While I don't doubt that social media can drive some of these mental health issues, I think most teenagers are simply stressed from the constant work that's necessary for the college admissions process.
I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular). Most of the little extra time I had remaining would go to additional extracurricular activities that had the potential to enhance my college application. I only really got to socialize by talking to my teammates on our runs.
As a result, even when I had extra time I was so burnt out and stressed from everything else that I felt consumed by anxiety. I would sometimes start crying spontaneously after I got home in the evenings. Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience. Not everyone is so lucky.
If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life. Sure, less social media would help, but it won't solve the root of the problem. Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17, and that's not a fair expectation for any 17 year old. We shouldn't be surprised that many break under this kind of pressure.
40% of high school students don't go to college (of any type). Of those, only a tiny portion are focused on elite universities. Many are just going to Long Beach State, University of Redlands and other 4 year schools that you've never heard of. They have lax admissions. Among adult Americans, only a third have bachelors degrees. Certainly the high pressure scholastic environment of certain high schools is not common.
> If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life.
We (American here) need to take a step back and let everyone enjoy life. That means providing healthcare, food, and shelter to every single person so that they can live their life and work in a non-anxiety-inducing way. Every therapist I've talked to in the past few years has told me that they think the number one thing that would reduce their workload is if people weren't so stressed about paying for the most basic things for their family. Most of the people they see would still have issues they need to deal with, but wouldn't be on the precipice of suicide and taking loads of pills. That's an anecdote, but to me it's clear that the "hustle culture" and lack of social support have combined in the USA to make things very hard for the average American. This applies to kids directly, too, because that hustle has to start pre-college!
Most teenagers don't stress over college admissions in my experience. The top like 30% academically successful teens probably do, but I believe this effect is seen across teenagers of all groups
So many people here want to say, "That's not it, it's {something else}."
Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the things.
But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media account or a mobile phone.
So, my humble counter is: it's all of it. We've entered a peak bullshit culture moment in time. We throw a million negative and spurious cultural and professional expectations at young people and then couple that with the death of a reasonable middle class end-game, and then are shocked that so many of them, and the rest of us, are angry and unhealthy and impoverished in various "whole person" ways.
I understand your point, because I was the same. But I’m not sure our experience is a super common one among teens.
Reason I think this now, is that I have volunteered at large local high schools for college admission help. There just aren’t that many students who get pushed or push themselves like this. The majority in the US don’t go to college, and the vast majority don’t put in a stressful amount of effort into college/career prep and extra-curricular activities.
I don’t know what theory to replace it with, but I don’t think the majority of the students in the US are overworked like this.
You're in a bubble. It's nowhere near that hard to get into non-elite universities, which the vast majority of college-bound students attend. Just keeping your grades up and doing well on a standardized test will get you into a good (well-regarded in at least some fields, very well-known at least regionally) state school—and the ones in the next couple tiers under that are even more lax. Then there are community colleges—ask nicely and they'll probably let you in at least on a probational basis, even if your grades were incredibly bad in high school and you don't have much else going for you.
And that's for the students that go at all.
[EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher friends, the students who genuinely have crazy-busy schedules are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid) means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots and lots of practice, for each sport, plus extra training camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where the students are stressed over academics and non-sports extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those are because of a strong focus on sports.
For about 2.5 years starting in 2015 I was a high school teacher at a Title I (low income area) school. There was a lot of anxiety and depression -- obviously not far outside trends around that. Very, very few kids were doing extracurriculars beyond maybe one sport, or a part-time job for a minority of the juniors and seniors. The (very) few kids who were oversubscribed the way you were didn't seem to have a rate of anxiety or depression greater than their peers, and the greatest incidence seemed to be in the lowest-achieving students.
Obviously this is anecdotal, and there can be multiple causes, but teaching gives you a lot of anecdotes and they don't seem to fit this narrative.
They aren't being drafted to go fight in Vietnam. The Russians aren't bombing our cities. The main health problem is eating too much food, not too little. Teens aren't even expected to have jobs anymore. (In my day, teens got jobs at 16.)
My dad volunteered in WW2. He expected to die in combat, as his cohort had an 80% casualty rate. 4 out of 5. Every mission meant holes in the airplane, and you stayed on course and took it. He helplessly watched men die. His best friend had his face burned off. When he returned home, he thought the concerns on the home front were trivial. After all, they were going to live another day.
I feel like this is because school, especially college, and particularly exams, is about as high-stakes as most people's lives ever get, so they look back at that time as peak-anxiety. Think about it: you're being evaluated and the result of that evaluation shapes the next step in the pipeline, and ultimately the trajectory of the rest of your life! Well, at least that's what the university officials, professors, your peers and parents all tell you. You pretty much have a series of "one chance" events that you must pass or you're done for. Failure of any step is permanent, and affects your average (seemingly) forever.
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
My son is 10 and is naturally accelerated across many subjects (12th grade proficiency in ELA, 9th grade proficiency in Math, talented in music, writing, etc).
We have been actively indoctrinating our kids with the idea that college is not the be-all-end-all, that they should NOT apply for Ivy schools, 3rd tier schools are very good and if they want to go abroad or even eschew college altogether, we will support them. I've seen the effects that college admissions have on kids, especially in schools like Gunn and Palo Alto high in the Bay Area. Children committing suicide because they screw up a test is disgusting.
There is NO WAY I'm letting my kids go through that mental hell. And from some of the TikTok videos I've seen, you can dedicate your entire life to having a top application (sports, grades, extra curricular activities) and still get completely rejected by all Tier 1 schools. I won't allow my children to go through that just to be subjected to the whims of a racist, capricious admissions board.
It's also important to note that social media doesn't operate in isolation. We can blame social media all we want, but when we keep preferring candidates in the hiring process who have presentable social media, it's just amplified for teens. Now they have to keep up a grand social media presence, good grades, stay in physical shape, manage their changing family dynamics, get and hold a job, and their own internal systems changing on them.
It's no wonder stress levels are peaking. We demand they carry immense burdens the second they're able to hold a full conversation, but without any of the freedoms associated with responsibility. Can't move out, can't afford help, so what do we really expect to happen when people are placed into such conditions?
We place them under constant pressure, and act surprised that this pressure hurts. Why can't you be more like your sister who's doing good in school? Look at your cousin he got a job already and he's only 16. When you turn 18 you need to have your act together because I'm kicking you out. Endless pressure because we are unable to process our own feelings of insignificance, we just project it on kids all without the help of social media.
The rising wealth inquality amplifies these problems more in every way.
Social media gets a lot of negative attention but there's also a huge positive here. You can connect with others who get you and can maybe help you get through those unbearable days - they make it feel tolerable. And so for people to pin the blame entirely on social media, we're just going to cause so much more harm when we realize how many teens are out there that are only avoiding suicide marginally because of social media.
Coincidentally 2012 is IIRC the year I bought (then a university student) my first smart phone. IIRC when doing my abroad term overseas the american students all had smartphones in like 2010, I think most where on plans that provided smartphones eventually.
So I would not be surprised if smartphones are part of the reason for a poor state of mental heath.
I agree that the college admissions process is quite stressful, and we should take a critical look at it. But did it really only begin happening around 2012? Across all demographics? I don't think that this explanation really fits the data.
Having exited my teen years just before the smartphones became ubiquitous in the US, I got the opportunity to watch externally how social media and other similar systems effected the day-to-day of my younger siblings through their teen years. It was not positive. Maybe someone younger can attest to my observations:
- more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their attention in internet communities
- less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences.
- a shift in perceived life value/success based on internet influencers and incentive to emulate their lifestyles.
- always online presence increasing the stakes making embarrassing or uncool mistakes permanent and detrimental to one's image.
Anecdotally, I was (as probably many here were) ahead of the curve in digital devices usage when I started hanging out in IRC and various web forums as a teenager in early 2000s. At some point I noticed that just using computers induced some amount of anxiety compared to "old tech"; whenever there was some period of time when I used my computer less (like christmas, vacations, etc.) and joined back to the "world of the normal people", I felt much calmer and happier. Even though I noticed this, it was difficult to log off during normal times since most of my life was in the internet.
Now everyone is using digital devices all the time and the "normal people world" has ceased to exist. Also almost everyone is anxious and/or depressed. I think this is not a coincidence. However, I do not think that this is due to social media per se, but using digital devices for anything (social media being just the reason why most people use them).
My theory is that just using digital devices for anything is somewhat stressful; you have to keep the eyes focused all the time (Can you think of other activities that require this? There aren't many and they are all somewhat stressful), you have to navigate all the various applications and menus, you have to occasionally solve minor problems that you run into when using the devices, etc.
Using digital devices is the same for your brain as heavy, repetitive physical labour is to your body; in small amounts it might even be healthy, but several hours every day is going to destroy your body/mind.
> Can you think of other activities that require this?
Well, reading books (and other documents). I also am suspicious of screens (and specially spending too much time on them... I'm certainly guilty), but the existence of books is somewhat confusing in this regard. However, I really don't think the population as a whole was reading quite as many books/documents as we today use digital devices or social media. That could be cutting into other things, like sun exposure, exercising, perhaps face-to-face social relationships, social support networks.
Something I've noticed since about that time as well is a growing unease and pessimism with our collective future (and even present!). Some things are bleak (like climate change, uncertainty with technologies, etc.), but there's a sense of little hope that definitely should have an impact on the youth. I remember the 90s as a quite hopeful time and that definitely had an impact on my mood. My personal contribution would be spreading more hope about life.
My favorite author w.r.t. this right now that I recommend is Jane Goodall:
I think it's the connectivity of the digital devices that is specifically at fault, and that offline-only digital devices wouldn't cause this. At any moment, my phone or computer may deliver unwelcome news to me. My boss asking me about some work shit, my family with some sort of unwelcome sad news, or whatever. In the past these would have been relatively mundane stresses, but now there is a social expectation that everybody be attentive to incoming communications at all times. You get at most a few hours a night where people don't expect you to respond, but even then sometimes they forget about timezones and freak out when they don't get a prompt response. There is never any real reprieve and it's starting to seem like this represents a permanent cultural shift.
I have another hunch: that working as a programmer, and maybe with computers in general, is anxiety-inducing. As Campbell put it, computers are like old testament gods: lots of rules and no mercy.
> My theory is that just using digital devices for anything is somewhat stressful
I don’t know, talking to the government and figuring out stuff about your taxes or health coverage over the internet is soooo much less stressful than if I have to call, or worse, go there in person, wait an hour, and have to talk to someone who really doesn’t want to solve my problem.
I can now pay my property taxes online and know it’s done, instead of sending them a letter and hoping for the best, that’s such an improvement.
Ugh, I guess it varies from person but for me (nearly?) every human contact is somewhat stressful, even watching humans interact can be very stressful. Using devices is downright bliss and calmness in comparison. I'm so happy when I see people interacting with their devices. I feel they are more like me and I feel safer with them than with people who don't.
Another possible explanation is that we are simply diagnosing these kind of mental health issues better – due to decrease in stigmatization and/or more attention to it – but that our treatment is worse than doing nothing, and is leading to higher rates of self-harm and suicide.
I have no idea if that's the case – and if it is a factor at all it probably doesn't account for all of it – but it seems something worth exploring. Certainly in my own teen years I benefited more from the occasional swift kick in the backside and being told to "man up" than treatment with school counsellors and such. Not that counsellors are bad, but sometimes you can take things "too serious" which can make matters worse, in spite of being well-intentioned.
This is a good piece, with the author consciously examining their own biases and assumptions. I do think underdiagnosis is an issue; when I sought mental health treatment in an earlier period, there was a veritable line of people telling me I couldn't be mentally ill because my clothes were clean and my sentences coherent.
I think the author errs in not projecting his data far back enough into the past and looking for correlations with previous rises or falls. I agree that social media is probably a main driver; the ability to receive mass communication at scale is not something the brain evolved for, and there's a lot of maladaptive online behavior that doesn't show in these statistics but is nonetheless problematic. I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example.
But I think there are other factors in play, like the 24-7 news cycle and deep political polarizations, both of which have a huge impact on adult behavior and create an unhealthy psychological environment in which kids have to operate.
> I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example.
Shaka, when the walls fell ;)
honestly there's an interesting argument to be made there that memes and cliches provide a higher symbol density to our communications via shared context/subtext. A meme has additional layers of context and nuance that are implicitly carried along with the actual words themselves, it has higher "meaning-density".
Whether or not you like them, this is how human communications are evolving, and have been for a long time, particularly as we reshape language around our new technologies. "lol" as an interjective is a tonality carrier, just like vocal tone. Emojis are short textual-form memes. Etc etc. Image memes as high-density multilayered communication are just another form.
I mean half the time when I write out a longform comment, the response I get is "I ain't reading all that shit" even here on HN. ;). People just want higher symbol density, it's the same reason they don't read the article or watch the video. The human brain is a meaning-density machine and we inherently seek ways to increase the amount and preciseness of meaning-interchange. Higher meaning-density per symbol is a great way to do that given our physical limitations at processing more symbols.
In ironic contrast to the rise of youtube-driven content production - I think people inherently crave symbol density and meaning. But since we've monetized attention, there's a perverse incentive to decrease symbol density/meaning-density to allow greater time for monetization... but I think that also rubs against what our brains want to do.
In the aggregate, the way memes bounce around communities nowadays is also not dissimilar to a neural network working with higher-order objects instead of zeros and ones or floats. Memes that don't get passed between groups are the ones that are less relevant - so we have activation energy in some form, short-term storage, and cross-group linkage between neurons. And the memes are symbolic encodings of some groups of features (concepts). They are an emergent cluster of features that activates various groups reliably.
Higher meaning-density is also the reason some people prefer face-to-face communication or phone calls. Things like facial expressions and tone of voice also increase meaning-density as well. People say things like "it's less ambiguous/more immediate" but I think that's because of those sub-channels increasing the meaningfulness. And while meme culture/emojis isn't all good, maybe it's best viewed as replacing some of those sub-channels we lost in the shift from verbal to written communication rather than a regression to repetitive communication.
Okay, data is great, but the conclusions at the end have almost nothing to do with the data. They're a bunch of unsupported assumptions about what we've changed that must have caused all of this. It includes two separate links to his article about how we're ruining the children by coddling them with woke bullshit. Here's the tagline: "In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health."
The increase in poverty was pretty small (<5% over the recent average), disappeared by 2015 and the poverty rate has been generally trending down ever since.
If poverty were a major contributing factor, it should be immediately obvious in terms of who's affected. The children of the professional-managerial class should be roughly exempt. What we see is in fact the opposite.
Social media is global, so any effects it has should be visible globally.
> Teenage suicides rates have, on average, declined slightly over the past two decades or so. While in 1990 there were, on average across the OECD, 8.5 suicides per 100 000 teenagers
(15-19), by 2015 this rate had fallen to 7.4. Much of this decline occurred during the 2000s. Between 1990 and 1999 the OECD average teenage suicide remained fairly stable at around 8.4 suicides per 100,000, but this average fell across the 2000s before reaching a low of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2007. With the exception of 2008, the average rate remained lower than 7.0 until 2014, although it increased slightly in 2014 and 2015.
A lot of the stats cited are ultimately subjective assessments of things like mental health. Calling more people "bipolar" or "depressed" or "anxious" can just as easily be a change in language as to what those words mean, as easily as they can reflect a change in the underlying language and how people express things. Notably the definition of most mental illnesses in the country Haidt is pulling his data from changed in 2013 due to the release of the DSM-V, so I don't really think pre-2013 data is comparable to post-2013 data at all, as these words in question are not medically or socially defined in the same way that they were before. In fact one of the most common criticisms of the DSM-V when it was being drafted to the present day is the allegation that it leads to more mental illness diagnosis's.
Attempted suicide is one of the few stats I treat as grounded relatively firmly in reality because it's not nearly as subjective, but this measure seems to have started skyrocketing in the mid 2000's not in 2012.
If the conclusion is that the rise of the internet has caused more and more teens to label themselves as mentally ill, I would say that's a conclusion I'm firmly convinced of. The conclusion that mental illness is actually increasing population wide, I'm very very sceptical of. I could imagine that it's happening to an extent due to things like economic pressures and increased inequality, we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face value.
Plus quite simply, using time series data about when mental illness increased in society doesn't really shed much light on WHAT caused the mental illness to rise even if you can establish such a rise was happening, but I'm not even convinced by the date "2012".
> we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face value.
This just seems like a flat out contradiction. How would suicides ‘skyrocket’ if mental illness is not increasing.
Agreed that 2012 may be irrelevant and we may not know the cause.
Digital society sucks, and to a degree modern society in general.
There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities.
Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever.
Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen.
You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void.
The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance.
Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.
While I don't doubt that social media can have a negative impact on teens... my own experience as the parent of a teen is slightly different and doesn't point to social media as being a driver. At least in my case.
I have a teenager that struggles with anxiety, low self-esteem and depression. He's incredibly smart and is an honors student in high school. BUT he also thinks he's terrible and he's incapable of accepting a compliment or congratulations on a good grade or work which he immediately deflects and says he was lucky or he's not really smart or something negative.
What does this have to do with the article as far as my experience? He's not on social media. While he might consume some social media (ex. TikTok) he doesn't have his own social media accounts. He doesn't have a Facebook account, Instagram account, etc. Which might sound hard to believe and you are likely thinking "I bet he has burner accounts..." but actually he doesn't.
He didn't have a smartphone until he was 13. And while he used an iPad before that it was primarily for playing games and watching Youtube.
What he is into is online gaming and Youtube. I guess you could count Youtube as a form of social media but even with that he's a consumer of the content and not a creator or commenter. So he's not posting videos on Youtube or getting into arguments with people in the Youtube comments, etc. He simply watches content.
So I'm only a sample size of one but I deal with a teen who struggles with a lot of what is described in this article... yet it isn't being driven by social media.
I think there are far more factors at play than simply smartphones and social media. And those factors could be different depending on the individual. Although some of the factors are obviously going to be shared. And I have no doubt social media can have a tremendous negative impact on mental health. But I think there is much more going on than just that.
As an adult I realized my attitude came from simply not having any example or basis for what I was doing. All I had were long term goals that always seemed just beyond the horizon.
In that situation almost any expectations will seem lofty and it's just as easy to feel either pride or shame regardless of what is actually accomplished.
This is not easy to deal with, but it is possible. As they say, you should surround yourself with people you can look up to. That's how you grow.
Consuming is the worst. The Internet is a toxic cesspool, for the most part. Having an account and interacting with friends would be one of the few exceptions, and maybe learning some stuff now and then.
All the things he cites are lagging indicators. Self-harm and suicide typically follow long, long battles with mental health issues; they're not the first thing that happens, or even close. Diagnoses are also typically far from immediate; having depression and being diagnosed with depression are two very different things. (And without increased awareness, many people never get care and are never diagnosed.)
As such, the inflection point, if there is one, is likely much earlier than 2012.
Looking at the "suicide attempts requiring medical attention" we see a low of 1.7% in 1991, then a peak of 2.8% in 1995, and another low in 1.9%, and then now another peak (but less than 1995).
For actual suicides I found this chart https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm which shows we are well below baseline trends for males. For females we do seem to have an increase lately, so that part seems like the main thing to be concerned about. Although it seems to have started more around 2007 than 2012 which seems a bit early to be blaming social media (almost no one really had smartphones in 2007, let alone teens). So I do think it's worth looking into this but it's easy to try to find data to fit our preconceived notions rather than the truth.
We didn't have smartphones, but we did have cell phones. I was in 7/8th grade at that time and had a cell phone as a lower middle class kid. I mainly used it to call my parents or text with friends. That time was shortly after providers moved to unlimited calls/texts in the US because kids would steamroll through a billion sms messages anyway.
My daughter hit her teens in2012. It was a horrible couple of years not just for her but from about 8th grade up.
Our HS had a suicide wave. Many attepts (my daughter being one) and quite a few of those attempts were successful later. Thankfully my child responded well to therapy.
This was in a high competitive HS IN NORTHERN VA.
My thoughts on factors:
Crazy parents pushing kids to try and get in TJ who had no business there. (We did not)
Peer pressure to over perform at everything
(If you did t have a 4.5 gpa you were stupid)
And the big bad social media really started going for teens then. And it was brutal
Over scheduling for activities. We played travel soccer. Super competitive. We had girls that played travel basketbal,soccer and softball. One of those is almost year round. Three? Your never home
We balanced it all with camping. It helped so much. One weekend a month minimum. No excuses.
Rambled a bit but from about 2011 on kids have been fucked.
I agree with the authors premise and argument but the data visualizations are not well done, and I'm confused about the conclusions he draws from them.
For starters, it's unclear why he draws a line at 2012, when in many of the graphs the slope gets steeper at 2010 instead, and in fact that's where the percentage increase calculations start from as well. That vertical line at 2012 is misleading and confusing.
Also, in the US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14), the uptick clearly started in 2007. I don't disagree that social media is bad and I've seen firsthand people who become mentally ill because of the standards and expectations supplied by a constant stream of highlight rules that make you question your own worth. But I think that the data provided here is not strong enough to come to that conclusion.
I think if you do a moving average that the trend would adhere more to 2012 being the inflection point. I'm basing that on just noticing that in US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14) chart the there was a decent amount of fluctuation in the leading years.
As for why these trends exist, one of the interesting things is that these are present in all of the anglosphere. Can we think of another explanation? What else has changed on a global scale in the last couple of decades?
For boys suicides 10-14 it sure looks like it started in 2007, yeah. For girls the 1 year increase from 2012 to 2013 is kind of suspicious, so I could see an argument for 2007 as well. That does seem to decrease the strength of the argument for social media specifically since I don't believe it was all that widespread until the 2010s.
I think the point is that you can't just draw a single year as the change, which obviously makes sense with any social trends. It's not like people wake up Jan 1 and suddenly they have depression.
The dismissive statement "people have made similar claims before, therefore this claim isn't true" is one of my pet peeves. You see it a lot around issues like this as a way to not engage with an argument.
It's an obvious fallacy: it doesn't matter if something was said in the past, or whether or not it was true when said before. The only thing that matters is whether it is true in this case.
This is just complete speculation, but to me, the timing and difference in ratio between male and female seems to correlate extremely well with a hypothesis that much of this is driven by the "sexting age" brought about with the advent of snapchat and similar apps. These apps have the dangerous duality that they are viewed very naively by less tech literate who see as something that facilitates sending nude pictures by only letting your recipient see them and deleting them after a fixed period. Of cause to anyone slightly more tech literate apps like that are a bombshell waiting to happen anytime anything remotely compromising is sent. This fits well with a lot of the cases you hear about where what would have just been hallway gossip of "did you hear that XX and XY broke up and are fighting?" which now is a viral package of pictures typically of XX being sent around to everyone on campus.
This hypothesis also helps to explain why European countries where snapchat and similar apps never gained huge popularity before there where already campaigns warning young people never to trust that something sent through them would not end up on the internet forever.
But that's all just random speculation on my part, and I have no real evidence to make the connection. All I can say is that the timing and ratio makes me thing that it's worth looking into just how many major depressed teenagers have had some sort of personal material leak outside of the intended recipients.
Having seen our kids pass through this timeframe into adulthood, experiencing various forms of "mental illness" along the way, the main "obvious" factors that were different from our childhoods were ...
a) social media, and
b) schools pressuring them to commit to major life decisions before they were even allowed to drive a car, and never letting up, and
c) the magnitude of student loans necessary to comply with that pressure.
This was all hammering them long before any sort of college admissions process came into play.
As a teenager growing up I don’t think I really understood what anxiety or depression was or looked like and I sure as hell wouldn’t admit to having either. I understood both academically, but no one wanted to call you anxious or depressed and you didn’t want anyone to call you that either. In retrospection, I was both anxious and depressed for most of high school.
Going to therapy wouldn’t have been an option. Drugs wouldn’t have been an option, because depression and/or anxiety was not something you needed either to treat. It was a temporary state, at best, that you needed to shake yourself from.
Mental illness is no longer stigmatized in the same way it was even a decade ago. It makes sense more kids are self-reporting feeling that way.
I don’t think kids are all that different now. I don’t think things are so much worse for them. I do think school is probably more prison like than ever, but beyond that it is all the same stuff in a slightly different context.
One of the core dilemmas of raising the next generation:
1. We base much of our own sense of self-worth on difficulties we have overcome and our ability to take care of others.
2. We fairly extend that same metric to others and judge others by the difficulties they've overcome and what they do for others.
3. Therefore, the better we are at living up to our own values and improving the lives of the next generation, the less we respect them for it.
If kids had it as hard as us, it would indicate a failure on our part to provide for them. If they don't have it as hard us, we see them as soft.
(The current generation has tackled this dilemma both by destroying the climate and functioning economic and institutional systems they had the luxury of growing up under thus making it worse for the next generation, and still calling them weak for, unsurprisingly, wanting to tune out of the horror show that is the world by staring at their phone.)
[+] [-] nluken|3 years ago|reply
I'm 24, so I would have been a teenager in 2012, but I didn't have a smartphone until I was 16 or so. My high school experience consisted almost entirely of school, studying, and running (my primary extracurricular). Most of the little extra time I had remaining would go to additional extracurricular activities that had the potential to enhance my college application. I only really got to socialize by talking to my teammates on our runs.
As a result, even when I had extra time I was so burnt out and stressed from everything else that I felt consumed by anxiety. I would sometimes start crying spontaneously after I got home in the evenings. Things only started getting better when I started seeing a therapist and worked on my issues over the second half of my high school experience. Not everyone is so lucky.
If we want a healthier society, we need to take a step back and give teenagers a chance to actually live life. Sure, less social media would help, but it won't solve the root of the problem. Today's society demands so much from adolescents for so little in return. It's very easy to think that you're a failure if you don't know exactly who you are and what you want to be at age 17, and that's not a fair expectation for any 17 year old. We shouldn't be surprised that many break under this kind of pressure.
[+] [-] carabiner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
We (American here) need to take a step back and let everyone enjoy life. That means providing healthcare, food, and shelter to every single person so that they can live their life and work in a non-anxiety-inducing way. Every therapist I've talked to in the past few years has told me that they think the number one thing that would reduce their workload is if people weren't so stressed about paying for the most basic things for their family. Most of the people they see would still have issues they need to deal with, but wouldn't be on the precipice of suicide and taking loads of pills. That's an anecdote, but to me it's clear that the "hustle culture" and lack of social support have combined in the USA to make things very hard for the average American. This applies to kids directly, too, because that hustle has to start pre-college!
[+] [-] nabakin|3 years ago|reply
If this was true, you'd expect there to be a similar trend between Major Depression and college admissions. The data doesn't seem to show that[1][2]
[1] https://educationdata.org/wp-content/uploads/74/Historical-C...
[2] http://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a6...
Most teenagers don't stress over college admissions in my experience. The top like 30% academically successful teens probably do, but I believe this effect is seen across teenagers of all groups
[+] [-] browningstreet|3 years ago|reply
Might be more fruitful to argue about a stack-rank of the things.
But, as the father of a son who is a freshman in college at a Research 1 university, I'll say that his college experience so closely mirrors my enterprise organization work bullshit experience it's shocking. And he doesn't have a social media account or a mobile phone.
So, my humble counter is: it's all of it. We've entered a peak bullshit culture moment in time. We throw a million negative and spurious cultural and professional expectations at young people and then couple that with the death of a reasonable middle class end-game, and then are shocked that so many of them, and the rest of us, are angry and unhealthy and impoverished in various "whole person" ways.
(Not to mention climate change...)
[+] [-] HEmanZ|3 years ago|reply
Reason I think this now, is that I have volunteered at large local high schools for college admission help. There just aren’t that many students who get pushed or push themselves like this. The majority in the US don’t go to college, and the vast majority don’t put in a stressful amount of effort into college/career prep and extra-curricular activities.
I don’t know what theory to replace it with, but I don’t think the majority of the students in the US are overworked like this.
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
And that's for the students that go at all.
[EDIT] Incidentally, from tales told by my various teacher friends, the students who genuinely have crazy-busy schedules are almost always the ones who are extremely into playing two or more sports. Even half-serious participation (so, maaaaybe gunning to play college ball, plus the mostly-delusional but fairly-common parental aspirations of having a pro-league kid) means being in a league that makes you travel a lot, and lots and lots of practice, for each sport, plus extra training camps and shit like that. I believe tales of some schools where the students are stressed over academics and non-sports extracurriculars (plus the single requisite sport to keep Harvard from binning your application) but out in the vast reaches of non-elite America, only a few students have very-high schedule pressure, and most (not all, but most) of those are because of a strong focus on sports.
[+] [-] Matticus_Rex|3 years ago|reply
Obviously this is anecdotal, and there can be multiple causes, but teaching gives you a lot of anecdotes and they don't seem to fit this narrative.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
They aren't being drafted to go fight in Vietnam. The Russians aren't bombing our cities. The main health problem is eating too much food, not too little. Teens aren't even expected to have jobs anymore. (In my day, teens got jobs at 16.)
My dad volunteered in WW2. He expected to die in combat, as his cohort had an 80% casualty rate. 4 out of 5. Every mission meant holes in the airplane, and you stayed on course and took it. He helplessly watched men die. His best friend had his face burned off. When he returned home, he thought the concerns on the home front were trivial. After all, they were going to live another day.
> what you want to be at age 17
In other words, America is full of opportunity.
We live in a golden age in America.
[+] [-] nixass|3 years ago|reply
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
[+] [-] purpleblue|3 years ago|reply
We have been actively indoctrinating our kids with the idea that college is not the be-all-end-all, that they should NOT apply for Ivy schools, 3rd tier schools are very good and if they want to go abroad or even eschew college altogether, we will support them. I've seen the effects that college admissions have on kids, especially in schools like Gunn and Palo Alto high in the Bay Area. Children committing suicide because they screw up a test is disgusting.
There is NO WAY I'm letting my kids go through that mental hell. And from some of the TikTok videos I've seen, you can dedicate your entire life to having a top application (sports, grades, extra curricular activities) and still get completely rejected by all Tier 1 schools. I won't allow my children to go through that just to be subjected to the whims of a racist, capricious admissions board.
[+] [-] waboremo|3 years ago|reply
It's no wonder stress levels are peaking. We demand they carry immense burdens the second they're able to hold a full conversation, but without any of the freedoms associated with responsibility. Can't move out, can't afford help, so what do we really expect to happen when people are placed into such conditions?
We place them under constant pressure, and act surprised that this pressure hurts. Why can't you be more like your sister who's doing good in school? Look at your cousin he got a job already and he's only 16. When you turn 18 you need to have your act together because I'm kicking you out. Endless pressure because we are unable to process our own feelings of insignificance, we just project it on kids all without the help of social media.
The rising wealth inquality amplifies these problems more in every way.
Social media gets a lot of negative attention but there's also a huge positive here. You can connect with others who get you and can maybe help you get through those unbearable days - they make it feel tolerable. And so for people to pin the blame entirely on social media, we're just going to cause so much more harm when we realize how many teens are out there that are only avoiding suicide marginally because of social media.
[+] [-] wirrbel|3 years ago|reply
So I would not be surprised if smartphones are part of the reason for a poor state of mental heath.
[+] [-] johnfn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d_sem|3 years ago|reply
- more localized isolation as kids spent a higher % of their attention in internet communities - less cultural cohesion due to hyper diversity in memes resulting in fewer shared experiences. - a shift in perceived life value/success based on internet influencers and incentive to emulate their lifestyles. - always online presence increasing the stakes making embarrassing or uncool mistakes permanent and detrimental to one's image.
[+] [-] vkk8|3 years ago|reply
Now everyone is using digital devices all the time and the "normal people world" has ceased to exist. Also almost everyone is anxious and/or depressed. I think this is not a coincidence. However, I do not think that this is due to social media per se, but using digital devices for anything (social media being just the reason why most people use them).
My theory is that just using digital devices for anything is somewhat stressful; you have to keep the eyes focused all the time (Can you think of other activities that require this? There aren't many and they are all somewhat stressful), you have to navigate all the various applications and menus, you have to occasionally solve minor problems that you run into when using the devices, etc.
Using digital devices is the same for your brain as heavy, repetitive physical labour is to your body; in small amounts it might even be healthy, but several hours every day is going to destroy your body/mind.
[+] [-] gnramires|3 years ago|reply
Well, reading books (and other documents). I also am suspicious of screens (and specially spending too much time on them... I'm certainly guilty), but the existence of books is somewhat confusing in this regard. However, I really don't think the population as a whole was reading quite as many books/documents as we today use digital devices or social media. That could be cutting into other things, like sun exposure, exercising, perhaps face-to-face social relationships, social support networks.
Something I've noticed since about that time as well is a growing unease and pessimism with our collective future (and even present!). Some things are bleak (like climate change, uncertainty with technologies, etc.), but there's a sense of little hope that definitely should have an impact on the youth. I remember the 90s as a quite hopeful time and that definitely had an impact on my mood. My personal contribution would be spreading more hope about life.
My favorite author w.r.t. this right now that I recommend is Jane Goodall:
https://bookwyrm.social/book/391141/s/the-book-of-hope
[+] [-] LarryMullins|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narag|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|3 years ago|reply
I don’t know, talking to the government and figuring out stuff about your taxes or health coverage over the internet is soooo much less stressful than if I have to call, or worse, go there in person, wait an hour, and have to talk to someone who really doesn’t want to solve my problem.
I can now pay my property taxes online and know it’s done, instead of sending them a letter and hoping for the best, that’s such an improvement.
[+] [-] scotty79|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arp242|3 years ago|reply
I have no idea if that's the case – and if it is a factor at all it probably doesn't account for all of it – but it seems something worth exploring. Certainly in my own teen years I benefited more from the occasional swift kick in the backside and being told to "man up" than treatment with school counsellors and such. Not that counsellors are bad, but sometimes you can take things "too serious" which can make matters worse, in spite of being well-intentioned.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|3 years ago|reply
I think the author errs in not projecting his data far back enough into the past and looking for correlations with previous rises or falls. I agree that social media is probably a main driver; the ability to receive mass communication at scale is not something the brain evolved for, and there's a lot of maladaptive online behavior that doesn't show in these statistics but is nonetheless problematic. I'm honestly appalled by the pervasive tendency to rely on repetition of cliches in favor of original communication, for example.
But I think there are other factors in play, like the 24-7 news cycle and deep political polarizations, both of which have a huge impact on adult behavior and create an unhealthy psychological environment in which kids have to operate.
[+] [-] paulmd|3 years ago|reply
Shaka, when the walls fell ;)
honestly there's an interesting argument to be made there that memes and cliches provide a higher symbol density to our communications via shared context/subtext. A meme has additional layers of context and nuance that are implicitly carried along with the actual words themselves, it has higher "meaning-density".
Whether or not you like them, this is how human communications are evolving, and have been for a long time, particularly as we reshape language around our new technologies. "lol" as an interjective is a tonality carrier, just like vocal tone. Emojis are short textual-form memes. Etc etc. Image memes as high-density multilayered communication are just another form.
I mean half the time when I write out a longform comment, the response I get is "I ain't reading all that shit" even here on HN. ;). People just want higher symbol density, it's the same reason they don't read the article or watch the video. The human brain is a meaning-density machine and we inherently seek ways to increase the amount and preciseness of meaning-interchange. Higher meaning-density per symbol is a great way to do that given our physical limitations at processing more symbols.
In ironic contrast to the rise of youtube-driven content production - I think people inherently crave symbol density and meaning. But since we've monetized attention, there's a perverse incentive to decrease symbol density/meaning-density to allow greater time for monetization... but I think that also rubs against what our brains want to do.
In the aggregate, the way memes bounce around communities nowadays is also not dissimilar to a neural network working with higher-order objects instead of zeros and ones or floats. Memes that don't get passed between groups are the ones that are less relevant - so we have activation energy in some form, short-term storage, and cross-group linkage between neurons. And the memes are symbolic encodings of some groups of features (concepts). They are an emergent cluster of features that activates various groups reliably.
Higher meaning-density is also the reason some people prefer face-to-face communication or phone calls. Things like facial expressions and tone of voice also increase meaning-density as well. People say things like "it's less ambiguous/more immediate" but I think that's because of those sub-channels increasing the meaningfulness. And while meme culture/emojis isn't all good, maybe it's best viewed as replacing some of those sub-channels we lost in the shift from verbal to written communication rather than a regression to repetitive communication.
[+] [-] banannaise|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/poverty-may-have-a-greate...
There was a notable increase in poverty rates after the 2008 economic collapse, along with a decrease in home ownership and increased unemployment.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
The fact that this article doesn't even mention this obvious contributing factor certainly undermines its thesis.
[+] [-] marcusverus|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anikan_vader|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|3 years ago|reply
> Teenage suicides rates have, on average, declined slightly over the past two decades or so. While in 1990 there were, on average across the OECD, 8.5 suicides per 100 000 teenagers (15-19), by 2015 this rate had fallen to 7.4. Much of this decline occurred during the 2000s. Between 1990 and 1999 the OECD average teenage suicide remained fairly stable at around 8.4 suicides per 100,000, but this average fell across the 2000s before reaching a low of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2007. With the exception of 2008, the average rate remained lower than 7.0 until 2014, although it increased slightly in 2014 and 2015.
https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO_4_4_Teenage-Suicide.pdf
[+] [-] faeriechangling|3 years ago|reply
Attempted suicide is one of the few stats I treat as grounded relatively firmly in reality because it's not nearly as subjective, but this measure seems to have started skyrocketing in the mid 2000's not in 2012.
If the conclusion is that the rise of the internet has caused more and more teens to label themselves as mentally ill, I would say that's a conclusion I'm firmly convinced of. The conclusion that mental illness is actually increasing population wide, I'm very very sceptical of. I could imagine that it's happening to an extent due to things like economic pressures and increased inequality, we are seeing things like declines in lifespans and increases in suicide, but I don't think mental illness is increasingly nearly as much as the stats would lead you to believe at face value.
Plus quite simply, using time series data about when mental illness increased in society doesn't really shed much light on WHAT caused the mental illness to rise even if you can establish such a rise was happening, but I'm not even convinced by the date "2012".
[+] [-] strawpeople|3 years ago|reply
This just seems like a flat out contradiction. How would suicides ‘skyrocket’ if mental illness is not increasing.
Agreed that 2012 may be irrelevant and we may not know the cause.
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
There used to be religion, which you may dislike, but it offered social bonding at scale. You'd get to known an entire community, neighborhood, might make new friends or even find a spouse. Learn about people hobbies and form sub communities.
Or you go to school. Or to work, where before globalization you'd have a stable local team that you'd get to know very deeply. Or you may go to a bar, a hobby club, and attend public places for shopping, entertainment, whichever.
Now you wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone. Next, you may learn or work remotely, sitting alone, watching a screen breathing low quality air. You don't go to a store, you use delivery. You use your little work breaks to watch another screen, the smartphone. After dinner, there's more screen time. Passive entertainment, doomscrolling or interacting with a "community", weird little avatars on a screen.
You don't even have a relation with objects either. In the digital world, you don't really own anything. There's no stability. It's all fleeting, flexible, disrupted, empty. That's increasingly the dominant lifestyle: void.
The world is entirely financialized, hence you don't really live in a society, it's performance culture. You're expected to juggle 10 balls from an early age, which are life's "expectations". It offers no time for discovery, play or recovery. You need to check the damn boxes. The reward of mastering the boxes is that well actually...you still can't afford a basic middle class existence. The financial system constantly rug-pulls you whilst technology constantly disrupts your relevance.
Am I dramatizing? Yes, somewhat. But I sincerely mean it when I say that life used to better. We lost a lot.
[+] [-] benrhodesuk|3 years ago|reply
I have a teenager that struggles with anxiety, low self-esteem and depression. He's incredibly smart and is an honors student in high school. BUT he also thinks he's terrible and he's incapable of accepting a compliment or congratulations on a good grade or work which he immediately deflects and says he was lucky or he's not really smart or something negative.
What does this have to do with the article as far as my experience? He's not on social media. While he might consume some social media (ex. TikTok) he doesn't have his own social media accounts. He doesn't have a Facebook account, Instagram account, etc. Which might sound hard to believe and you are likely thinking "I bet he has burner accounts..." but actually he doesn't.
He didn't have a smartphone until he was 13. And while he used an iPad before that it was primarily for playing games and watching Youtube.
What he is into is online gaming and Youtube. I guess you could count Youtube as a form of social media but even with that he's a consumer of the content and not a creator or commenter. So he's not posting videos on Youtube or getting into arguments with people in the Youtube comments, etc. He simply watches content.
So I'm only a sample size of one but I deal with a teen who struggles with a lot of what is described in this article... yet it isn't being driven by social media.
I think there are far more factors at play than simply smartphones and social media. And those factors could be different depending on the individual. Although some of the factors are obviously going to be shared. And I have no doubt social media can have a tremendous negative impact on mental health. But I think there is much more going on than just that.
[+] [-] sublinear|3 years ago|reply
As an adult I realized my attitude came from simply not having any example or basis for what I was doing. All I had were long term goals that always seemed just beyond the horizon.
In that situation almost any expectations will seem lofty and it's just as easy to feel either pride or shame regardless of what is actually accomplished.
This is not easy to deal with, but it is possible. As they say, you should surround yourself with people you can look up to. That's how you grow.
[+] [-] righttoolforjob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnramires|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasmer|3 years ago|reply
Also try sports. Team sports.
[+] [-] banannaise|3 years ago|reply
As such, the inflection point, if there is one, is likely much earlier than 2012.
[+] [-] zeroonetwothree|3 years ago|reply
Looking at the "suicide attempts requiring medical attention" we see a low of 1.7% in 1991, then a peak of 2.8% in 1995, and another low in 1.9%, and then now another peak (but less than 1995).
For actual suicides I found this chart https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm which shows we are well below baseline trends for males. For females we do seem to have an increase lately, so that part seems like the main thing to be concerned about. Although it seems to have started more around 2007 than 2012 which seems a bit early to be blaming social media (almost no one really had smartphones in 2007, let alone teens). So I do think it's worth looking into this but it's easy to try to find data to fit our preconceived notions rather than the truth.
[+] [-] yurishimo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeslave13|3 years ago|reply
Our HS had a suicide wave. Many attepts (my daughter being one) and quite a few of those attempts were successful later. Thankfully my child responded well to therapy.
This was in a high competitive HS IN NORTHERN VA.
My thoughts on factors:
Crazy parents pushing kids to try and get in TJ who had no business there. (We did not)
Peer pressure to over perform at everything (If you did t have a 4.5 gpa you were stupid)
And the big bad social media really started going for teens then. And it was brutal
Over scheduling for activities. We played travel soccer. Super competitive. We had girls that played travel basketbal,soccer and softball. One of those is almost year round. Three? Your never home
We balanced it all with camping. It helped so much. One weekend a month minimum. No excuses.
Rambled a bit but from about 2011 on kids have been fucked.
[+] [-] justsocrateasin|3 years ago|reply
For starters, it's unclear why he draws a line at 2012, when in many of the graphs the slope gets steeper at 2010 instead, and in fact that's where the percentage increase calculations start from as well. That vertical line at 2012 is misleading and confusing.
Also, in the US Teens, Suicides (Ages 10-14), the uptick clearly started in 2007. I don't disagree that social media is bad and I've seen firsthand people who become mentally ill because of the standards and expectations supplied by a constant stream of highlight rules that make you question your own worth. But I think that the data provided here is not strong enough to come to that conclusion.
[+] [-] williamcotton|3 years ago|reply
As for why these trends exist, one of the interesting things is that these are present in all of the anglosphere. Can we think of another explanation? What else has changed on a global scale in the last couple of decades?
[+] [-] zeroonetwothree|3 years ago|reply
I think the point is that you can't just draw a single year as the change, which obviously makes sense with any social trends. It's not like people wake up Jan 1 and suddenly they have depression.
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
It's an obvious fallacy: it doesn't matter if something was said in the past, or whether or not it was true when said before. The only thing that matters is whether it is true in this case.
[+] [-] expazl|3 years ago|reply
This hypothesis also helps to explain why European countries where snapchat and similar apps never gained huge popularity before there where already campaigns warning young people never to trust that something sent through them would not end up on the internet forever.
But that's all just random speculation on my part, and I have no real evidence to make the connection. All I can say is that the timing and ratio makes me thing that it's worth looking into just how many major depressed teenagers have had some sort of personal material leak outside of the intended recipients.
[+] [-] ergonaught|3 years ago|reply
a) social media, and
b) schools pressuring them to commit to major life decisions before they were even allowed to drive a car, and never letting up, and
c) the magnitude of student loans necessary to comply with that pressure.
This was all hammering them long before any sort of college admissions process came into play.
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
Going to therapy wouldn’t have been an option. Drugs wouldn’t have been an option, because depression and/or anxiety was not something you needed either to treat. It was a temporary state, at best, that you needed to shake yourself from.
Mental illness is no longer stigmatized in the same way it was even a decade ago. It makes sense more kids are self-reporting feeling that way.
I don’t think kids are all that different now. I don’t think things are so much worse for them. I do think school is probably more prison like than ever, but beyond that it is all the same stuff in a slightly different context.
[+] [-] munificent|3 years ago|reply
1. We base much of our own sense of self-worth on difficulties we have overcome and our ability to take care of others.
2. We fairly extend that same metric to others and judge others by the difficulties they've overcome and what they do for others.
3. Therefore, the better we are at living up to our own values and improving the lives of the next generation, the less we respect them for it.
If kids had it as hard as us, it would indicate a failure on our part to provide for them. If they don't have it as hard us, we see them as soft.
(The current generation has tackled this dilemma both by destroying the climate and functioning economic and institutional systems they had the luxury of growing up under thus making it worse for the next generation, and still calling them weak for, unsurprisingly, wanting to tune out of the horror show that is the world by staring at their phone.)