It astonishes me to see people defending the idea that the pandemic is not a notable component of this. I agree that social media, internet porn, competitive school environment, economic conditions, etc., are all negative influences on teenage mental health. However, to propose that forcing (or, at the least, very strongly encouraging) an entire populace into self-isolation would not have negative impacts for a group in one of the most social and formative times of life, is absurd.
Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I cannot imagine any rational person is capable of believing this to not be a major factor to their mental health.
Anecdotally, I am a reasonably strong introvert, and I switched teams at my job during the pandemic after nine months of work from home because it did not feel healthy to my mental state to not have interacted with anyone in so long. I felt that my social abilities had atrophied, and that I had lost sight of a lot of the important things in life that derive from social interaction. I can only imagine that the impact is far greater to someone who can't choose to change their life to obtain the social interaction they are missing, and who (I am generalizing a bit here) probably requires mental/emotional guidance and support from their peers, elders, etc.
As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know them, I keep hearing this kind of statement:
There is no room for mistakes.
Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…
And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you? Just work harder, or just not caring about their mental health.
They see this never ending cycle of
turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a job, because they want or need money.
Many are going to bed after midnight every night.
Something has to give.
This is really disturbing to me.
How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of being this are giving up.
I'm a senior in university now, but it did really feel like this when I was in high-school. And it still feels like this in university, though I'm now much more capable of reasoning of whether it's true or if I just feel that it's true.
I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless.
I mean, all these things are true. The middle class is disappearing, and society is quickly bifurcating into a few haves and the rest have-nots. When I was a kid, you could get B’s or C’s and have a good job after high school. Now you’re competing with the smartest of the ~50M other kids your age globally for one of the few tickets out of poverty. And you can bet if you miss that one homework assignment or get that one B, you’re way behind the kids who are doing everything to 100% perfection. I can understand how it is a pressure cooker of stress!
> Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…
As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80.
When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.
It's because, fundamentally, the middle class is shrinking. The barrier for staying in the middle class is getting higher and higher every day. And this is happening before our eyes at a rapid pace over the last 10-20 years.
Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp.
That's the super high achieving group.
I saw that some decades back when I kept a horse at the barn on the Stanford campus and met some of the local teens. These were kids with very high powered parents, and were pressured to keep up. These teens knew the ones who committed suicide at Gunn and Paly high schools.[1]
Notes from then:
- Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in a bleak voice, "4.5".
- Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting the swim team down."
- One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, saying how hard it was.
"Less bright" here means "can't get into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college.
This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience.
> adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you
Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are getting record numbers of applications, because of all the deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected gap years.
> Many are going to bed after midnight every night.
Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to socialize or play games etc. any earlier.
I know if I ever have kids, I'm probably going to tell them it's okay to even drop out of high school.
None of it really matters, you can drop out of high school, go backpacking in Europe, and as long as you find a way to support yourself, no one has a right to judge you.
You definitely don't need to get into college. In the last 30 years or so, we've turned everyone into maniacs. Back in the day, if you just graduated high school that was something to be proud of.
Now, no, you need to get straight A's, no, you need to take a foreign language. If you're not able to pass a foreign language class, maybe you're messed up in the head, maybe we can give you some dangerous stimulants to fix you.
Again, none of it matters, I make significantly more money than most of the rest of my family and I'm one of the least educated. I was making more than what they make now with their fancy masters degrees, before I even finished my BA.
The only thing that really matters is finding peace with yourself, and again as long as you can support yourself. Nobody really cares. Of course. Someone's going to be smarter on paper, someone's going to get into a better school, someone's going to have a bigger house. But if you're constantly trying to compete with every other person, you're going to find, no matter how well you do, you'll devalue your own accomplishments.
The pandemic was the last straw… I thought. I’m disturbed to see that the world is going right back to 'the way things were'.
Folks take the idea that you have to work for a living, and have dialed it up to eleven…thousand!
As best as I understand: hard work is not rewarded, it’s exploited. A natural resource to be drilled, pumped, and burned out.
That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points—there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."
I am glad this is not the case in Europe (with the exception of the UK). Here we do not only look to performance and pride and you need to win everything. Individual development is very important. Hope it will remain like that.
I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible.
Zoomers are the first generation with nearly unrestricted access to social media essentially from birth (access that probably should've been restricted early on, but that's water under the bridge). Couple that early and frequent exposure with artificial echo chambers created by apps to boost engagement, and impressionable minds end up soaked in endlessly-amplified negative perspectives.
The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials. Today, EDs, ideation of self harm, etc are all mercilessly reflected back at people on just about every social media platform rather than just the niche ones. The pandemic only made it worse by preventing people from spending time with each other in person, but kids are glued to their phones anyway.
$1 Bet: millennial parents will probably learn from this with their own kids. Or if not, legislators probably will. Late Gen-α and the generation that follows will hopefully see a rebound from these trends with parenting habits that benefit from these learnings.
Kids have been exposed to multiple consecutive years of social isolation due to the pandemic. They haven't been going to school or seeing their peers in person. That's kind of the obvious hypothesis. To just completely write that off, you really have to have axe to grind against social media.
As you said, "kids are glued to their phones anyway." That was already true before the pandemic. Which, again, suggests to me that the extreme factor here is the isolation, not the phones.
Not that social media is good or healthy. But the way it's scapegoated reminds me of the way television and video games were demonized when I was a child growing up in the 90s. It was over the top.
I'm always entertained by the idea that 4chan did something to people as opposed to it revealing what was always there. We're social animals, we're more defined by our environment than we'd like to believe; but similarly, we have the capability to generate and manipulate that environment ourselves.
I would suggest that the basic human feedback loop just got more tightly coupled and that mass personal communication was always going to lead to this.
> I'm not sure the pandemic is solely or even largely responsible
I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root cause (social media, outrage / attention culture, the breakdown of normal human discourse, polarization) as the mental health problems. Blaming "the pandemic" fails to acknowledge that covid was as much or more about our collective reaction as it was about the actual virus. It's the "powder keg" thing - the conditions were there, and inevitably something would come along to set it off.
The quality of the discussion is in parts abysmal. Assertions are thrown into the world without even mentioning a source.
A substantive discussion is therefore not possible. It is just 'opinion porn' imho.
Regardless of whether the pandemic, social media, (real) porn, industrial food, excessive demands at school, any combination thereof or other anecdotes are used as the cause. Nothing is substantiated by linking sources. Or at least naming them.
Whatever is claimed can only be questioned, not refuted, as there is no substantive point of attack.
Thus, in the end, everyone feels good because they were able to express an opinion. But unfortunately we have learned nothing.
The reality is the pandemic fear mongers won't cite fataility rates for groups like 5 year olds, because the data doesn't support steps taken.
They won't cite data about N95 use because N95's DO work, and if we just let people who wanted to / were at risk wear N95's we'd solve half the problem right there without burdening anyone else. And yes, N95's with a vent are fine and should be encouraged because they make mask wearing a LOT easier.
Instead we are just fed endless BS. Citing the CDC and WHO is pointless because their stuff was not actually grounded in science but in BS. Witness their loud announcements that travel restrictions (time honored method to reduce spread) was racist and wouldn't reduce spread. Or that masks don't work etc. You have an airbone disease, masks probably help. You have a transmittable disease, reducing travel may help.
You know, opinions are valuable here for hypothesis generation.
No one knows and there is no consensus why this is happening. I have a few opinions as a middle-and-high school teacher. But talking about this is important to help wrap our heads around it.
If a definitive understanding or reason were easy to acquire, we'd have done it already. So, the toil continues: for researchers, policymakers, laymen... and those of us in the trenches trying to do something about it with not enough information.
This situation if the result of the destruction of the social network of relations due to the modern lifestyle. To have meaningful social relations with our peers is extremely important for humans and even more so for teenagers I guess.
First the modern lifestyle mostly destroyed the small communities where people know each other and spend a lot of time together. People began to stay in their house all the time with no contacts with a community.
At this first stage, as the local community was eliminated, the remaining pillars of social relations were school, for young people, and work for adults. I some case adults were able to maintain some degree of additional social life by having some friends and inviting them regularly to create the opportunity to meet.
Later it come all the smartphones, tablets, computers, social networks that captivated all the attention, especially of young people so even more so people were pushed to stay more at home and meet less people further increasing the social isolation.
The final blow came from the COVID-19 confinement were people were forced to stay at home reducing social contacts only to the close family members. This situation created an unsustainable isolation raising serious mental health problem especially for teenagers but also for adult people.
Modern society got it all wrong. We think having more goods and entertainment to consume make us happier but this is not how it works. Not if the social life and the social network around us is poor or non-existent.
Scientific thought that they know all and can say people what to do and they give us instruction just to avoid that people dies. The problem is that people doesn't just need to stay physically alive, we need to be also happy and fulfilled by our life.
We need to radically change modern lifestyle and stop with all the bullshit coming from politicians.
I agree with a lot of this, but I think the effect has more complex roots.
I think there's an economic component to this as well. Housing prices are rising, meaning a lot of people are pushed out of their existing community, or that they perceive their community is temporary (until they all get pushed out). It starts to feel pointless to build a community of renters when you don't think it will exist in 5 years.
A lot of local shops have been overtaken by corporations, who exist in the community but aren't really part of it. Walmart/Target/Dick's/etc isn't sponsoring the local little league, or throwing a potluck, or creating any kind of space or events to build a community around.
Religious service attendance is also down, which is another way people used to build communities, and I haven't seen a lot of secular replacements (not a criticism of anyone, I don't attend myself). I think a lot of people replaced religion with politics, which has created communities more focused on things outside themselves (laws and public opinion) than within themselves.
I don't even know that social media is the cause of loss of community. It seems to me that social media was the market responding to the loss of in-person communities; it was responding to an already-established need. It might have accelerated the decline, but I think healthy communities could have withstood social media. We just didn't have many healthy communities left.
Anecdotally I've seen much less damage among those who are deeply religious that I know(Muslims). Social networks are strong so they were preserved even among the pandemic. Say what you want about the problems that come with religion, but it is great at solving a lot of the issues that humans have dealt with for thousands of years. Those problems are ones modern society has done little to solve
Communities fell apart starting in the 60-80s, well before the internet and social media.
People forget the concrete institutions that were dissolved that led to communities collapsing.
First it was families falling apart due to high rates of divorce and low birth rates. Also people moving away from home for job opportunities split the family apart. Entire towns were hollowed out.
Also the dissolution of institutions like church, political groups, fraternal orders (e.g. Elks, Kiwanis), Charity Groups. See the book "Bowling Alone".
Social media and entertainment spiked afterward to fill the void – but it was the collapse of the families, community groups & towns that were a precursor to the death of communities.
Sure the pandemic may have accelerated or been the catalyst, but let's be honest here. TV/Internet/Video game addiction is a serious thing that nobody is paying attention to. I struggled with this personally for the last 25 years of my life and I'm 30. I now have two kids and have to ensure I moderate their usage in responsible ways as they grow up.
I was a generation before the iPad, but the current teenagers struggling have likely had a smart device from as early as 2. My smart device was a TV and nintendo. The guidelines the CDC even has for responsible device usage is reasonable, but nobody follows it. Most people are picking up their devices up to a hundred times a day or every 10 minutes. The average screen time is close to 3 hours. That's an average by the way...
We need to bring awareness to this problem like Nicholas Carr did over a decade ago. We can't let big tech companies convince us this isn't a problem with their sponsored studies to control a narrative.
Before 2000 or so, every stupid thing you did as a kid wasn't recorded on a phone or online somewhere permanently that you could forget it.
Maybe at school but bullying wasn't possible 24/7 online like now.
You had no idea what the latest news or political drama was as a kid before 2000 because it wasn't in your hand 12+ hours a day. No twitter/facebook or whatever they are using now.
Now being a kid is as depressing as being an adult and you are wired-in to a world that's overwhelming you. Sure they don't have jobs or rents to pay but everything still feels fatalistic to them, like they can't escape the world defines them, not the other way around.
> Although young people were spared the brunt of the virus — falling ill and dying at much lower rates than older people — they might still pay a steep price for the pandemic, having come of age while weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil and, for many, grief.
The honest truth that most people don’t want to face is that there is a direct relationship between economic turmoil and mental health. Instead, we will get politicians and community leaders blaming everything else for the problem, when all you have to do to address it is to pay people a living wage and provide an adequate social net to fall back upon. Our leaders will never admit this.
These trends have been happening for decades and it tracks quite well the gradual breakdown of stable family structures. Psychologically for example, kids experience their parent’s divorce as worse than a parent’s death.
Do you have a source for that claim? It sounds like nonsense. My parents divorced when I was 6 or 7 years old, and I’m pretty sure it would be unimaginably more traumatic if one of them had died instead.
If you compare children of divorce with children who have a parent die the children of divorce look worse on basically every measure, sure. That doesn’t mean divorce is worse for children than the death of a parent. Divorce is a choice. The king of person who gets divorced is different from the kind who doesn’t. By way of example Asian-Americanc college graduates who get married in their 30s have a divorce rate around ~2%. Most people who get divorced remarry. The kind of person who marries a divorcee is not the same king of person as those who don’t.
I've read some takes that divorce can be positive for a child. The theory was: parents having time away from their child gave them a break, and also helped them value their time with the child more. There are also theories that living in a divorced family is better than living in an unhappily married one.
AFAIR there are studies looking at families with different cultural stances on divorce (but good luck controlling for other factors there). Also they tend to measure more easily measurable outcomes in the child than mental health, such as grades, which don't necessarily correlate.
This is unsurprising. There are no good prospects — war, climate change, a divided society — in all of this: You, a teen with a digital mirror, that keeps you updated on how much more you seem to suck than all the others you have to compare yourself against. Your parents who constantly tell you your generation has to fix and/or safe the planet, while you wonder if you will even be able to fix and/or safe yourself.
Meanwhile even people who you see as adults have given up of ever being able to retiring, but you know it is quite definitly going to get worse for you.
I often feel my development went... much different than most in my peer group due to my much earlier access to the Internet/on-line services and me being a "curious hacker" getting into places and reading things I definitely should not have at that age. Seeing how utterly incompetent "powerful" institutions were (combined with teenage arrogance) that I was raised to deeply respect is still something I have difficulty processing.
I can't imagine being bombarded not just with 100x more information about how the future is f*cked and how incompetent those running the show are, but also it being amped up to 11 by hucksters selling "engagement" and ads. The content is coming to you now.
I think a lot of early adulthood is just brazen naivety. For example, I'd never have started the company I did at 17 at age 37, there would be too many reasons I know it'd fail. If you lose that naivety too early, at least personally I would have utterly lost any motivation to "try" since the odds were so astronomically against me.
When a generation collectively believes they will have it worse than their parents I'm not entirely sure what to expect the outcomes to be.
1) how am I missing the link to the actual CDC study? or did WaPo not even post the link to the survey results they were discussing?
2) disappointing not to see any comparison to other advanced economies. Is this happening everywhere with high internet usage? Did the severity correlate at all to how severe the pandemic was or what the responses were? Does it correlate to income levels or political polarization or religiosity or any of the other things that vary (at least somewhat) between different advanced economies? Maybe the CDC study looked at this, but if so WaPo said nothing about it. Hard to know what to do with this information with nothing but a WaPo text wall talking about it.
My wife's a middle school teacher for over 22 years. If you want an unvarnished view into just how bad things have gotten since the pandemic begain--for mental health, school engagement, and all things related--talk to a teacher. It's unprecedented, and the long tail of the damage will take decades to understand.
I worry that it is the expected result of taking away hope. Powerful actors try, and have succeeded - with our unwitting help - in spreading a highly reactionary message of despair, disabling those who might challenge their power. You have no power; only the wealthy and large corporations, and all that matters is profit.
Progress; the equal value of individuals from any class, status, ethnicity, gender, etc; the power of any individual to change the world through hard work; - the things humanity has worked for since the beginning of the Enlightenment, with incredible success - are derided, even here in the heart of innovation and entrepreneurialism, which fundamentally depend on those notions. The garages of Silicon Valley defeated IBM.
Younger generations now believe they have no power, that humanity is fundamentally evil and corrupt, that progress isn't possible. Look at climate change: most believe not that, 'the people, united, can never be defeated', but that nothing can be done. We have the tools, the knowledge, the need is clear, but the powerful have created despair. That's not what I grew up with; I grew up with hope, and people who changed the world, from George Washington to Dr King, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, from Edison to Jobs.
Even the left-of-center and many progressives have adopted this message. Somone - that means you - needs to start spreading one of hope. I think they would be incredibly popular.
Another factor may be that many people that teens look up to today talk openly about mental health problems, to the point that now it seems almost trendy to struggle with mental health. Perhaps this encourages teens to let their mental health deteriorate for attention, which is the social currency of today’s society. Remember they are not entirely rational beings.
Makes me wonder what the CDC's recommendation will be. More medication? More pills? Isn't that their answer for everything. We are already the most medicated society on earth. I guess a little bit more won't hurt.
The only teens who have been "isolated" for two years are maybe some of those at very high risk (or the unfortunate children of hyper-paranoid parents). No need to exaggerate.
A lot of people would, and did, isolate even without being told too until they were vaccinated. They would have done so out of fear. All that governments really did by mandating lockdowns was enforce it on the part of the population that wouldn't do it with the hope that it would stop the spread of COVID. In some countries it worked, in others it didn't.
All this is to say there is no causal relationship between the government lockdowns (mandated at the state level in the USA, no?) and the CDC reporting on mental health. Both occured independently. There are however plenty of plausible arguments to make for lockdowns being causal on mental health though.
The entire pandemic felt like screaming in an empty room sometimes.
My wife is a teacher in a low-SES area, and my sister-in-law is a psychologist dealing specifically with at-risk youth.
From the start they could see first-hand the detrimental impact lockdown had on the poorest and most vulnerable.
For many of these kids, school is a sanctuary from a dysfunctional and/or abusive home life. They don't have quiet places to study, let alone the means (laptop, internet).
Just a little example here, based on a close friend's upbringing. A young teen can't sleep because her degenerate father is blasting music from 11PM to 3AM. Fortunately, her grandparents live up the road, and their house has become a bit of a safe-haven. So she runs down there, and gets a good night sleep. When things are tough at home, she knows she can always stay there a few nights.
In lockdown world, that option is totally removed. The father, now out of work, is verbally abusive and blasts music all night. How do you think she's going to fare with "remote learning"?
2 years cut off from their peers, stuck in toxic environments, these kids have come back terribly damaged. My wife says she has never seen so many fights at school. My sister-in-law says they are so short-staffed right now they're having to turf kids because they're not "at-risk" enough.
Of course, politicians kept assuring us this was not the case, that there was no data showing any negative impact. Of course there was no data yet - it was still being collated! But talk to any person on the frontline and they could tell you.
But I suppose politicians' kids go to pretty nice schools, with supportive family environments and the means to support remote learning (laptops, fast internet, a quiet place to study).
A more disconnected, clueless lot, I have never seen.
Before you blame circumstances, remember that even people with seemingly perfect lives (money, fame) still suffer. I can think of a wealthy public figure who's full time job was to travel and enjoy great food, yet still abused drugs and committed suicide.
Suffering is part of life. Until recently, poverty, starvation & disease were universal. We certainly have it better than that, even with "social media", "bullying", "college acceptance" threatening teens.
The bigger problem is that we haven't given young people a solid sense of purpose. If their only purpose is money and fame, they will certainly fall apart, even if it goes well. You can never have enough.
No amount of money, anti depressants or therapy will make up for a lack of meaning.
Sure we should work to improve circumstances, but unless we give people a reason to live, it won't matter.
"We" as adults at least have the mostly-capable ability to discern good from bad, whereas a child until the age of 14-18 (depending on the topic at hand) does not have the sense of responsibility, especially about the crucial aspect which is his/her own health. Therefore you could expect an adult to be able to take care of him/her-self after the ~age of adulthood, whereas a children is very rarely expected to do so, because most of the times they're not even fully aware of it (consciously speaking, not talking about almost instinctive reactions).
[+] [-] lumb63|4 years ago|reply
Imagine you spent half the time you were in high school, alone. I cannot imagine any rational person is capable of believing this to not be a major factor to their mental health.
Anecdotally, I am a reasonably strong introvert, and I switched teams at my job during the pandemic after nine months of work from home because it did not feel healthy to my mental state to not have interacted with anyone in so long. I felt that my social abilities had atrophied, and that I had lost sight of a lot of the important things in life that derive from social interaction. I can only imagine that the impact is far greater to someone who can't choose to change their life to obtain the social interaction they are missing, and who (I am generalizing a bit here) probably requires mental/emotional guidance and support from their peers, elders, etc.
[+] [-] johnold|4 years ago|reply
There is no room for mistakes.
Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…
And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you? Just work harder, or just not caring about their mental health.
They see this never ending cycle of
turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a job, because they want or need money.
Many are going to bed after midnight every night.
Something has to give.
This is really disturbing to me.
How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of being this are giving up.
[+] [-] nynx|4 years ago|reply
I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless.
Something will eventually give.
[+] [-] ryandrake|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|4 years ago|reply
As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80.
When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.
[+] [-] nvarsj|4 years ago|reply
Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp.
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
Notes from then:
- Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in a bleak voice, "4.5".
- Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting the swim team down."
- One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, saying how hard it was. "Less bright" here means "can't get into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college.
This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...
[+] [-] notacoward|4 years ago|reply
Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are getting record numbers of applications, because of all the deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected gap years.
> Many are going to bed after midnight every night.
Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to socialize or play games etc. any earlier.
[+] [-] 999900000999|4 years ago|reply
None of it really matters, you can drop out of high school, go backpacking in Europe, and as long as you find a way to support yourself, no one has a right to judge you.
You definitely don't need to get into college. In the last 30 years or so, we've turned everyone into maniacs. Back in the day, if you just graduated high school that was something to be proud of.
Now, no, you need to get straight A's, no, you need to take a foreign language. If you're not able to pass a foreign language class, maybe you're messed up in the head, maybe we can give you some dangerous stimulants to fix you.
Again, none of it matters, I make significantly more money than most of the rest of my family and I'm one of the least educated. I was making more than what they make now with their fancy masters degrees, before I even finished my BA.
The only thing that really matters is finding peace with yourself, and again as long as you can support yourself. Nobody really cares. Of course. Someone's going to be smarter on paper, someone's going to get into a better school, someone's going to have a bigger house. But if you're constantly trying to compete with every other person, you're going to find, no matter how well you do, you'll devalue your own accomplishments.
[+] [-] vonwoodson|4 years ago|reply
The pandemic was the last straw… I thought. I’m disturbed to see that the world is going right back to 'the way things were'. Folks take the idea that you have to work for a living, and have dialed it up to eleven…thousand!
As best as I understand: hard work is not rewarded, it’s exploited. A natural resource to be drilled, pumped, and burned out.
[+] [-] jseliger|4 years ago|reply
Tell them to look at their Screen Time or Digital Life applications: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never... and ask about their weekly time usage. It's often over four hours a day. I commonly see six and seven hours a day.
That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points—there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."
[+] [-] holoduke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eganist|4 years ago|reply
Zoomers are the first generation with nearly unrestricted access to social media essentially from birth (access that probably should've been restricted early on, but that's water under the bridge). Couple that early and frequent exposure with artificial echo chambers created by apps to boost engagement, and impressionable minds end up soaked in endlessly-amplified negative perspectives.
The test case for this was 4chan incubating incel/redpill culture and Reddit later amplifying it among late-millennials. Today, EDs, ideation of self harm, etc are all mercilessly reflected back at people on just about every social media platform rather than just the niche ones. The pandemic only made it worse by preventing people from spending time with each other in person, but kids are glued to their phones anyway.
$1 Bet: millennial parents will probably learn from this with their own kids. Or if not, legislators probably will. Late Gen-α and the generation that follows will hopefully see a rebound from these trends with parenting habits that benefit from these learnings.
[+] [-] csallen|4 years ago|reply
As you said, "kids are glued to their phones anyway." That was already true before the pandemic. Which, again, suggests to me that the extreme factor here is the isolation, not the phones.
Not that social media is good or healthy. But the way it's scapegoated reminds me of the way television and video games were demonized when I was a child growing up in the 90s. It was over the top.
[+] [-] akira2501|4 years ago|reply
I would suggest that the basic human feedback loop just got more tightly coupled and that mass personal communication was always going to lead to this.
[+] [-] version_five|4 years ago|reply
I agree that the pandemic is probably not a root cause: I think the global reaction to the pandemic could have a related root cause (social media, outrage / attention culture, the breakdown of normal human discourse, polarization) as the mental health problems. Blaming "the pandemic" fails to acknowledge that covid was as much or more about our collective reaction as it was about the actual virus. It's the "powder keg" thing - the conditions were there, and inevitably something would come along to set it off.
[+] [-] sdoering|4 years ago|reply
A substantive discussion is therefore not possible. It is just 'opinion porn' imho.
Regardless of whether the pandemic, social media, (real) porn, industrial food, excessive demands at school, any combination thereof or other anecdotes are used as the cause. Nothing is substantiated by linking sources. Or at least naming them.
Whatever is claimed can only be questioned, not refuted, as there is no substantive point of attack.
Thus, in the end, everyone feels good because they were able to express an opinion. But unfortunately we have learned nothing.
[+] [-] onphonenow|4 years ago|reply
They won't cite data about N95 use because N95's DO work, and if we just let people who wanted to / were at risk wear N95's we'd solve half the problem right there without burdening anyone else. And yes, N95's with a vent are fine and should be encouraged because they make mask wearing a LOT easier.
Instead we are just fed endless BS. Citing the CDC and WHO is pointless because their stuff was not actually grounded in science but in BS. Witness their loud announcements that travel restrictions (time honored method to reduce spread) was racist and wouldn't reduce spread. Or that masks don't work etc. You have an airbone disease, masks probably help. You have a transmittable disease, reducing travel may help.
[+] [-] mlyle|4 years ago|reply
No one knows and there is no consensus why this is happening. I have a few opinions as a middle-and-high school teacher. But talking about this is important to help wrap our heads around it.
If a definitive understanding or reason were easy to acquire, we'd have done it already. So, the toil continues: for researchers, policymakers, laymen... and those of us in the trenches trying to do something about it with not enough information.
[+] [-] paulcole|4 years ago|reply
Leader in the clubhouse for the 2022 Accidental HN Slogan Contest.
[+] [-] SixDouble5321|4 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, moving into the deep woods is not just for Bible-thumping gun-nuts anymore.
[+] [-] frankohn|4 years ago|reply
First the modern lifestyle mostly destroyed the small communities where people know each other and spend a lot of time together. People began to stay in their house all the time with no contacts with a community.
At this first stage, as the local community was eliminated, the remaining pillars of social relations were school, for young people, and work for adults. I some case adults were able to maintain some degree of additional social life by having some friends and inviting them regularly to create the opportunity to meet.
Later it come all the smartphones, tablets, computers, social networks that captivated all the attention, especially of young people so even more so people were pushed to stay more at home and meet less people further increasing the social isolation.
The final blow came from the COVID-19 confinement were people were forced to stay at home reducing social contacts only to the close family members. This situation created an unsustainable isolation raising serious mental health problem especially for teenagers but also for adult people.
Modern society got it all wrong. We think having more goods and entertainment to consume make us happier but this is not how it works. Not if the social life and the social network around us is poor or non-existent.
Scientific thought that they know all and can say people what to do and they give us instruction just to avoid that people dies. The problem is that people doesn't just need to stay physically alive, we need to be also happy and fulfilled by our life.
We need to radically change modern lifestyle and stop with all the bullshit coming from politicians.
[+] [-] everforward|4 years ago|reply
I think there's an economic component to this as well. Housing prices are rising, meaning a lot of people are pushed out of their existing community, or that they perceive their community is temporary (until they all get pushed out). It starts to feel pointless to build a community of renters when you don't think it will exist in 5 years.
A lot of local shops have been overtaken by corporations, who exist in the community but aren't really part of it. Walmart/Target/Dick's/etc isn't sponsoring the local little league, or throwing a potluck, or creating any kind of space or events to build a community around.
Religious service attendance is also down, which is another way people used to build communities, and I haven't seen a lot of secular replacements (not a criticism of anyone, I don't attend myself). I think a lot of people replaced religion with politics, which has created communities more focused on things outside themselves (laws and public opinion) than within themselves.
I don't even know that social media is the cause of loss of community. It seems to me that social media was the market responding to the loss of in-person communities; it was responding to an already-established need. It might have accelerated the decline, but I think healthy communities could have withstood social media. We just didn't have many healthy communities left.
[+] [-] tsol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonymet|4 years ago|reply
People forget the concrete institutions that were dissolved that led to communities collapsing.
First it was families falling apart due to high rates of divorce and low birth rates. Also people moving away from home for job opportunities split the family apart. Entire towns were hollowed out.
Also the dissolution of institutions like church, political groups, fraternal orders (e.g. Elks, Kiwanis), Charity Groups. See the book "Bowling Alone".
Social media and entertainment spiked afterward to fill the void – but it was the collapse of the families, community groups & towns that were a precursor to the death of communities.
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
The lack of community in current times is absolutely a negative.
[+] [-] thenerdhead|4 years ago|reply
I was a generation before the iPad, but the current teenagers struggling have likely had a smart device from as early as 2. My smart device was a TV and nintendo. The guidelines the CDC even has for responsible device usage is reasonable, but nobody follows it. Most people are picking up their devices up to a hundred times a day or every 10 minutes. The average screen time is close to 3 hours. That's an average by the way...
We need to bring awareness to this problem like Nicholas Carr did over a decade ago. We can't let big tech companies convince us this isn't a problem with their sponsored studies to control a narrative.
[+] [-] ck2|4 years ago|reply
Maybe at school but bullying wasn't possible 24/7 online like now.
You had no idea what the latest news or political drama was as a kid before 2000 because it wasn't in your hand 12+ hours a day. No twitter/facebook or whatever they are using now.
Now being a kid is as depressing as being an adult and you are wired-in to a world that's overwhelming you. Sure they don't have jobs or rents to pay but everything still feels fatalistic to them, like they can't escape the world defines them, not the other way around.
[+] [-] sammalloy|4 years ago|reply
The honest truth that most people don’t want to face is that there is a direct relationship between economic turmoil and mental health. Instead, we will get politicians and community leaders blaming everything else for the problem, when all you have to do to address it is to pay people a living wage and provide an adequate social net to fall back upon. Our leaders will never admit this.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SalmoShalazar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|4 years ago|reply
Correlation isn’t causation.
[+] [-] Cpoll|4 years ago|reply
AFAIR there are studies looking at families with different cultural stances on divorce (but good luck controlling for other factors there). Also they tend to measure more easily measurable outcomes in the child than mental health, such as grades, which don't necessarily correlate.
[+] [-] atoav|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phil21|4 years ago|reply
I often feel my development went... much different than most in my peer group due to my much earlier access to the Internet/on-line services and me being a "curious hacker" getting into places and reading things I definitely should not have at that age. Seeing how utterly incompetent "powerful" institutions were (combined with teenage arrogance) that I was raised to deeply respect is still something I have difficulty processing.
I can't imagine being bombarded not just with 100x more information about how the future is f*cked and how incompetent those running the show are, but also it being amped up to 11 by hucksters selling "engagement" and ads. The content is coming to you now.
I think a lot of early adulthood is just brazen naivety. For example, I'd never have started the company I did at 17 at age 37, there would be too many reasons I know it'd fail. If you lose that naivety too early, at least personally I would have utterly lost any motivation to "try" since the odds were so astronomically against me.
When a generation collectively believes they will have it worse than their parents I'm not entirely sure what to expect the outcomes to be.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
2) disappointing not to see any comparison to other advanced economies. Is this happening everywhere with high internet usage? Did the severity correlate at all to how severe the pandemic was or what the responses were? Does it correlate to income levels or political polarization or religiosity or any of the other things that vary (at least somewhat) between different advanced economies? Maybe the CDC study looked at this, but if so WaPo said nothing about it. Hard to know what to do with this information with nothing but a WaPo text wall talking about it.
[+] [-] stakkur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|4 years ago|reply
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/abes/tables/index.htm
The survey was conducted in the first half of 2021
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
Progress; the equal value of individuals from any class, status, ethnicity, gender, etc; the power of any individual to change the world through hard work; - the things humanity has worked for since the beginning of the Enlightenment, with incredible success - are derided, even here in the heart of innovation and entrepreneurialism, which fundamentally depend on those notions. The garages of Silicon Valley defeated IBM.
Younger generations now believe they have no power, that humanity is fundamentally evil and corrupt, that progress isn't possible. Look at climate change: most believe not that, 'the people, united, can never be defeated', but that nothing can be done. We have the tools, the knowledge, the need is clear, but the powerful have created despair. That's not what I grew up with; I grew up with hope, and people who changed the world, from George Washington to Dr King, from Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, from Edison to Jobs.
Even the left-of-center and many progressives have adopted this message. Somone - that means you - needs to start spreading one of hope. I think they would be incredibly popular.
[+] [-] YATA1|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] xwdv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drno123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qiskit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] standardUser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImaCake|4 years ago|reply
All this is to say there is no causal relationship between the government lockdowns (mandated at the state level in the USA, no?) and the CDC reporting on mental health. Both occured independently. There are however plenty of plausible arguments to make for lockdowns being causal on mental health though.
[+] [-] tastysandwich|4 years ago|reply
My wife is a teacher in a low-SES area, and my sister-in-law is a psychologist dealing specifically with at-risk youth.
From the start they could see first-hand the detrimental impact lockdown had on the poorest and most vulnerable.
For many of these kids, school is a sanctuary from a dysfunctional and/or abusive home life. They don't have quiet places to study, let alone the means (laptop, internet).
Just a little example here, based on a close friend's upbringing. A young teen can't sleep because her degenerate father is blasting music from 11PM to 3AM. Fortunately, her grandparents live up the road, and their house has become a bit of a safe-haven. So she runs down there, and gets a good night sleep. When things are tough at home, she knows she can always stay there a few nights.
In lockdown world, that option is totally removed. The father, now out of work, is verbally abusive and blasts music all night. How do you think she's going to fare with "remote learning"?
2 years cut off from their peers, stuck in toxic environments, these kids have come back terribly damaged. My wife says she has never seen so many fights at school. My sister-in-law says they are so short-staffed right now they're having to turf kids because they're not "at-risk" enough.
Of course, politicians kept assuring us this was not the case, that there was no data showing any negative impact. Of course there was no data yet - it was still being collated! But talk to any person on the frontline and they could tell you.
But I suppose politicians' kids go to pretty nice schools, with supportive family environments and the means to support remote learning (laptops, fast internet, a quiet place to study).
A more disconnected, clueless lot, I have never seen.
[+] [-] aaomidi|4 years ago|reply
Economic forecasts being shit
Social media
Realizing the injustice in the world and seeing adults do nothing about it
Hyper competitive schooling
Lack of support during the pandemic
Yeah all of this has an impact.
[+] [-] tonymet|4 years ago|reply
Suffering is part of life. Until recently, poverty, starvation & disease were universal. We certainly have it better than that, even with "social media", "bullying", "college acceptance" threatening teens.
The bigger problem is that we haven't given young people a solid sense of purpose. If their only purpose is money and fame, they will certainly fall apart, even if it goes well. You can never have enough.
No amount of money, anti depressants or therapy will make up for a lack of meaning.
Sure we should work to improve circumstances, but unless we give people a reason to live, it won't matter.
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebow|4 years ago|reply