critical thinking for any given saucy subject (most recently see Roe vs Wade) means that the opinions people hold are generally prepackaged from whatever sources they obtained them from and are internally congruent† - they know things here and there about a given subject, but externally nonsensical given the situation that the person is in and what they ought to focus their attention/time towards - they are, for lack of a better term, wasting their precious time away getting baited by professional media con people with attention grabbing headlines and memes.

† Best seen in person as a dialogue between two or more people where you're aware that their source material was written by one person in an essay (or a tweet roll) form, but has been changed to be a kind of a ping-ponged conversation where each person takes a turn to continue the over all narrative. (Better put: one big agreeable circle-jerk.)

I never understood the food photos. Do I just not love food enough? Do people really enjoy seeing photos of their friends’ meals?

We have other issues here, though (speaking for the situation in Germany). I’m quite some time out of my teens at 36, but for many years now I’ve been told that all that tax (technically not a tax) I pay for my pension will not result in me getting any meaningful pension.

For people who are currently teenagers it probably sounds like this: "Once you get a job, which won’t afford you a house, you’ll pay a decent chunk of your salary so the people who managed to destroy the environment and don’t care about you have a better end of life. You’ll not see anything of this money ever again."

And that is without including all the messaging during the pandemic that young people (more towards people in their early 20ies, but still) are at fault for nearly everything.

edit: I should mention that I’m still not discounting social media, I couldn’t, as I know next to nothing about it.

It was bad enough when I was in high school when all we had was Facebook, because we were comparing the whole of ourselves to our peers in their best light. It is so much worse now.

But Europe has far lower professional salaries than the US.

Also economic conditions definitely have a big impact, I could finally buy a small flat after years of renting and it's such a great change to be able to make changes in your own home and buy your own things.

My father did that at 23, not 30.

Are we sure about that? The fun thing with a lot of childhood trauma can take years to surface, let alone figure out. I personally wonder whether it has contributed to our race towards a kleptocratic society.

I can say that personally, while I was born in the early 80s, the recession had an impact on my family. Essentially, my parents chose to focus their efforts on making sure we could get as many college grants/scholarships as possible. An insanely intense focus on education and being able to sustain oneself. Didn't quite work out how they hoped.

Exhibit A people: we have impeding total collapse of the ecosystem, and they blame 'too many phones'. Have you spoken to a teenager lately? All my younger colleagues are convinced they are the ones that will have to deal with the mess, and they are probably right

Here's a question for me to understand where you're coming from and you to examine your assumptions. How does "too aware" get defined? Who defines it? I am an 80s kid(though grew up in India) and seen some issues myself, but can't claim I am worse off for knowing what I did. And to be clear, I didn't have internet till the start of the millenium and relied on books, radio and newspapers and I still was more about the state of the world i was to inherit than my parents.

Or rather, they see how historically threats were dealt with: lead was banned, CFCs were banned, sulphur in fuel was banned - in short, environmental threats were met with decisive action.

And then they see how scientists have warned for decades now about climate change and they can clearly see that nothing happens except a lot of useless bla-bla.

Children, even as young as ten, are not dumb. They can see and understand what is going on, and to recognize inaction and corruption in politics is not rocket science.

For some it will be liberation and an incredible tool to leverage but for many it will be just a waste of their life and even, for some, the end of their lives. I left Facebook years ago and recently left Twitter for higher quality sources.

But ... your "One." is distasteful ...

The GFC caused a decade of austerity and quiet unseen cuts in support and public service. If we agree there should, in fact, be some form of safety net, they had had many holes cut in that net in the last 15 years.

Where I am, I was one of the last who had their Uni tuition paid for, I had a relatively fun time growing up, my wife and I bought a property when they had gone through multiple incredible price increases, we have just paid off a mortgage, no matter what happens next short of a world war, we'll be ok. I cannot imagine how we would have done that in today's enviroment ... look beyond this forum and your own experience.

I feel absolutely gutted for the continuous squeeze the generation that followed me have endured. And, considering the outlook, the next recession seems on its way just to compound things at a time when exogenous inflation is all the rage.

It's a mess.

So, please hold both factors in mind. Social media is the cesspit that has amplified just an incredible economics and political mess of the last 15 years.

The first thing that was said is that Social media definitely amplifies it. I don’t think that’s a dismissal.. you don’t have to be on social media, you just have to hear or read or watch the news.

If seems like one continuous recession since 2008 - at least here in the UK, and I suspect also in many places. Nearly a decade and a half of austerity and failure: what does that do to their hopes for the future? My children (both teenagers) ask me "has it always been like this?" I was a child/teen in the seventies and I remember thinking the same thing.

Add to that the perma-war, the climate crisis, massive and pervasive social inequality, housing and employment precarity, Trump/Putin, Brexit...

> Perhaps it's social media that makes that they are either too aware of it or simply mention it more often.

Teenagers know what's coming down the road. They just, broadly, haven't developed the adult habits of denial and avoidance yet. We need to listen to them, not tell them that they are "too aware".

Then I wouldn't really say it's social media failure.

I was 14 when I had to loan my parents some money, and was acutely aware that I would not be able to afford college.

I read the news every day and was smart enough to realize that things were not going so great (according to the news).

To say that kids are blissfully unaware of the world they are born into is just wrong. Social media makes it even more apparent.

This awareness helped me make the right decisions for myself (deciding to not go to college, for example), but I am fortunately mostly optimistic. The weight of the world crushed some of my peers.

That's just not true, though. I'm over 40: My first formal 'current events' portion of a social studies class happened when I was 12, IIRC. The first gulf war was the current topic.

Middle schoolers would be told now that they need to think about going to college, how doing well in high school is their only hope of a scholarship, and so on.

They know about political extremism: They just might not use those words. They might know someone that is queer and see the hate they get. Heck, they might be spewing the same hate as their parents.

They likely know about inflation even if they don't know what it is. Poverty - or even a tight budget - affects you as a child especially in the pre-teen and younger teen years. Parents stress over money, after all, and some of their peers might have struggled with homelessness, depending on where you live.

At 15, I had started to care about politics. I mean, I knew they were a thing since elementary (and the mock elections they held), but I saw how it affected me.

And of course they know about the fun things.

You probably didn't successfully forbit FB and Instagram if their friends don't use it: This is more common with younger folks than their parents. Plus, if they are out playing in the yard (Which I quit doing during middle school and there was no internet) they might be too young to care right now.

Especially because many of their parents (if they’re fortunate enough to have both) probably lost their jobs.

Besides, living in an economy that moves from recession to recession has an impact on the mental health of their parents, especially in economies with little or non-existent safety nets (see UK and US), and I’d be very surprised if that didn’t have repercussions on their kids’ mental health.

Those things are heavily affecting teenagers mental health even if they don't give a flying about them. Poverty, uncertainty, and anxiety in the family home have serious and lasting, even generational consequences.

The "I'm alright Jack"-ness of that statement is making me actually angry. You think forbidding the social media of 20yo's from your teenagers is making a difference? You put "suffered" in quotes? Gross.

>I successfully forbid FB, Instagram, Snapchat..

If exclusion is what you believe is causing them to be unhappy then forcing them to be excluded seems like an almost sadistic (though likely just misguided) response. I definitely hated when my parents did things like that.

Except from the very privileged, I'm pretty sure they are at least exposed to adults discussing those subjects, or at least from medias. If the volume of concerning subject is large, they will internalize it and build up some anxiety, and that will impact mental health.

But many factors and to pin them upon a singular aspect is hard, also geographic and more so financial backgrounds play a factor that needs to be eliminated to see a more common root cause.

But hey, social media since Elon brought twitter a seen a resurgance in news about it, so more and more social media focus aspects will pop up and been a lot of ongoing debate and concerns on rollover for a while now as is.

As an anicdote how things have changed, a friend in his mid 40's was at some event and found some marbels so was playing a game with another friend for nostagia and some teens came up asking why you throwing stones about - as they had never seen marbles, let alone played it. Yet for decades and decades prior, everybody would instantly recognise marbles. Times change, not saying people who grow up playing marbles less prone to mental health. You find everybody has some aspect and there own coping ways.

Perhaps it may well be a case that we are looking into things like mental health more in a more detailed way and then looking at patterns of our times. After all, earthquakes have increased but equally the sensors in play to measure them have also increased so you have to balance out the more you see and compare to seeing less with less in the past very varefully as easy to see patterns that may not be there and come to conclusions.

After all, TikTok has been around less than any teenager era, let alone generatioins to get a clear picture.

But then, isn't social media for many mental health issues across generations, with it's echo chamber avenues and bombardment of all you care or dislike, it can be a dangerous rabbit hole for an angry or angst mind of any age.

But your approach to block it, safest and smartest way, like keys to the house - you need to have trust built before you let them loose and until then, block. Worse case they will educate themselves in how to get around the block.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass)

and in ancient history (circa 2003), "For Now" from Avenue Q:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-9T5f_VtxNc&t=6342

Increased divide between rich and poor, lack of middle class in my country, our pension/retirement system has been a joke for 10s of years and we were joking in middle school about it(!). Politicians actively working against country's best interests to line their own pockets is a norm - and that applies to every party so even elections are a joke.

Add high inflation to that, as a teen with limited budget you tend to notice price rises of snacks and fast food.

USA was hailed as a the promised land here when i was a teen, disillusionment with it is also a contributing factor.

After the initial shock of the first couple of years, post-war Germany seems to have been a pretty comfortable place for a young person willing to conform to pretty strict social standards and put in some (by the standards of that time) moderately hard work. It tends to be that way after great disruptions, like after the plague, after the 30-years war, etc. When power structures that consolidate wealth have been thoroughly disrupted it usually takes a while to get back to a point where most people are excluded from most opportunities. Hence, for most people, opportunities tend to abound after great crises.

Most western democracies are not post-disruption societies; they're more like the opposite. Today's young people don't face the effects of a recent upheaval, they face the effects of decades of peace and comfort. History would seem to indicate that that, too, is a dangerous place to be in.

> Yet, he and many others lived.

> But I think humanity has proven that it will find its way.

So? People will live in the craziest conditions. Humanity's way has historically lead through an awful lot of unnecessary suffering. Good luck inspiring anyone with that sort of outlook, in times of peace and crazy prosperity no less.

Democracy and rule of law aren't ends in themselves, freedom is far from a natural equilibrium state. There's a social contract that says we do these things, you get peace, a good life, a chance at success and wealth, and a decent amount of participation. Right now, western nations across the board are hollowing out that contract crazy fast. The rising popularity of anti-freedom, anti-democracy, anti-rule of law politicians may be a foreshadowing of things to come if we keep this up.

During WWII and the Cold War, other than the present or looming threat of war, things were generally improving. Also, without the internet, people did not really care about far away events.

On the other hand, many of the challenges of today have been known for deacades(plural). A good portion of the anxiety is caused by watching in real-time slow-motion the unfolding of the global selfinflicted trainwreck and observing that all countermeasures are ineffective.

The end of the Cold War set the premises for humanity to have a bright future, yet humanity seems to prefer self-destruction.

Compared to then, humanity now is in a crisis of hopelessness.

Suicide in the GDR is a much more complex topic. Here is an excellent article about it: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/2014/11/27/the-death-of-others...

The situation today feels like we're already in an equilibrium and there's no single obvious problem to solve to make things better.

mere survival shouldn't impress anyone

Anecdotally, I'm part of a tightly knit religious community and these problems are much less common. Even the nerdy awkward kids all have friends, why does it matter that they're awkward when they're still good people? But I rarely saw that sort of thinking in public school. It was as much a free for all as adult society and there were kids I saw go without friends from middle school to high school graduation because no one wanted to stomach their being awkward.

But often when I bring this up and rather than help the kids, people would usually try to convince me that my religion doesn't have any value. There's no interest in actually making things better, just taking things apart

Most people are getting drip fed curated content to 'influence' them, which has a very different agenda to accuracy regarding real things.

Also most people are not selecting real things, they are selecting entertainment.

If you had just said connecting to real things, agreed that sometimes it is, plus a lot of false things, plus heaps of fantasy/entertainment. But when you said its connecting us more accurately to the real state of things, well thats just false.

Accuracy in echo chambers that create information bubbles as socmed systems do is simply impossible, then the fact these systems are used to influence not inform makes them produce highly distorted minds.

1. Kid seems happy, does stuff

2. Kid gets phone for birthday

3. Kid seems sad, and no longer does anything other than sit in his room scrolling through tiktok

It's an extraordinarily depressing situation and anyone who denies this obvious truth is DELUSIONALLY BLIND

[0] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/secretary-generals-statemen...

Those are not always equivalent. Think "Brave New World"

2) seems to point the finger at social media more heavily though I think, but I'm not entirely sure what to make of that but this point is convincing to me.

The modern world is brilliant at creating a constant sense of insecurity. That is often artificial but feels real. Your place is society and in the group is always insecure and shifting. Maybe kids are mollycoddled, but you have to wonder why people are driven to do that. Why do the richest most stable countries feels so insecure?

> However, teenagers had a terrible, rotten time during WWII - bombs on cites, constant threat of military service, parents and elder brothers killed in war, one's country being invaded, etc. yet on the whole most never suffered these mental health issues. The difference is striking

> Somehow, they had stamina and resilience that today's teenagers don't have. Many of today's problems I believe go back to over-protection and mollycoddling of kids when they are very young. In the War years a kid was an independent agent by the time he or she was six.

There is a small problem. A survivor bias. You are only counting people that survived WW2. There were plenty of people that didn't survived, that didn't have stamina to do it, that were mentally ill(by itself was a reason for forced euthanasia). People that couldn't deal with the situation, couldn't do anything and just died, one way or another. And yes people committed suicides during WW2. Now we have something called suicide by cops. Just think how much easier it was when you were explicitly hunted.vOr people that outright killed themselves. In the end you only count bullet holes on planes that did return, not ones that failed to do so.

Now you have social media giving a constant reminder that you're not good enough and that you need to achieve more.

Conversely I do agree that there is a bit of a "learned helplessness" that I've noticed is a bit more prevalent in the younger generations, and I can't work out if that's a symptom or a cause.

Nowadays, what's anyone got to look forward to? Earlier today my favorite record label announced they were getting purchased by a bigger label, and a few months ago, my favorite way to purchase music got bought by a massive conglomerate that supports concentration camps in China. I am going to die without having seen upward economic mobility (in many ways being significantly poorer than my working-class parent). I avoided going to university since I didn't reasonably have a way to afford it, and was denied advancement in classes despite having test scores that indicated I could have performed well above where I was when I was in schooling.

If that's enough to bother me, a person who doesn't use any of these social platforms, what do you think it would do to a child of schooling age? They have nothing to look forward to. Their futures suck. Things kind of just suck. We have surrendered all control of society to a handful of parasitic corporations. People may not be dying of polio, but there's no longer hope to balance out the suffering. There's nothing to look forward to. You're going to die in the same spot as who came before you, if not worse.

I think we blame the social media too much and don't blame the fact that society is just miserable these days for any person not born into wealth.

Multiple major recessions —> 2008 was biggest since 1929. Dunno about multiple

a global pandemic —> this happened and is still happening

rising inflation —> objectively true. Though I suspect the oncoming recession will quash it as in 2008

housing and education getting more expensive by the day —> huge house and education price increases in past decade, far outstripping inflation

prospect of a mountain of debt right after graduation —> student loan debt more than doubled in last decade

climate that will be unlivable in a few decades —> debateable but CO2 is rising fast and we are already logging effects. Will accelerate within 30 years without geoengineering or carbon zero + sequestering

political extremism becoming the norm —> It definitely increased on both sides

and massive government gridlock that has made fixing any of this impossible —> Age old complaint, but filibusters did increase

Which do you think are just products of the media?

I’m more optimistic than OP but I don’t think the list is wrong

If you think a car rapidly depreciates, try reselling your degree. You might be in for a shock.

Winner: The car.

> getting a decent college degree will pay dividends throughout your life in increased earnings power.

The data says otherwise. Wages have held stagnant through the rise of post-secondary schooling. You can't both have increased earning power and stagnant earning power.

The earning power of not being limited to a physically close job that a car affords did show some upward wage movement, however. There was clear wage growth seen during the rise of the automobile.

Winner: The car.

> According to govt estimates, the average lifetime earnings difference between someone with just a high-school diploma, and someone with a college degree is - on average $550,000.

Ouch. The opportunity cost of a four year degree is, on average, more than a million dollars. That's a nasty haircut.

And that's ignoring that your methodology is flawed. We know that different people are different. Of course the person with down syndrome, who just scraped by in high school and struggles in the workplace for the same reason, is going to have lower earning potential than the person who breezed through their studies at Stanford. These people are not comparable.

Which is why you actually want to compare people over time. Using a time vector maintains the spectrum of people from high functioning to low functioning. Over time, as more and more have attained degrees, incomes have held stagnant. There has actually been no economic benefit gained.

Not when you're not even sure of being able to pay back those $31K+interests afterwards.

But that really hits home when you start to consider that in 1939 the world population was around 2.3 billion. So those 80 million deaths would be 275 million scaled to current population, primarily among the youth and those in the prime of their lives.

The thing that's exceptional in contemporary times is not how bad things are, but rather how unimaginably good things were during the bubble of time most of us grew up in. And we seemingly took that extreme outlier in the history of humanity for granted.

People don't do anything useful about anything now, and I think that is the most depressing of all. There's rabble about stuff on social media, politicians don't do anything but move the U.S. more towards and oligarchy, and corporations keep selling us stuff to consume, which consumers then lap up.

The Internet is the single most divisive technology ever created by humanity, and it does nothing but distance us from one another. There's never been greater threats to humanity than the Internet and its woes and the already arrived environmental and climate crisis.

That's not even considering the deep financial stress people are under these days. Even just 30 years ago, my parents bought a lot and built a house for $100,000. That barely covers tuition at most universities, and a similar sized house now costs around $1,000,000 just to buy. Just as recent as the late 90s and early 2000s, gas was under a dollar. We're sitting at $4.50 now. People can't afford the number of kids people used to have and must delay even having one or two kids well into their 30s, often due to financial constraints. Minimum wage has barely doubled since my teenage years, and yet everything is exponentially more expensive. Then there is the onslaught of several other socioeconomic factors.

People, aside from the wealthy, are getting slammed from literally every direction, and there is no concerted effort to improve any of it. It's not hard to understand why people are depressed more than ever.

If you was born in 1900, you would be 122 years old now.

Also I don't think those dates quite line up. A better estimate is the range of 20 to 33 (ish) years for most families (I personally would like to hope some start later but kind of doubt this offhand...)

Between 1900 and 2020 that's anywhere from 6 to about 3 different generations, with different windows of experience overlap.

> The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8

The oil cannot be unburnt. The glaciers cannot be refrozen. The species cannot be made unextinct. At least not in any human lifespan.

It's a figure of speech.

I think there might have been, it just took different forms. For one thing, alcoholism and wife abuse (beating) was absolutely rampant in those times. These are not signs of mentally healthy individuals...

Ironically, most selfies don't (accurately) show one's face. Digitally "enhancing" photos is the norm now, so much so that most selfies have become caricatures to me.

This notion that "it doesn't directly affect teens so they don't care" is a painfully naive narrative. If anything teens have A LOT of time and energy and little clue what to do with it. So many naturally find something to care/obsess over, with or without social media. (although it is probably amplified by it)

Teenagers are affected by recessions, inflations, housing costs and education. Their parents cant afford things, argue about money, they have to move, loose house, learn they have to take more debt for college or plain cant afford them.

I mean, yes, if your parents are rich, then teenager has zero idea about the above. But, everyone else, poor teenagers, lower and middle class teenagers are affected. know.

Yeah, we will probably survive for the next 50 years at least. But climate events will be making life a lot harder. Droughts, floods, forest fires and tornados will be wrecking havoc in many places. Even if you don't live in one of those places, you'll be feeling the effects through shortages (as we're currently experiencing a very small taste of in Europe), refugees and political instability.

I don't really disagree with you, but I don't think it's a good idea to be dismissive in any form about the consequences of climate change, as people are built in such a way that we grasp onto such messages as an excuse not to take action. We should be focusing on this.

The hell it doesn’t! Did you even put a moment’s thought into that claim? Parents losing a job, or a house, or not being able to afford new clothes, or FFS the other hundreds of impacts recessions and inflation have on a family affect teenagers. Talk about misinformed, lordy lor’

I find this denial concerning, it reminds me of Steven Pinker's "the world is actually getting better look poverty is going down" (also, we redefined poverty to be anything below $1.90 per day).

We've already seen summers get singing hot. I live in a place where AC was very rare, because you'd only really need it for a week at max per year. That has gone up to several months (and yet new construction still wouldn't install at least wall units, so I'm also stuck with my amazing single hose unit)

I am in also in a position where I have an income considered good, but my prospects of ever owning a place to live are near nil. Because all housing now exists solely as a speculative asset.

And my pension will, as estimated right now, barely cover the "living minimum" that is provided by social support anyhow. To significantly escape that, you'd have to make about 70k EUR a year at age 20 and then keep getting raises for 47 years. Good luck with that. So I am just paying in for boomers that ruined the climate and bought up all the housing and other generational wealth to have a nice end of life.

Where's the fucking lie?

Perhaps this idea is the problem then? Having some mental requirement to fit in I would qualify as a mental illness. What did the parents, or others in their life, do to them to require confirmation from others to the point it literally defines their life?

They don't actually contribute anything to society, they are just vampires leeching on attention and time and selling whatever data they get.

In a perfect world they wouldn't exist at all, in our flawed one they should have to pay the price for providing essentially nothing.

Maybe you meant illicit drugs. Almost everyone I know of consumes some type of drug.

Your idea seems similar to China's recent policy, restricting access to online games for younger people.

To enforce literacy is of course easy. Talk to them, teach them.

To enforce that a child actually follows your advice not to watch thing X when they have the physical ability to watch thing X, including when you aren't looking? Basically impossible. Kids aren't computers. They don't necessarily do what you tell them to do.

I mean, I have massive difficulty getting myself not to waste my life on the internet, this very comment being evidence of the fact.

It's really not that simple, kids are not computers. The age old parental meme of repeating yourself 1000 times before your kids "gets" it is accurate.

Honestly, do you think parents are able to effectively counter literal billion-dollar companies that pour resources into making sure their apps are engaging (read: addictive)? How?

We've taken a hard-line stance with our kids and have explained/educated them on every aspect of social media, attention, and addictive programs. And we're still losing the fight. I genuinely think people massively underestimate how addictive many apps are, especially to developing minds that are constantly seeking novelty.

My kids are <10 and they have youtube limits, but they can play heaps of interactive games where they learn about resource management, team play, how systems work, how to solve problems and how to think.

I will even let them back on the computer in the evening after dinner if they want to do programming or level editing in Roblox, or make music in garage band, or something else creative.

I wish my parents reduced the extent to which I was exposed to recommendation algorithms at a young age.

Recently, I've become aware of how much of the time I spend on social media is not necessarily time I want to be spending there. The problem with recommendation algorithms is that they always recommend you continue watching and scrolling. When I was young, I used to read 500 page books like they were nothing, but as I've spent more time on short form entertainment, the harder it has become for me to engage in long form content like books. I still do fine in school, and I've been generally successful, but I feel like if I can't sit in silence for 30 minutes, I'm not really in control of myself. Any time I have a period of boredom or free time, it's easy to fill it with entertainment, rather than thinking on my own.

I've been trying to break these habits (or, honestly, addictions) recently, but it's really hard after years of conditioning.

I don't think modern recommendation media is completely negative, but it is built on getting people addicted, and I can see why you don't want that for your children.

And the people that don't fit in will usually put more energy in other ways to express themselves and have a much higher chance of becoming Truly Interesting People, if they make it through that pressure cooker.

It's tough and I'm glad I'm not a part of it, but it's not the end of all cohesion in society that some make it out to be.

I used to fish a lot, and would constantly see younger people, usually but not always women, come near me (because I'm away from the crowds) and setup a tripod and spend 20 or so minutes taking different selfies, then leaving.

I can 100% guarantee you the vast majority of those were going on instagram, writing a long story about how a day at the beach is good for your soul, etc...when in reality they just drove to the beach, took a few photos, then went home.

People living in extreme poverty globally is down to 700 million from 1.9 billion.

The world today is better than the 90s in many measurable ways.

Putting the comparison aside. It is not healthy or helpful to teach children that they are doomed, the situation is hopeless, and their their future is destined to be miserable.

I wouldn't tell my child "your life will suck, and you would be better off dead" every morning when they wake up. Pessimists preach this, and children believe it.

There will always be trials and tribulations. The ones that solve those are the ones that truly believe they can. The more blind optimism we instill in folks the more confidence they will have to try and tackle the seemingly impossible (they never are) problems.

This is the exact kind of BS the parent comment is referring too. The world is full of problems but it’s never been better for most people in most ways.

"Boomers" tried to scrape together a life and provide for a family within the rules of the world where they lived. They elected people to solve the problems that they knew about at the time, just like every other generation.

If I find it I will link it, but here's an article in a similar vein: https://www.psychalive.org/worst-mental-health-instagram-fac...

So yes, the search is obviously geared towards engagement. But not at the cost of mental health.

Even this backfired at me when I was dating. Everything is completely separate and I get misjudged entirely.

But maybe I'm talking to the wrong people, but a lot of people are kinda the same in that regard.

I'm also curious how "coddling" would describe social media.

This is the most risk adverse, most monitored, and most policed generation of Americans.

I think this results in less freedom to experiment, explore, grow, and find happiness.

In about 25 years we have gone from teens behavior being largely untraceable, to them being reachable by cellphones, to the majority of their behavior and communication being recorded and available for later scrutiny.

Not to mention the other obvious contributors to poor mental health (war, isolation, health, economic, etc.) that surround us that are being: 1. Ignored due to increased ability to distract one's self 2. Being constantly amplified via social media

In differing conditions, social media may not pose as much harm as it does today. I sure hope they factor this into account when legislating anything.

Anecdotally, really really well! based on Haidt's watershed of 2009 I'm seeing what's in the pipeline at bachelors and masters level education 10-12 years on. Most of my L6 and L7 are young adults aged around 20-25. They've either had about a decade of exposure to smartphones and social media, or for some reason they have opted out.

There is a very significant difference in their abilities and attitudes. I can almost see it in their eyes in the first tutorial.

Motivation is higher.

Punctuality and commitment are massively better (they turn up to tutorials and don't email me at the last minute with an excuse)

Concentration and listening is better, They are not constantly twitching and looking to their phone.

Emotional range of affect (ability for seriousness and good humour) is higher.

Positive interpersonal skills are better. This isn't an introvert-extrovert thing, it's about focus, openness, body language, eye contact, thoughtfulness of speech, vocabulary. It's just a different experience to meet people who are phone-free.

Even ability to use technology is improved. Counterintuitive maybe. But they seem better at searching, referencing and organising information.

I pretty much breathe a sigh of joy when I see a student has a dumb phone or tells me they "don't do smartphone and social media". I know there's going to be more to work with, and the outcomes are going to be interesting.

The irony is of course, that these "weird ones" would have been us geeks 30 years ago. The same group you'd expect to have a more intense relation to authentic knowledge, curiosity and better academic outcomes.

Things have flipped so that technology overuse is now normative, and the "geeky" thing to do is be moderate, circumspect and sceptical.

Twitter and TikTok are still pretty big for the "weird girls". Witch culture, far-left politics, nerdy fandoms, and outsider music all have pretty big communities online, a lot of which are made up of teenage girls or queer-adjacent kids.

The "weird boys" mostly end up on reddit and Discord, as expected. I remember spending time with their group at one point and asking one of the kids what he was doing on his phone all night, he said he was arguing with another reddit mod on Discord about rules for their new sub. This was at a campfire.

The comic book store or DIY concert hall don't exist as watering holes for nerdy Gen-Z. I think there's something profoundly sad about that.

It’s not easy. Do your best. Try to actively support broadening their experiences with (hopefully) the outcome that they expand their interests. I think the needed thing here is not necessarily teetotaling, but finding something better to do than consuming media all the time.

It's possible that this time it's different. We mark the adoption of movable type as a watershed in Western civilization, in the sense that it changed how people relate to their churches and their governments as well as how they experienced science, art, and culture. The Internet is a far bigger deal than movable type was. Anyone who says they know exactly what its effects will be on teenagers or on any other demographic or institution is blowing smoke.

That said, the issue is the all encompassing nature of it. Always on. Less time interacting with peers. Less time in extended thought. Less time even with their own thoughts.

I’ve taught high schoolers in the countryside, the city and the fancy suburbs both pre and post smartphone. The transition feels rapid and noticeable.

But - I would also argue that boredom is not a negative state of mind. Boredom motivates us to think, to dream, to change, to move our bodies, to be creative, to seek connection, to free associate, to let our minds rest, to..., to..., to…

Perhaps, our minds aren’t built to be captivated all day (though the root of the word does feel appropriate to the conversation).

Does anyone not have friends or family members who became angrier, darker, or otherwise seem to have lost touch with reality since becoming extremely online?

Frankly, younger people can make the same hypothesis and test from the obverse...it's not that hard.

They never said it was. IF they were drawing any connection, it is the opposite direction. Poor social skills and lack of community can lead to feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and depression.

>Have you ever considered that maybe young people are disillusioned with their surroundings and the people who are older than them? After all - you come on here and complain that they’re socially inept, negative, and mostly unworthy of any attention. Maybe they’re just reflecting back what you feel about them.

This is a valid consideration. It is possible that there is a generational divide at play where youth are seen as having nothing valued by older generations in terms of interests and social interactions. This could be a perception, or it could be a reality.

In my life, there are certainly people that I do not share an interests with and do not enjoy their company.

As for the accusation, I certainly hope not. I am absolutely one of those type that kills them with kindness and excitement. And, to be clear, I didn’t call them socially inept - I called their social skills are reduced compared to students in the recent past/socially disinterested.

And, I absolutely didn’t call them unworthy of any attention; that’s absurd.

I don't understand how you could think any of this.

Relationships? They are absolutely a competition for the young: both platonic and romantic, but especially romantic. Nothing more competitive.

Work? Work is absolutely a competition, for young and old alike.

Community? What else do you think teens are seeking out online?

you've edited your post a couple of times so this was a reply to your earlier edit about natural/status games

Those are all speculations tho.

Historically, also issues like alcoholism, anorexia, drug use had different rates between genders. It is not unprecedented for one gender to be affected differently then the other.

Women attempt more suicides, but men commit more suicides.

Some people say that this trend looks to be reversing in teens (girls committing more suicides) but not sure that’s already clear in the data.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

It cites many sources including biological and social, however:

> ... we still do not really understand the causes of these differences, and comparatively little research has been done to explain them.

Also, often young people compare their lives to unrealistic images portrayed through social media influencers, and get depressed when their life seems worse. So even "positive" content can be a source of depression.

Newspapers bring you that, once per day. And social media brings a lot more than that.

The trick social media companies use is convincing people that all they're doing is giving people access to "information". They are not; they're just creating addiction machines. It should be self evident that wikipedia or a minimalist blog with a comment box is in an entirely different solar system from facebook's algorithm that keeps track of how long you scroll and then shows you something you're likely to interact with right before you're supposed to close the app, manipulating your emotions to keep you "engaged" longer.

>Our descendants will create better platforms that can allow users to better filter for their emotional needs and they'll likely have better tools to understand their own emotions.

We already have them. My kids won't be able to access the internet until they figure out how to navigate the command line.

In the beginning ...

The distribution channel isn't the main issue, it is that the role of a parent is more complicated than it ever was and parents are not keeping up.

In the past you had to ensure that your kid doesn't pick up negative influences from the kids around them. Today you need to be more proactive in ensuring that they don't pick up negative influences from the multitudes of misguided people unrestricted by geography who's half-formed views are propagated as long as they are interesting and make people feel good about themselves in the short term.

All the time, every day, forever?

Not sure what society you're living in but here in the western world the push for censorship is constant.

Most dont let young children have access to pornography and extremely violent content for example. Historically, this access has been limited both by parents and social groups.

I wouldn't want to rely on my toddlers cognitive tools to digest and defend against a high resolution video of someone being dismembered and beheaded alive.

Yeah, but why should I solve them ?

Modern media and modern world has taught us that our existence is merely here to satisfy our own needs. Sure, humans' main objective is to prevail the existence of the human species. But why live ?

Why exist ? As a person with (recovering?) depression, I am not motivated enough to contribute to anything at all. Maybe making software is my thing. But what are we? endless Consumption machines ?

I apologize in advance for not sounding optimistic at all. I think that lackthereof religion has brought us to question our existence even more.

With a seemingly more-accessible we've made some things easy (survival, basic needs except mind) and others hard (purpose & happiness, setting expectations).

I think that the anxiety might come from the view that we might not fix those problems in time, because the amount of work needed to do so is that vast.

I wouldn't call living paycheck to paycheck "making it." Most people aren't making it--by the numbers.

I know the type of person that posts these kinds of incredibly out of touch comments on here. You work at a corporation, or your skills are currently in high demmand. You are surrounded by people making good money. This insulates you, leading you to extrapolate the conditions you are living under over the WHOLE WORLD--today's world!

Let them eat cake?

In today's world it's: let them withdraw from their 401k if they fall on hard times.

It's ridiculous and frankly insulting and dismissive of the plight of many struggling people. It's the old aristocratic mentality: anyone that doesn't succeed is a fuck up. It's a method of projecting the failings of the system onto those it fails, used over and over throughout history.

I suspect with the political instability of this nation, we won't be having these types of arguments much longer. As the system fails, debates will become viciously partisan. There will be no more "if you try hard, you can succeed." Everything will be reduced to, "Submit to the will of the party, and you're good. Don't and you're a traitor deserving of elimination." This is what happens when people retreat behind slogans and refuse to address reality. Things break down, then things get out of control because we have failed to adapt. Then comes the age of horror where the system has to destructively seek a new equilibrium.

It depends how you define "success" of course, but by my criteria of "living with financial independence, real happiness, and the ability to choose what impact you have on the world" very few HN readers will ever be successful. We trade our happiness and satisfaction that comes from making a real impact on the world for a pile of cash to make tech people don't care about.